Before she reported on the stars of outer space professionally, Jackie Wattles ’14 (CLAS) spent her UConn journalism days reporting on the stars of student government.
“They were willing to stick around and debate late into the night, so I would rush to meet my deadlines by sprinting from the Student Union to the Daily Campus newspaper building,” Wattles recalls. Fortunately, the cross-campus dash didn’t take too many strides: Wattles is 6’2”.
Indeed, Wattles also played for the women’s volleyball team as a middle blocker, the center position in the front row usually held by the tallest person on the roster. Growing up 1,800 miles from Storrs in the small Texas town of Liberty Hill, Wattles was recruited by several DI volleyball squads. “I tell my dad I chose UConn to attend a school where the men’s basketball team could beat his University of Arizona.”
Wattles, a journalism and political science double major, remembers one particular assignment. Professor Marcel Dufresne tasked his investigative journalism students to find as much information as they could about him (through legal means only). While almost everyone else stuck to the internet for research, Wattles — recognizing that many municipal records hadn’t been digitized by then — drove to Dufresne’s hometown town hall, where she dug up his voter records and property deeds on paper. “For some assignments,” she admits, “I will go fully mentally deranged.”
Today, Wattles covers the private space industry for CNN — a beat she entered accidentally. Spending her first several years at CNN as a breaking news business reporter, she was often assigned nights and weekends, as early-career journalists often are. “A lot of rockets launch on nights and weekends!” she says. CNN eventually promoted her to their website’s full-time space reporter.
