Jessica Graue

Jessica Graue uses an insider’s understanding of comedy and a reporter’s eye for place to cover entertainment, historic homes and neighborhood stories for the Dayton Daily News. Her work is anchored in recurring series such as the Laugh Riot Girl comedy column and the Timeless Dayton features on old homes and preservation, which give her coverage a consistent voice across very different corners of local culture.

Laugh Riot Girl: Local Comedy Scene

Graue’s Laugh Riot Girl column is her primary entertainment vehicle, focusing on the stand-up comedy scene and the issues that surround it.

She writes as a comedian, journalist and professor, and she states that freedom of speech and expression sit at the center of her daily work. Columns on censorship and its effect on local comedians show her willingness to address how performance intersects with speech, venue rules and audience expectations in concrete terms. She devotes whole pieces to the “sandboxes of comedy,” explaining how open mics function as places where comedians hone material, and she provides detailed listings of shows, sign-up times and venues in the region.

Her writing often profiles individual comics, including a traveling comedian returning home after performing around the world and another who appeared on the live stand-up podcast “Kill Tony,” tracing how they build careers and balance local and national exposure. Graue also reviews comedy-related films such as “The Paper,” treating them as part of a broader conversation about how media portray newsroom and performance culture. Several columns delve into mental health, describing the stage as a form of therapy for comedians and recounting the impact of suicide and grief within the comedy community. She brings personal experience into the work, including an essay on her father’s illness and death that links family loss to questions about whether she will remain funny, and she offsets that reflection with practical round-ups of comedy shows and ticketed events.

Across these pieces, the column mixes first-person narrative, profiles, listings and commentary, making her coverage more intimate and insider-driven than a standard events calendar.

Timeless Dayton: Historic Homes and Preservation

Alongside entertainment, Graue leads Timeless Dayton, a series dedicated to historic homes, miniature houses and the people who preserve them. She has written a year-in-review piece explaining that she produced 18 articles in 2025 about old homes, their interiors and the specialists who focus on preservation, which frames the series as sustained reporting rather than occasional features.

Individual stories explore properties such as the historic Huffman Black home becoming a bed-and-breakfast, highlighting how restoration decisions intersect with business plans and hospitality. Other pieces focus on a grand painted lady on Linden Avenue built in the 1880s, documenting its architectural character and the work homeowners undertake to restore and maintain it. She covers an Oakwood Avenue home where renovation is intentionally slow, treating pacing and patience as part of the narrative of preservation.

Another article follows a couple selling the original F.A. Requarth home in the Oregon District, connecting personal decisions about leaving a house to the building’s place in local history.

In these features she consistently foregrounds owners’ stories, renovation choices and the textures of interiors, treating the houses as lived spaces rather than just facades. Timeless Dayton also functions as a reporting pipeline, with Graue inviting people with historic homes and restoration journeys to share their stories, which keeps the series rooted in community-sourced subjects.

Neighborhood Change and Human-interest Features

Graue extends her focus on place into broader neighborhood and human-interest coverage.

She has reported on a family working with a real estate investor to improve a neighborhood, using that story to show how individual households and capital projects combine to change a block over time. In another feature she writes about small acts of kindness, framed around the idea that people are “all in this together” while physically separated, and she invites readers to share their own examples of generosity.

These pieces lean on simple, concrete episodes - neighbors helping one another, investors renovating properties, families making choices about where to live - to illustrate wider patterns of community resilience and change. The same attention to individual voices that defines Timeless Dayton appears here, but the emphasis shifts from architecture to everyday interactions, giving communications professionals a sense of how she handles softer, people-centered stories.

Background in Journalism, Teaching and Comedy

Graue brings more than two decades in media to her current reporting and column work. She describes herself as a writer, teacher and editor whose life revolves around words and language, and she now teaches journalism full time while advising a student newspaper. Her background includes newsroom leadership roles at daily papers and nearly a decade designing newspaper pages, which gives her fluency in both content and presentation.

She has worked in digital publishing, posting stories online and using social platforms to promote media products, experience that informs how her pieces can be repurposed and amplified. Currently she writes and edits as a freelance contributor and digital specialist for the Dayton Daily News and related outlets.

In her comedy column she explicitly identifies as a journalist, professor and comedian, and she uses that mix of roles to frame discussions of speech, performance and the ethics of entertainment. This hybrid profile - educator, working comic and experienced editor - means her coverage tends to combine clear explanatory prose with an insider’s vocabulary and an eye for how stories will play both on stage and on the page.