Betsy O’Donovan – Faculty Update – Western Journalism Alumni

Betsy O'Donovan, MPhil

Associate Professor

Betsy O’Donovan Updates

Winter 2026 Update

Hello, all.

First thing: If you’re reading this and we haven’t checked in recently, I’m curious about what you’re up to, how you’re doing, and whether you have what you need to get wherever you’re going next. Touch base when you can: odonove@wwu.edu still works and I’d love to hear from you. (Despite the glacial speed of my responses when the academic year is attacking on all fronts.)

It’s been a busy, fun, thought-provoking year. I got to head to Dublin in December to research how Irish book publishers and literary magazines are dealing with the rise of large language models and other AI (“skeptically” is one answer), and found a new favorite place to hang out and work. (The Cake Cafe joins The International Bar as best hangouts in the city my Irish friends call “The Big Smoke.”)

While I was off doing that, Jeff Shaw (husband, next-office neighbor, award-collecting Planet adviser) was in London to do some research about how newspapers wrote about the suffragettes who used jiu-jitsu to defend Emmaline Pankhurst from police raids and angry mobs. I’m a little jealous, frankly, because what a fun project — but I also got to work with Jeff on a paper about American newspaper coverage of jiu-jitsu from 1904-1906, when it first hit our shores and became popular as a way for women to combat street “mashers,” or harassers; that’s coming out from the Journal of 20th Century Media History. If you like great stories about politics, history, and sports, Jeff’s recent projects have been super fun to read. For one thing, he will make you look at the “Sister Suffragette” number from “Mary Poppins” in a whole new light.

After we got done with interviews and archives, we met up in Edinburgh, Scotland, for Christmas (recommended places there: Typewronger Books, I.J. Mellis Artisanal Scottish Cheese Shop (yes, I am mocking myself for typing that, but cheese), the Greyfriars Bobby statue) because why not go even farther north than Bellingham during the dark winter months? (Kidding. It was my first trip there and magical for anyone with a drop of imagination.)

It’s been a travel-heavy year, honestly; I did my first feature reporting trip in quite a while when I went to QuiltCon in Raleigh, North Carolina, last month, to work on a story about how the (mostly) women who love this quintessential American art are using it to comment on our political moment and speak back to the federal government. I’m still drafting (and revising and revising and revising), and it’s torturous fun to be back at my desk, doing the work that I ask students to tackle in feature writing.

Speaking of teaching: My freshest news (as of, literally, yesterday) is that I am the 2026 recipient of the Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award, and I feel like I owe everyone who’s ever taken a class with me a lot of thanks for joining in on teaching experiments, intense conversations with classmates, and great, clear feedback about how to level up. (As you might know, though, I think everything can always be improved, so the experiments will continue.) It’s the first time the journalism department has brought one home (I predict not the last), and it comes with a literal medal. It’s not weird to wear that on the first day of class, right?

There’s lots more going on, as I suspect there is with all of you, and I wasn’t kidding at the top (that’s why I put it in the lede): Check in when you can, not just when you have good news. We’re here, interested, have a lot of tips about how to travel on a tight budget, and we’d love to know what you’re doing, wherever and whatever that might be.

Fondly,

Betsy O’Donovan
Winter 2025 Update

Last September, I had a cool opportunity that also delivered a sharp, difficult and important journalism lesson, so I’d like to tell you about both.

Misinformation has become an existential threat to human health and societies; I doubt I need to go into detail to persuade any of our alumni on that point. Climate misinformation is particularly entrenched, and the communities that are most affected by climate change tend to be the same communities that have a hard time getting a hearing from American news audiences.

So, I was excited to go to Tonga — a multi-island monarchy in the South Pacific with a population roughly the size of Bellingham — to run a workshop about how to tell climate stories and address climate misinformation with young leaders from around the South Pacific. Among others, I was joined by Jeff Shaw, the Planet’s adviser (and my favorite person), WWU alumnus Rhys Logan, and friend-of-the-WWU-journalism-program Laura Wides-Muñoz, who’s a standards and practices editor at NBC News in Washington, D.C. We spent months selecting participants and planning the workshop with community organizers in Nuku’alofa, the capital of Tonga. Planning a good, useful workshop is a fun challenge, but it was a familiar one.

One of the reasons I was particularly excited about this workshop is that I knew I had some things to learn, too. I wanted to hear about (and, ideally, see) the process of talanoa, a process of inclusive dialogue that’s used to resolve community problems. It has a lot in common with engagement journalism, which is one of my primary interests, and the way that journalists can become more effective and build more trust by listening to the everyday people in their communities.

But we missed a step in our communication. Somehow, in all of those planning conversations where we talked about talanoa, we missed a key aspect of cultural competency, which has to do with how a roomful of people introduce themselves to one another in Tonga and around the Pacific. Although we built in space for conversations around culture, and for people to introduce themselves in small groups, we hadn’t built time into our schedule to allow each of the people in the space to individually introduce themselves to the whole group and talk about their work and personal purpose as we formed the group. It wasn’t a disaster by any stretch of the imagination, but it meant that the people who’d traveled days to get their (flights in the Pacific can be tricky) didn’t have the information and mental map of the room that they needed in order to do their best work. It was a significant enough problem that we tore up our schedule to address it as soon as we realized how it was affecting the workshop.

And that’s the first journalism lesson here: Those of us who seek connections beyond our “home” communities and cultures are going to miss things. It’s a huge part of the argument for diversifying journalism’s workforce in the first place. And it can be uncomfortable, embarrassing, and a little stressful to be confronted by your own ignorance and have to correct it in real time, which can be a near-daily experience when you’re working to get to know an unfamiliar culture or community.

The second journalism lesson here is that discomfort, embarrassment and stress are not as important as the work we’re trying to do. The workshop’s participants were generous with their insight, and gracious with our misstep and its effects on our schedule and plans. Now, we all know a lot more about how their communities organize and work with information. They, I hope, have more tools to apply to their work in persuading the rest of the world to listen and learn from their experiences of climate change, and to help their communities sort fact from propaganda.

We’re going to need more solidarity, more cultural fluency, and more journalism as we confront the novel challenges ahead of us. Fortunately, journalism’s standard problem-solving techniques are incredibly effective: get curious, be humble about what you know, and never stop asking questions.

I hope the past year has been kind to you. If you need anything, you know where to find me and I hope you will.
Spring 2024 Update

As I write this, I’m transitioning from one remarkable journey with students to another. And, since both experiences highlight our program’s growth and how much we’ve benefitted from our alumni’s support, I’d like to tell you about them.

This year marked Western’s first invitation to the Christopher J. Georges Conference on College Journalism, hosted by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. The conference welcomed us as one of just two West Coast programs, alongside Stanford University (which, vexingly, took the “farthest travel to conference” bragging rights by a single mile).

You can learn more about the insights Franny Vollert and Oren Roberts brought back from the conference [story coming soon], or check out the conference sessions and, eventually, videos, at Nieman’s website. (While you’re there, check out and consider applying for their midcareer fellowships, which are an amazing opportunity and have produced two of Western’s journalism faculty.)

Our weekend in Cambridge and Boston was filled with exploration and deep conversations – including a helpful check-in with Charlie Sennott, the founder of Report for America, about opportunities for our recent graduates.

In April, Franny, Mia Limmer-Lai, Mars Wetzbarger, and Milo Whitman represented Western at the Seattle Times’ inaugural Best of the Northwest Symposium. The Times, as a new way to spot developing talent in our region, invited just seven journalism programs to bring some of our strongest second- and third-year news-editorial and visual journalism majors. Our crew spent two days going out on assignments, having their portfolios reviewed, and participating in skills workshops led by Times journalists.

I’m proud of how seriously Western journalism students take these opportunities – and how they bring back their experiences to enhance our entire program. That’s the kind of collaboration and horizontal loyalty that make a profound difference in the long-term success of our alumni.

Our industry, like many that are built around trust and personal integrity, depends on relationships.

That’s why I’m so grateful to alumni like Kaleigh Carroll, who supported Western’s participation at the Times (and recently used her sharp pen to tidy up our department’s “AP Style Essentials” document); and to Nate Sanford, who made it a point to text about a new opening at the Inlander so that faculty could reach out to our early career alumni; and to Kiana Doyle, who continues to advise and encourage students pursuing a Dow Jones News Fund internship; and to Audra Anderson, Connor Benintendi and Hailey Hoffman, whose kindness to interns at the Cascadia Daily News comes back to us in stories about reporting adventures.

The ways our alumni invest in the future of journalism leaves me inspired and hopeful. I hope you feel the same way.

As for personal things: I’m very happy to have been promoted to associate professor with tenure this year and will be embarking on a project in Tonga and Pasifika this September to explore stories about climate change, thanks to a U.S. State Department grant. I have no doubt that other adventures are on the horizon.

But every good journey concludes with a warm homecoming, and I treasure the moments when Jeff and I walk our hounds and reflect on everything I’ve experienced and shared, and how those things change (or challenge) me as a scholar, a teacher and a journalist.

Stay in touch. Send news. You know we love it.

Betsy
Winter 2022 Update

I salute you, WWU Journalism Department community, from the end of my first week of teaching on campus since March 2020. This is the week in which I discovered that I’ve forgotten how to commute; dug so far in the back of my closet that I had equal odds of finding Narnia or my professional wardrobe; and been entirely, utterly, perfectly delighted to discover how tall all of my students are as we finally gathered in person. (It turns out that guesses about height based on Zoom are unreliable and that teaching while wearing an N95 mask is not as inaudible and sweaty as I feared.)

This year marks another significant milestone: The students who began their journey in the journalism department when I first arrived at Western in 2018 are launching into their professional careers. I’m not sure that there’s anything as joyful as seeing their hard work begin to pay off in first jobs, new mentors, and creative, meaningful work. Can this also serve as a reminder to you that alumni mentorship can make a profound difference? The interest, advice and advocacy of alumni have all played a role in this generation of students’ success. To those of you who have offered help, thank you. To those of you who haven’t had the opportunity, let me invite and encourage you. It’s fun. It’s important, too.

But many of our students haven’t waited for graduation to test their skills. Winter 2021 Front Editor-in-Chief Izzie Lund and Managing Editor Kaleigh Carroll pitched (and published) a guide for writing protest coverage policies in Poynter. Two-term Front EIC Nate Sanford has earned bylines from Crosscut and The Inlander (where he’ll be working as a staff writer after graduation). These opportunities are good for students, obviously, but I’ve also been working with editors at national publications, including The Washington Post, who are eager for student voices as they try to diversify their coverage, include new voices, and spot rising talent. If your newsroom is working on the same goals, I’d love to hear about it so I can direct high-quality student pitches your way. (I should add: Being in academia hasn’t made me forget how busy newsrooms are, so please don’t worry that offering to field student journalists’ pitches will open the floodgates. Part of the value of our work here is in preparing young journalists to pitch wisely and well, to be ready for revision or rejection, and to treat time and attention as the precious resources that they are.)

As for me? After two busy, wonderful years teaching and advising The Front, I got to work with longtime Bellingham Herald reporter Kie Relyea as she stepped into that role. I am excited to see how The Front continues to evolve with her leadership and skills. Although I miss the buzz and frenzy of the newsroom, it’s also amazing to have time to do what I did yesterday: Curl up in my office chair with Wonder Woman slippers and a mug of coffee, working on edits for research in progress, catching up with academic journals that have stacked up for months, and figuring out how to explain what a dangling modifier is to game-but-puzzled editing students.

Let me wrap up on a personal victory: Just before I joined Western’s faculty, I was the executive director at The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We had a problem familiar to college newsrooms: UNC refused to disclose the names of people who had been found responsible for sexual assaults on campus. We believed those records were public. The university claimed that they were not. So, in 2016, I cobbled together a coalition of newsrooms that could share the costs, and we sued — with the DTH, the only student newsroom, as the leading plaintiff. Last year, after four years of escalating battles, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear UNC’s appeals, forcing the university to follow the N.C. Supreme Court’s order to release the records. Why is that news that merits a mention in Western’s journalism alumni newsletter? Because I have the same hopes for a suit that three WWU journalism alumni have pursued to resolve the same question here. (You can follow The Front for ongoing coverage — and I hope you will.)

If any of this sounds fun or important to you, or if you’re looking for opportunities to help student journalists on their way, please be in touch: odonove@wwu.edu. And, as ever, thanks for the ways that you support the students who follow you. It makes a difference and means a lot
Winter 2021 Update

Friends, I just ordered 500 adhesive googly eyes for my spring quarter editing class.

I’m running an assignment called “Errors in the Wild,” which requires students to spot tortured English in their daily lives, submit photos of the crime scene, and then explain each problem and how they would fix it.

But, as my fellow word freaks will know, nerdy corners of the internet have a lot of those already — a temptation! — and I want original examples of students bringing their training into their daily lives. Thus we arrive at googly eyes: In order to earn credit for finding their natural prey, the student editors of J309 will have to mark them with a single sticker and snap a photo.

The assignment is one of my answers for how these young journalists and I are finding our way through the pandemic, distance learning, and the struggle to stay connected to our work and each other in editing and at The Front, where I’m wrapping up the second of my two years as adviser. (Please check out spring EIC Izzie Lund’s thoughtful and comprehensive list of all that we’ve accomplished in the past year at The Front in this newsletter. I’m blisteringly proud of these teams and how they’ve handed off big tasks, quarter to quarter, to get important things done.)

In my classrooms and the Front newsroom, the ethos is “We do hard things well” and the rule is “No one struggles or succeeds alone.” I think you all would be impressed with how these young journalists have risen this year, and how they have supported one another in doing smart, hard, thoughtful journalism.

They need support from you, too, so if you have capacity to Zoom into a class, advise someone about internships, hire a new grad, give to our scholarship accounts with the Foundation, or volunteer for the Front’s new advisory board, please be in touch.

I hope you all can stay safe and healthy — and a little joyful, too.
Winter 2020 Update

Writing faculty updates feels (delightfully) like sending a letter used to: I’m writing this long before you’ll read it, and everything will have changed by the time you receive it, from the foliage in the arb (currently October’s bright reds and yellows) to the challenges we’re tackling at The Western Front. That things change so quickly is one of the great charms of working in journalism, higher education, and at Western, in particular.

As I step into my second year on faculty, it’s with the pleasure of working closely with the student journalists at the Front, as their instructor and adviser. Much of the past year has been occupied with imagining and implementing new structures and opportunities for students in the newsroom. We’ve gotten a lot done already, thanks to lots of consultation with former editors, interested faculty (current and emeritus), and particularly Carolyn Nielsen (who chairs the Student Publications Council) and Jack Keith (who made the transition infinitely easier). What does that look like? If you pop into the Front these days, you’ll find student reporters working in beat teams and filing stories every day of the week so we can keep pushing a digital-first strategy. Student editors are tackling significant projects, from revamping our hiring guidelines and job descriptions to rethinking our photo archiving system to creating a consistent design guide for digital and print presentations. We’ve revised how and when our work gets done, changed the way we assess student development, and taken up the challenge of making sure students who pass through this gateway class for the major are well-prepared for all that follows.

I’m especially proud of our student editors: In addition to the regular work of getting the news to the community, they’re also doing special training in newsroom coaching and team management — and the early results are good.

As for the other half of the job: I just closed a magazine feature for Publisher’s Weekly about historical research and romance novels, and used my first-year summer research grant to dive into questions about how Hearken’s community-first approach to reporting is shifting the nature of the news, and their audiences’ relationship to journalists and journalism. I’m also just starting to shape a project that connects the Army War College’s research into military unit cohesion with models for developing high-performing teams of journalists. This summer, I was accepted into the second cohort of Solutions Journalism Academy fellows at the University of Oregon (an experience and approach to reporting that I highly recommend),

Basically, I’ve had an interesting, challenging and beautiful year — and I hope the same is true for you.
Winter 2019 Update

How has this school year been? Let’s take this exact moment as a sample: Here I sit in JFK’s terminal 8, revising a forthcoming article about metrics for The American Press Institute, fresh off of a meeting about newsletter and audience strategy at StoryCorps, with a half-marked-up copy of The Western Front in my bag, a list of students’ investigative story ideas at my elbow, and a half-plotted journalism department hackathon open in another tab on my browser.

And, full disclosure, I’m setting a rotten example: This blurb was due yesterday. (You might want to mark me down a full letter grade for that. I would.)

In sum, my first four months at Western have been lively, demanding and outrageously fun — not unlike our students, come to think of it.

That part is no surprise; I came to Bellingham from The Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina, after a busy few years juggling journalism practice with life on campus (adjuncting at Northeastern and Harvard in Boston, earning a master’s in writing at Trinity College Dublin). I’m looking forward to bringing that practice (20 years’ worth now) to our students as they explore feature writing, new forms and platforms, and develop the crucial, durable qualities of curiosity, skepticism and hunger for growth.

As I find my way at Western, I’d like to hear about your growth, your practices of journalism and storytelling, and how your time here has influenced your careers. Please be in touch!