5 journalists earn Quill award

QUINCY, Mass. – Five New England journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a TV reporter at the center of the national debate over confidential sources, are the recipients of the 2007 Yankee Quill Award for their contributions to improving journalism in the region.

The award is presented annually by the Academy of New England Journalists through the auspices of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. It is considered the highest individual honor awarded by fellow journalists in the region.

This year’s recipients are:

. Eileen McNamara, a Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist at The Boston Globe and now a professor of journalism at Brandeis University.

. James Taricani, an investigative reporter for WJAR-TV, Providence, R.I., who was punished by the courts for refusing to disclose a secret news source.

. Larry McDermott, publisher of The Republican, Springfield, Mass., and president of the Massachusetts Newspaper Publishers Association.

. Barbara Walsh, an award-winning reporter at The Eagle-Tribune in Lawrence, Mass., and the Portland Press Herald-Maine Sunday Telegram;

. Michael Donoghue, a sportswriter at The Burlington, Vt., Free Press and executive director of the Vermont Press Association.

They will receive the Yankee Quill award on Oct. 25 during the joint conference of the New England Society of Newspaper Editors and the New England Newspaper Association at the Quincy Marriott.

McNamara will be honored as an advocate for the highest standards of ethics in the newsroom, with a passion to correct social injustice and provide a voice to the voiceless. She served 20 years as a reporter with United Press International and The Boston Globe before becoming a Globe columnist in 1996. One year later, she won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary “for her many-sided columns on Massachusetts people and issues.” McNamara, who retired from the Globe earlier this year, is now a full-time professor at Brandeis University.

Taricani has won numerous awards for his aggressive reporting in Rhode Island, including Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award. He will be honored for his role as an advocate for journalists’ rights and a defender of the First Amendment. In 2004, Taricani was sentenced to six months of house confinement for refusing to divulge the source of an FBI videotape showing a politician’s aide taking a bribe. The judge said he did not send Taricani to jail based on his fragile health – a heart transplant in 1996 and pacemaker in 2001. Since then, he has been a tireless advocate for a federal shield law.

McDermott will be honored for his extraordinary work on public-access issues in Massachusetts. Before being named CEO and publisher of the Springfield papers, he was executive editor, editor and associate publisher of the newspaper. Since 1998, McDermott has served as co-chair of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s Judiciary-Media Committee, which was established to improve relations between the judiciary and the media. As editor and publisher in Springfield, he has insisted on excellence in reporting and has pushed the public’s right to know in a series of precedent-setting court cases.

Walsh, now a freelance writer, was a major contributor to the Pulitzer Prize won by The Eagle-Tribune in 1988 for a series of stories on convicted murderer Willie Horton and Massachusetts’ flawed prison furlough system. While at the Portland papers, her work was honored with numerous awards, from the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism to the Anna Quindlen Award for Excellence in Journalism. Walsh will be honored as a feisty project reporter who writes about important public matters and issues and whose works have changed society for the better.

Donoghue, a staff writer for 37 years who moved to sports in 1998, is also an adjunct journalism professor at St. Michael’s College and president of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association. Donoghue is being honored for his leadership role on right-to-know and free press issues in Vermont as a practicing journalist and as head of that state’s press association.