Good afternoon, Business Record readers. I’m writing today to introduce you to Mike Mendenhall, an experienced, award-winning journalist and Des Moines native we have hired to fill the newly created role of associate editor of the Business Record.

Mike, an East High graduate and a graduate of the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass Communication, moved with his wife back to Des Moines for this role after a four-and-a-half-year stint as the associate editor and reporter at the Jacksonville Daily Record – a business-focused publication similar to the Business Record.

Mike will have three primary responsibilities for the Business Record. First, he’ll lead the content that appears in our publications by working closely with our staff of reporters to plan, develop story ideas, and execute our coverage. In that capacity, Mike will serve as the conduit to the community for all news questions and will be your primary contact should you need to connect with the newsroom.

In addition, you will be seeing his byline in our products. Mike is an experienced reporter as well as editor and will be covering our economic development and government policy beats. This area will allow him to stay connected and provide you with in-depth coverage of our key business institutions and the trends affecting our community.

Lastly, Mike will coordinate with our recently promoted Digital News Editor Sarah Diehn on daily news coverage, and with Emily Wood, our former editor who took on the newly created role of special projects editor in July. Collectively the changes to our newsroom structure will allow our team to provide you with deeper coverage of the community, an increased focus on our digital products, and energy around the special things we do each year like Women of Influence, Forty Under 40 and 90 Ideas In 90 minutes, just to name a few.

Now, a bit more about Mike, his background and why we feel so fortunate to bring him back to our community.

While at the Jacksonville Daily Record, he covered city and state government, transportation and logistics, consumer energy policy and the Jacksonville Jaguars business operations. His reporting was wide-ranging and included the struggles and wins in a protracted push to revitalize Jacksonville’s historic Downtown; the city’s fiscal response to the COVID-19 pandemic; criminal investigations into the failed privatization of Jacksonville’s public utility that led to federal indictments of its CEO and CFO; and the Jaguars owner Shad Khan’s multibillion-dollar real estate development ambitions in Jacksonville.

He began his career in 2011 as a crime and courts reporter for the Newton Daily News and worked to eventually be named editor-in-chief in 2018. He was the organization’s news editor from 2014 to 2018, running the Prairie City News, Jasper County Tribune and Monroe Legacy.

Mike is also an award-winning journalist who received the Iowa Newspaper Association’s Genevieve Mauck Stoufer Outstanding Young Iowa Journalists Award in 2016 and the Harrison “Skip” Weber Investigative Reporting Award in 2014. In 2016, the Tribune and Prairie City News were honored with first and second place, respectively, in general excellence in the INA’s annual industry awards. You can read his full bio on our website here: Full bio

We’re very fortunate to have a journalist of Mike’s quality joining us in our newsroom and community. With more than 10 years of newsroom leadership and reporting experience, his ties to the community and an understanding of the role business journals play in a community, I know he’ll continue to serve our goal to help you do business better through our coverage. Please join me in welcoming him back to the community. Mike can be reached via email at mikemendenhall@bpcdm.com and you can connect with him on LinkedIn.