Jean Jennings is an American journalist, publisher and television personality covering the automotive industry, noted for making the industry more accessible to a broad cross-section of enthusiasts.
After writing for Car and Driver (1980-1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her widely known column, Vile Gossip, after becoming the magazine's editor in chief (2000-2014) and president (2006-2014).
She was the automotive correspondent for Good Morning America (1994-2000) and the Oxygen network. She was later the Chairman, CEO and host of the self-branded automotive website and blog, Jean Knows Cars (2012-2018), has written articles for LinkedIn, and edited the book Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings. She continued to write the Vile Gossip column intermittently for Autoblog.com.
Jennings has been honored by the Motor Press Guild, International Society for Vehicle Preservation, and Detroit Press Club Foundation. With Jennings as editor and President, Automobile magazine was the first car magazine to win a National Magazine Award. She is in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame and won the Ken Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Journalism.
Background
Jennings grew up in a Catholic family with four brothers (also reported as five brothers) on a farm near New Baltimore, Michigan, the daughter of Audrey Jean Lienert (1924-2016, née Gagnon) and Robert Marcellus Lienert (1926-1988). Her father had a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern, was a copy editor at the Detroit Free Press, and later became the editor of Automotive News.
Having learned about cars from her father, Jennings recalled that he routinely brought home new and interesting cars for his work. He once took her, age 7, and two brothers for a test drive from their house in a brand new supercharged Studebaker Avanti — driving it inadvertently into a ditch at high speed but quickly recovering to the pavement before returning home, noting that their mother was not to hear the details of the test drive. Her oldest brother, Paul Lienert, became a noted automotive journalist, managing editor of AutoWeek, and a correspondent for Thomson Reuters.
At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Andes mountains. She attended St. Mary's Queen of Creation school from 1960 to 1970, and later attended the University of Michigan (1970-1972), dropping out after three incomplete semesters.
At eighteen, she became a taxi driver. She bought a used Plymouth Satellite with a 318 V-8 engine, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as an owner/operator. While there, she redefined the city taxicab boundaries, trained and created a training manual for new cab drivers, and was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. She married Tom Lindamood, a taxi dispatcher, in 1979. Five years later, with the taxi driving having become increasingly dangerous, Jennings became a driver at Chrysler's Chelsea Proving Grounds and later worked at Chrysler's Impact Lab, where she crashed cars, test drove cars, welded, and wrote for its award-winning union newsletter.
In 2014, Jennings co-founded the annual Caden's Car Show with C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, celebrating the life of eleven-year-old Caden Bowles, a car enthusiast who died while waiting for a heart transplant. Jennings has Type 2 Diabetes, sits on the board of directors of the Metro Detroit and Southeast Michigan chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and has emceed the organization's Promise Ball Gala.
In a 2016 interview, she counted as large influences on her life a Catholic upbringing "with a heavy emphasis on reading, Latin, and the pursuit of nothing less than perfection;" a disruptive bent brought out by working on an underground newspaper; and a heavy desire to escape her dirt-road, middle-of-nowhere childhood, the latter facilitated by learning to drive at an early age.
She now lives on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere (in Michigan) with her husband, Tim Jennings.
Career
In 1980, at her brother Paul's encouragement, one month after she was laid off at Chrysler, she applied at Car and Driver and was hired as a staff writer by editor David E. Davis (1930–2011). Though she considers herself a poor automotive prognosticator, in the November 1984 issue of Car and Driver, she presciently ended her Oldsmobile Calais review, "won't it be embarrassing if, twenty years hence, the division goes under because all its customers have died?" The division folded sixteen years later, in 2000.