Jessica Walsh joined the college full time in 2020 and is an assistant professor in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications where she teaches editing and reporting classes and researches journalism.

Walsh researches local, rural and environmental journalism and has a stream of research on teaching editing and Associated Press style in U.S. journalism college classrooms. Jessica's research focuses on rural and local journalists and their roles in a networked community. Some of her published research has included how rural journalists cover hate speech, how they cover the environment and how national and local journalists use social media to report news. Her research has appeared in Newspaper Research Journal, Digital Journalism, Rural Sociology, Mass Communication and Society, Journalism Practice, Grassroots Editor and Educational Psychology Review. She is a faculty fellow at the Daugherty Water for Food Global Institute.

Walsh was a reporter for 12 years at news organizations, including The Associated Press, The Patriot Ledger and the Boston Herald, where she won several regional press awards. In 2021, a story she wrote for the Omaha World-Herald on nitrate contamination in Nebraska's groundwater won an award from the North American Agricultural Journalists. 

Walsh received a bachelor's degree in news-editorial and a master's degree in professional journalism, both from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, College of Journalism and Mass Communications. She is a Ph.D. student in UNL's Agricultural, Leadership, Education and Communication program.