(2017 ☆ ARCHIVED) Nina Jelenc - Slovenia

NINA JELENC (Slovenia) – Nominee for the 2017 Media Professional of the Year Award

Born: 1986 in Ljubljana, Slovenia;

Discipline: All canoeing disciplines, with an emphasis on canoe slalom and wildwater canoeing, canoe sprint, paracanoeing, canoe marathon and recently other canoeing disciplines
Freelance journalist and photographer, working for European Canoe Association and Canoe Federation of Slovenia as media manager (journalist, photographer, social media manager, website administrator), Editor of Slovenian Kayak&Canoe Magazine (Kajak&kanu)

Nina has been around paddling and major canoeing competitions since she was born. Daughter of a Wildwater World Champion, she has dabbled in the sport herself, besides trying different sports such as tennis, table tennis and volleyball but prefers to keep her feet dry to report and photograph events now instead.

A professional of both the pen and the lens, Nina’s skills are invaluable to canoeing’s news platforms. She is one of the greatest assets in the paddlesports community when it comes to media and promoting the sport. She recently took on the challenge of media manager for the European Canoe Association, where her first goal was to establish social media accounts Canoe Europe and to give visibility to European canoeing and its protagonists, European paddlers, in all canoeing disciplines. Furthermore she was the initiator and driving force for the modernization of European Canoe Association’s image, which this year resulted in new website, new logo and new media activities.

She is the person behind all the social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube) of European Canoe Association – Canoe Europe and Canoe Federation of Slovenia, as well as Slalom Tacen and Ljubljanica Paddle Challenge Facebook pages. In addition to that you will be able to find her at the river banks of all the major competitions, taking photos, doing interviews with athletes, writing articles and making short video interviews for all previously mentioned Facebook pages, websites and other media. She is also the administrator of European Canoe Association’s and Canoe Federation of Slovenia’s websites, publishing articles and all the content coming from the offices of both associations.   

Nina has been working in journalism already during her studies (she holds a Masters degree in journalism) and gathered media experience as one of the editors of student newspaper at the Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Ljubljana. She has been working as a sports journalist since 2005, establishing her skills in sports reporting at Slovenian daily newspaper Delo, and news portal zurnal24.si. She also worked for Sports magazine in Slovenia, focused entirely on youth sports.

Later she dedicated herself to promotion of canoeing. She specialized in canoe photography, writing, social media, media strategy and planning ... She has been cooperating with Canoe Federation of Slovenia for more than 10 years now, for the last seven years as their media officer, she is the editor of Slovenian Kayak and Canoe magazine, she cooperated with ICF and their Planet Canoe magazine, contributed content for Sportscene and now also cooperates with European Canoe Association.

Nina has been a Slovenian language lector/proofreader for two Slovenian books, specialized in canoeing: Paddle Smart: A guide for the implementation of the Euro Paddle Pass programmes (written by Andrej Jelenc, 2007) and Manual for coaches in sprint canoeing (written by Jernej Župančič Regent, 2015).

She has also been in charge of media office at the 2017 ECA Canoe Slalom European Championships in Ljubljana and head of press office at Tacen Canoe Slalom World Cups since the year 2011. She has been invited by the organisers to work as a special correspondent at the Congress of Coaches in Sprint Canoeing in Catoira, Spain, last year.

Nina enjoys travel photography, cycling, badminton, squash, cross country and alpine skiing as well as learning foreign languages, which helps her a lot in her work, when interviewing athletes from different countries. Besides her native Slovenian she is fluent in English and Serbian, speaks Spanish, in limited capacity also Portuguese and German, she understands the basics of French, Czech and Slovak.

This is a 2017 archived nominee. Voting has closed.