Veteran journalist Mike Donoghue meets with the team of “The Buzz” at WUHS in 2017.
(Phil Camp Photo)
By Eric Francis, Standard Correspondent
This year’s successful campaign to get Vermont’s Legislature to enshrine press protections for student journalists into the law, which included testimony by the editor of WUHS school paper “The Buzz,” has in turn led to a national honor for the executive director of the Vermont Press Association who spearheaded the effort.
Mike Donoghue, who spent decades reporting for the Burlington Free Press and who has also contributed stories to the Standard over the years, will be recognized as a ‘Friend of Scholastic Journalism’ by the Journalism Education Association in November when they hold their annual gathering in Dallas.
“I said I’d never go to Dallas because of the Cowboys,” groused Donoghue this week, who nonetheless was dusting off his New York Giants hat in anticipation of the trip.
Calling the award “a nice thing from a major national group,” Donoghue, who also currently serves as the vice president of the New England First Amendment Coalition, stressed that the so-called “New Voices” law which was signed by Governor Phil Scott this May in front of a group of student editors from across the Green Mountains, “really was a team effort.”
Michelle Fountain, faculty advisor for The Buzz at WUHS, said Donoghue’s efforts were “absolutely essential” to the eventual passage of the New Voices legislation.
“While it was a team effort, he was the coach, recruiting the players, calling the plays and analyzing each move,” Fountain said this week. “He kept all of the high school newspaper advisors like me informed every step of the way, encouraging us to reach out to our legislators and to testify or encourage our students to testify before the House Judiciary Committee.”
Fountain added, “Last year’s editor of Woodstock Union High School’s “The Buzz,” Jenna Majeski, was thrilled to go to Montpelier to testify on behalf of the bill that gives the power of the student press to the students.”
Donoghue is being much too modest, according to Nancy Olson, a retired English teacher at Brattleboro Union High who served as the advisor for her school’s paper and who herself tried unsuccessfully for three legislative sessions to get student’s First Amendment rights formally protected before Donoghue took up the cause.
“Although there were a lot of people involved, Mike was the lynchpin for all of this effort,” Olson said. “He’s been a reporter for 45 years and a professor of journalism at St. Michael’s College and he just knows everybody so he was at the Statehouse talking to people, lobbying, encouraging students to come testify, keeping people connected… he was just there all the time and that’s what it took.”
Olson said she was especially impressed that “when the governor signed (the legislation), Mike made sure students were present to see that, especially those students who had testified in support of the bill.”
She noted that one of the key examples put before the Legislature when student editors came to testify was The Buzz at WUHS. Then-WUHS senior Jenna Majeski told committee members about her experiences as the student editor at “The Buzz” when she tried to cover a story involving reported incidents of sexting by some students.
Donoghue said this week that it was that testimony from the student editors who travelled to the capitol from Woodstock, Brattleboro, St. Albans and Burlington that put the final version of the bill over the finish line.
“We wanted them to hear from students who had first-hand cases where censorship was being imposed,” Donoghue said, noting that while Vermont was the tenth state to pass a law along the lines of New Voices, Nevada has since followed suit and several other states are poised to join the movement.
Donoghue, who served as a coadvisor for St. Michael’s College student newspaper for years, said that while student’s First Amendment rights can come up in the context of everything from a yearbook quote to a joke on a T-shirt, real student journalism is not a solo sport and requires a dedicated effort from faculty advisors.
“School districts need to try and have adequate training and support for the advisors,” Donoghue stressed. “At the Vermont Press Association we’ve got editors, publishers, reporters and photographers that are willing to go into schools and talk to faculty and work with the kids.”
“I think it’s an exciting time to be around journalism, more so than ever with what is going on in the United States right now,” Donoghue continued. “We really need kids to be able to ask tough questions and be able to find out the right answers and the correct information that readers want and viewers want because if we don’t teach them at this age, when they are 15 to say 22, if we don’t give them the skills and the knowledge, the techniques and the understanding of how to do their job now, then when it comes time to hire somebody, whether it’s at the Vermont Standard, or the Burlington Free Press or WPTZ, we are going to be hurting.”
This article first appeared in the September 21, 2017 edition of the Vermont Standard.