She is warm and sincere. Everyone who visits her office is quickly invited to take a Snickers from her well-stocked candy mug. When the door to her office is closed there’s a thought-provoking question written on the back for students to write an answer to while they wait. Most of all, she loves her position, and it shows.

“I love working with young journalists and as I have shifted to more toward freelancing and consulting I’m working with people in more senior roles but a lot of the stuff I’m learning in my practice is stuff I really love talking to younger journalists about,” she said.

Before Western, she worked as the executive director for The Daily Tar Heel. Before that, there was a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Before that, years of experience as a community journalist. Along the way, she found herself at ESPN for four or so years too. Now, as an associate professor and co-founder of media consulting firm Hedgehog + Fox, she still has feet in the business doing freelance jobs as they fit into this new world of hers.

“I think it’s a really important feedback loop. We have to stay current with the field and we have to be able to give high-value advice, so this is exactly the kind of department I wanted to be in,” O’Donovan said.

Bellingham was appealing from the start.

“It’s an eerily beautiful place,” she said when remembering her first visit to Bellingham.

More so, though, the journalism department at Western was appealing. 

“There are so many people working on things that I think are really vital to journalism, and also doing high-quality teaching,” she said. On her first visit, she led a classroom discussion on race reporting in journalism to a room of students and faculty, including Carolyn Nielsen who had just finished her dissertation on covering racial issues in the digital age. 

“It was one of those moments where your heart drops when someone says ‘Oh yeah, this is my area of research’ and you worry you’ve just said something really dumb,” O’Donovan said. 

But she hadn’t, and the two noticed very similar trends on the issue. Shortly after, it was time to start planning the move to Bellingham.

She’s taken the role of a teacher throughout her career. Her first job after college was copy editing, helping reporters with the writing mechanics she had come to master as an English major at Wake Forest University.

“Everything I have done as a journalist has basically been tied to working with other people on their practice whether they were older or younger than me and that’s one of the things I’ve always loved about newsrooms,” she said.

She has a lot to share with the students. When she teaches feature writing she shows students some of the pitches she’s sent to editors, or the shared document of edits going back and forth between her and her editor to show students exactly what it’s like to be practicing journalism outside of university publications. (It turns out Google Docs transcends into the professional world as well.)

“I honestly think the classroom is the closest proxy there is to the golden age of print newsrooms. The cut and thrust of ideas, the constant sense of the opportunity for improvement, this really rigorous devotion to getting the story right- both in form and fact. It was a pretty natural transition,” she said.