As women's page editor for the Miami Herald, she shifted the focus of those pages from the "Four F's – family, food, fashion, and furnishings" – to focus on covering women's issues as hard news, and influenced other newspapers to follow suit.

[3]: 44 While at the Herald Jurney and Applegate held annual workshops for area women's club leaders, attracting up to 750 at a time.

They encouraged clubs to upgrade their programs to earn coverage and held contests for the best projects.

These workshops and contests changed the primary focus of area women's clubs from social-event organizing to cause-related fundraising.

"[3]: 57 In the early 1950s Jurney ran stories about the Kinsey Reports, commenting that female readers seemed to be "less squeamish" than men about sexuality being discussed in the newspaper, and about childbirth, which won Penney-Missouri Awards and encouraged other women's sections to follow suit.

[3]: 120  Jurney later said "back in the 1950s, male editors didn't give a whit what we 'girls' put in the section...it was all filler to them.

[6]: 26 Also in the 1950s, at a time when the news desk ignored such stories, Jurney ran stories in the women's section about issues in the black community such as housing; she said later that she had attempted to cover the civil rights movement but that "management did not want such news" in the women's pages.

[3]: 147 In January 1956 Jurney wrote an article for the American Society of Newspaper Editors urging women's page editors to cover "home and health" stories from a hard news perspective, saying "the home beat should be no different fundamentally than the police beat".

She later described how in that year she had volunteered to "cover events and relieve her male colleagues and editors of work, as a strategy for successfully expanding the scope of her section.

From 1977 to 1986 she did a study of women in journalism management, publishing her results in the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

She served as a board member of New Directions for News, a University of Missouri School of Journalism think tank.