The Editor Who Can’t Step Outside Without Finding a Story

There is a particular kind of person Lancaster seems to make its own. They arrive as visitors and then, somewhere between a first meal at a Central Market st and a late-night show at a local theater, they decide they’re not leaving. Jenelle Janci is one of those people. She’s also one of the reasons you probably already know about whatever new thing just opened in your neighborhood.

Janci is the editor of the Work and Play team at LNP | LancasterOnline, the local nonprofit newspaper that has been covering Lancaster County for generations. Her team’s coverage area is, in her words, “everything that contributes to Lancaster’s identity as a place.” That means coverage of business, transportation, development, health, entertainment, home and garden, food, local history, and personality profiles, a portfolio so broad it essentially amounts to Lancaster itself.

“If your eyes are open,” says Janci, “everywhere you look there is something that we would like to write about in the paper.”

Janci came here in 2015, after graduating from Temple University. She visited twice and decided Lancaster was “a really cool up-and-coming city”. Over a decade later, she’s still here and she’s recruited a fair number of friends to follow. “I pride myself in being an early adopter of Lancaster,” she says with a laugh, “and getting lots of folks to come here and call it home, too.”

The New Jersey native had to field the expected jokes when she first announced the move. Would she have electricity? Running water? She did, of course, along with access to fresh local produce, a thriving arts scene, and a $20 Friday night that outpaced anything most large cities could offer at twice the price. “People are starting to catch on now,” she says, “but it’s just a really special place to live and work.”

What makes Janci’s editorial work special is how thoroughly it’s fused with her daily life as a Lancaster resident. A new coffee shop she spots on her morning walk becomes a tip she fires off to a reporter. A surprise opening act at a West Art show on Saturday becomes a potential feature story by Monday. “It’s impossible for me to step outside my door and not see something that could be a story,” she says.

She describes Lancaster as hard to sum up for people who haven’t visited, not because it’s complicated, but because it packs so much. Living in Lancaster city, she can easily reach a downtown boutique, a hiking trail in the southern end, and an arts event in Lititz all in the same day. That density of things to do, she argues, is part of what makes Lancaster County so singular. “I think Lancaster is such a unique place for how much you get in a relatively small package.”

At its core, that’s the mission animating the Work and Play team’s coverage: not just to inform Lancaster residents, but to connect them. Janci hopes that reading the paper deepens people’s sense of belonging through learning about the new business around the corner or the artist in the neighboring township. “The more that you know about your local businesses, your neighbors, your community artists, the deeper your own roots to your place of residence become.”

It’s a mission that happens to align perfectly with the person doing it. Janci doesn’t cover Lancaster from a distance. She lives it, walks it, eats it, and stays out late listening to its music. When the Work and Play team publishes a story, there’s a chance it started as something Jenelle noticed on her way to get coffee. And that, perhaps more than anything else, is what local journalism is supposed to feel like.

To support the nonprofit news reporting of Jenelle Janci and the reporters of the Work and Play team at LNP | LancasterOnline, please visit Supportlocal.news to subscribe or make a tax-deductible donation. You can also donate by making a check payable to Always Lancaster and mailing it to: Always Lancaster Donation, PO Box 1328, Lancaster PA, 17608.

To contact the Work and Play team, email jjanci@lnpnews.com.

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