By Amanda Weber -

Jenni Hogan (BA, 2002) is a wearer of many hats, as she puts it, and it is this way of thinking that has been key to accomplishing all that she does.

Hogan graduated from UW with degrees in communication and economics. She is the star personality for KIRO-7’s traffic team, a social media maven, a mentor, community activist, public speaker, entrepreneur, and a full-time wife and mother to a 10-month-old baby girl — certainly enough roles for a closet full of hats (something this fashionista surely wouldn’t mind).

Swapping this myriad of hats every day may be overwhelming for the average Joe, but for Hogan it all seems to come naturally. “Multitasking, I think, is in my DNA,” she said. Thinking about how she became so adept at juggling duties, Hogan recalls that her move to Seattle from her homeland, Adelaide, Australia, was what pushed her to take on various activities with full force.

She came to the UW on a rowing scholarship in 1999, two years after racing with the Australian national rowing team in Seattle’s Windermere Cup. She captained the UW women’s rowing team, winning the Huskies two national championships; one in her senior year.

Half a world apart from her loved ones, it was always important for Hogan to keep in touch. “All my friends are back there so I was always on the computer keeping in contact,” said Hogan, “and working and then being an athlete at college — I just thrive on doing a lot of things at once.”

And that is exactly what Hogan does today. From the moment she wakes up at 3 a.m., Hogan switches into gear, checking her Blackberry for traffic alerts to be ready for the day ahead. Later, she rolls into the KIRO-7 studio, prepares for the camera, as any “traffoxy traffic tweeter” would, and come 4:30 a.m. it’s show time.

Hogan brightens up television screens across Puget Sound with her magnetic and bubbly personality, and in between her traffic updates she can be found checking in with her Twitter and Facebook accounts, which in total have more than 30,000 followers. Hogan’s presence in social media has even made her a finalist for the 3rd Annual Shorty Awards, which honors top short-form content creators on Twitter.

While she’s the face of the KIRO-7 traffic team, her fans and BTF’s (Best Twitter Friends) prove to be very helpful with traffic updates, tweeting about traffic snarls and hang-ups. “Instead of having just me telling the traffic news, I have a whole army of reporters telling me the news and I can be their voice,” said Hogan.

Once she gets the latest information from her traffic team and Twitter and Facebook buddies, it’s camera time once again. “It’s a sprint! For two and a half hours I’m on every ten minutes, but it’s breaking news because you can’t predict what’s going to happen,” said Hogan, “An accident could happen ten seconds before I go on, so it’s just crazy crazy crazy!”

Hogan takes on the role of traffic anchor five days a week, and while it may be a large part of her work, it’s only one piece of the Jenni Hogan brand. After her day at the studio, Hogan works on numerous things, one of her biggest professional ventures being Go Girl Academy.

Built on the idea of paying it forward, an important lesson Hogan learned from her aunt and uncle, Go Girl Academy is a ten-week structured course for women in all stages of their professional lives. It provides tools that enhance communication skills and self-confidence, where students are brought into a network of professionals who help one another in various ways.

“This idea started at least three years ago. When I graduated I reached out to mentors to help me to get to where I am, and the one thing they asked me in return was to pay it forward, so I started doing it for other people and it turned out a lot of people needed mentorship,” said Hogan.

Since launching Go Girl Academy in September 2010, Hogan has learned that starting a business is difficult, but the payoff is seeing the idea turn into reality and develop into much more than what was planned. “The first class blew away all my expectations,” she said. “I thought we were going to mentor individuals but when you watch these women come together and sit and talk about their dreams, and the light bulbs go off, it’s creating this network that’s just amazing.”

Hogan is also active in the community. She serves on the Department of Communication’s board of directors and leads the mentorship program, and she volunteers for the American Heart Association. Whenever people are in need, Hogan uses all of her resources to help out.

“On top of having KIRO and Go Girl, I have ‘Jenni Hogan,’ and it’s a platform that I use for non-profits or other causes. I look at it as a semi-job because I can be a voice for a lot of people,” said Hogan.

Over the holidays, Hogan and the KIRO-7 web team used social media to benefit Toys for Tots with a mobile Tweet-Up Campaign. People all over the Seattle area Tweeted their locations and Hogan and her team drove to them to pick up their donations. Recently Hogan also worked with Bravado Designs to raise nearly $35,000 dollars for Within Reach, a non-profit that supports new moms who have hit hard times.

Reflecting on her time as a communication student, Hogan remembers the journalism and public relations courses she took, and credits her former professors, like Kathleen Fearn-Banks and Kathy Gill, for her ability to inform and engage viewers.

Whether she’s telling the story of traffic, mentoring others with her personal experiences, using social media to generate support for non-profits, or simply reading a bedtime story to her baby girl, Siena, Hogan’s passion and talent for communication is undeniable.