Kaylee Lindenmuth got her start in the news business as a junior at Shenandoah Valley High School in Schuylkill County.
With no school newspaper or TV studio, she launched The Shenandoah Sentinel, a local news website covering northern Schuylkill County and portions of Columbia, Northumberland, and Luzerne Counties. In her senior year, she took advantage of a school policy allowing five excused absences for job shadowing or college visits to shadow in the news department at WYLN-TV 35 in Hazleton for a week. No one said the days couldn’t be consecutive!
Her work for the Sentinel helped her win the National Press Club’s Richard Zimmerman Scholarship in 2017 and a first place award for breaking news photo in the Pennsylvania NewsMedia Association’s Professional Keystone Awards in 2021. In 2022, she followed up with two first place awards in the same contest — for breaking news photo and graphic/photo illustration — along with two second place awards for breaking news photo and news beat reporting.
She accepted a photojournalist position at WFMZ-TV in Allentown in 2021. There, she sparked and spearheaded an investigative series, “Burning Coal Country,” digging into an underground mine fire potentially connected to the Centralia Mine Fire. She was nominated for a Mid-Atlantic Emmy Award and won a Pennsylvania Association of Broadcasters Excellence in Broadcasting award for the series.
Her work has appeared in at least four daily newspapers, two weekly newspapers, and on every major television station in the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton DMA.