Jenny is the cofounder of a lit­er­ary stu­dio called Plymp­ton, which focuses on pub­lish­ing seri­al­ized fic­tion for dig­i­tal reading. In addi­tion she is work­ing on a book on the struggle to be emotionally present in a hyperconnected age called "Left to My Own Devices" for Simon & Schuster.
She was a reporter for The New York Times for nine years, and has been a commentator for NPR on Mar­ket­place. She's also been a lead judge for the Knight News Chal­lenge, a $25 mil­lion ini­tia­tive to sup­port news inno­va­tion, and was a pro­ducer in News Foo camp. She is also on the boards of The Asian Amer­i­can Writ­ers’ Work­shop, the Cen­ter for Pub­lic Integrity, the Nie­man Foun­da­tion, and the Robert F. Kennedy Courage in Jour­nal­ism awards, and is a mem­ber of the New York Pub­lic Library’s Young Lions Com­mit­tee. Plus I am a board mem­ber of the Insti­tute on Higher Awe­some Stud­ies, which sup­ports the Awe­some Foun­da­tion. Related to that, I am a pro­ducer on the doc­u­men­tary, The Search for Gen­eral Tso with Ian Cheney, the director of King Corn.
She majored in applied math and eco­nom­ics at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and then went to Bei­jing Uni­ver­sity for a year on fel­low­ship and stud­ied inter­na­tional relations.