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Jim Hooker
Senior Anchor / Managing Editor, NJN News

As senior anchor and managing editor of NJN News, Jim helps lead a team of talented and experienced reporters, producers and editors.

Together, the award-winning NJN News team brings our viewers the top stories and interesting sidelights of life in the Garden State in a compelling and intelligent way.

Jim is a seasoned journalist with a deep background in New Jersey issues and politics. He has reported for NJN nationally and abroad, and brings more than 25 years of newsgathering experience to the anchor chair. Jim succeeded longtime NJN News senior anchor Kent Manahan in December, 2008. 

Jim also serves as a backup host for Reporters’ Roundtable and On The Record, two NJN News public affairs programs, and was a host of the Emmy-nominated Congress Watch, currently in hiatus. He’s also taken up blogging for the network, something he’s enjoyed, he says, because it takes him back to his “print journalist” roots and allows him a new avenue to communicate with viewers and watchers of the state scene.

There are many highlights Jim points to since coming to NJN News in mid-1995 as State House Correspondent. Included among them are stints that include leading NJN's ‘round-the-clock, week-long coverage of the first-ever state government shutdown during the 2006 budget crisis and exciting and hard-fought gubernatorial and legislative elections. There was also the chilling and sobering NJN News team coverage of the 9/11 terror attacks. And there was also the politically hyper-charged resignation of Governor McGreevey; covering presidential conventions from Los Angeles to Boston; traveling to China and Hong Kong for a documentary on educational exchanges and to the Netherlands for a documentary on seaport security in a post 9/11 world. (Jim and his team won a national CINE award in 2005 for that special broadcast he wrote, co-produced and hosted).

Jim also was a member of the NJN News team that won a 1996 Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award for best newscast. His contribution to the entry was a story about the concerns of residents of a North Jersey neighborhood that is home to a federal Superfund site which was visited by President Clinton.  He has also won numerous individual national, regional and local press awards.

Jim's work in journalism has been recognized repeatedly by his peers. In 2001, he was elected by reporters and bureau chiefs who cover the State House for other media outlets as president of the New Jersey Legislative Correspondents Club, becoming the first president in the club's 80-plus year history to come from the broadcast media.

He has also been recognized in the community. In 2006, for example, he was awarded the William H. Thomas Citizen of the Year award from the Probation Association of New Jersey. Jim was selected for the award by Mr. Thomas. The two met through tragedy in 1994 when Jim covered the Thomas and Wengert families' push for reforms for the Asbury Park Press after Mr. Thomas' 6-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Wengert, was murdered.

Before joining NJN, Jim was a staff writer at three newspapers and spent 10 years with The Times of Trenton and the Asbury Park Press.   As a member of the Asbury Park Press State House bureau, Jim shared first place honors from the New Jersey Press Association for the bureau's reporting on the 1993 governor's race. Jim was also recognized in 1994 by the New Jersey Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for public service for a series of reports on sex offender notification programs in Washington State and their impact on neighborhoods and offenders. The series ran as New Jersey lawmakers were debating Megan's Law.

In 1990, while with the Trenton Times State House Bureau, Jim was awarded the top prize for investigative reporting by the New Jersey Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The Society recognized Jim's exposure of and subsequent reporting on millions of dollars in unauthorized spending by a New Jersey State official. His reports led to a new state law strengthening penalties for such actions.

Jim started his journalism career as a news intern and later on the sports and obituary desks at the Herald-Dispatch newspaper in Huntington, West Virginia, while still a student at Marshall University. After graduating Marshall, he landed a job at the Smithtown News, the flagship paper for a chain of weeklies on Long Island's north shore. While with the paper in 1984, he was awarded the James Murphy Memorial Cub Reporter of the Year award from the Society of Professional Journalists’ Long Island Chapter. Jim left the News in 1985 to work at the Trenton Times, starting there as a general assignment reporter.

Outside news reporting, Jim enjoys music, nature, sports and spending time with his family.