Jennifer Barnhill honored by Military Reporters & Editors
WASHINGTON — During its annual conference for journalists, Military Reporters & Editors presented awards to winners of its 2025 MRE Journalism Contest. Jennifer Barnhill earns an Honorable Mention for Commentary/Opinion (Division 2) award for five stories appearing in Military.com about military service and families.
Award Summary
Five opinion articles on impact of military life on family, Military.com, published 4/22/2024 – 3/20/2025
Prize Category: Honorable Mention Commentary/Opinion Division 2, Text journalism published in traditional print or online media.
Best work by a columnist who writes about topics covering the military, national security, or homeland defense on a regular basis, published by a news organization with fewer than 20 reporters.
Judges’ Comments:
Barnhill wrote powerful stories in this collection about the less-covered, less-prominent, less-noticed part of the military family — the lives of spouses who are often forced to slight their careers and endure many of the same hardships of their active-duty partners — with far less notice or credit. Barnhill takes readers inside families and discussions with military spouses who have been down this difficult road — and how many of them suffer the same stress from travel or deployments, along with loneliness, depression, substance abuse, hardship and even coping with the unbearable suicides of loved ones.
Read the Winning Series
- Opinion 1: Why Are We Silent About Military Spouse Substance Abuse? Military.com (4/22/2024)
- Opinion 2: The Myth of Choice: Why We Ignore Military Spouses Out of the Workforce, Military.com (7/26/2024)
- Opinion 3: What Happens to Military Families After a Loved One’s Suicide? Military.com (12/31/2024)
- Opinion 4: How the Trump Administration Is Erasing History and Ignoring the Wishes of Descendants of Confederate Leaders, Military.com (2/26/2025)
- Opinion 5: The Daily Stress Weighing on Military Spouses, Military.com (3/20/2025)
Journalist Biography
Jennifer Barnhill
Jennifer Barnhill is a journalist, researcher, and fierce advocate for military families. She is a columnist for Military.com and the host of Military Dinner Table Conversations, a reverse town hall exploring the conversations military families are having around their dinner tables—conversations that directly impact recruitment and retention. She is a 2023 Bush Institute Stand-To Veteran Leadership Program Scholar and served on the board of the League of Wives Memorial Project, which helped erect the first statue honoring the advocacy of military spouses. Her reporting has been featured by CNN, The War Horse, Military Times and The Independent and her research on military children in special education has been cited by the White House.
In order to better understand the military community ecosystem, Jennifer obtained a Master of Public Administration from UNC Chapel Hill in 2022. Armed with this deeper understanding, she returned to journalism to spotlight some of the overlooked issues impacting the community: families facing food insecurity, surviving spouses fighting for earned death benefits and would-be recruits turned away due to outdated medical policies.
These and countless other experiences culminated in her debut book, The Military Stories You’ve Been Told: And the Ones You Need to Hear—an urgent examination of who gets to tell the military’s story, and why that must change. Through it, Jennifer invites readers to reconsider what they think they know about military service—by listening to the hidden all-volunteer force, military families.