Prof. Anne Donohue is Associate Professor of Journalism, Emerita, at Boston University's College of Communication, where she taught for 25 years before retiring in 2022. She was appointed the College's inaugural Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in 2017, serving in that role until 2020, and holds a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an M.S. from Boston University and an M.A. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts .
She came to teaching from a substantial broadcast career. She spent five years as special projects editor at Monitor Radio, and has contributed to NPR, the BBC, WGBH, WBUR and other public radio programmes, winning the duPont-Columbia Award for *The DNA Files* on NPR . Before public radio she was a writer and producer in commercial television news at ABC News in Washington and at the CBS affiliate in Boston . Her reporting has a clear through-line: she has won numerous journalism awards for productions on women and AIDS, population and women's reproductive health, and the treatment of women and girls in the developing world , subjects that were under-reported when she began covering them .
Her international work is unusually broad for a faculty member with an administrative load. She has reported from China, Egypt, Japan, Indonesia and throughout the United States . In 2008 she was a Fulbright Scholar at Renmin (People's) University in Beijing, teaching journalism, and she stayed on to file radio reports for several public radio outlets in the run-up to the Olympics as well as for NBC News during the Games , covering the Tibetan uprising, the Sichuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympics . She contributed a chapter to *From Home to Homeland* (2010) .
Her institutional legacy at BU is concentrated in two things. She was for many years the faculty advisor to WTBU, the student radio station, which under her guidance won repeated Associated Press awards and was named CMJ Station of the Year in consecutive years; student work from her classes won a Documentary Award for *Made in Massachusetts* . And in 2010 she founded the BU Program on Global Health Storytelling, a collaboration between the College of Communication, the School of Public Health and the Pulitzer Center , an attempt to train journalists to cover health as a global beat rather than a domestic one . She sits on the board of The Belmont Voice, the nonprofit newsroom that launched in 2023, as liaison between the governing board and the editorial advisory group [reference:19].
Prof. Donohue's career sits at a junction that journalism schools talk about more often than they achieve: she was a working producer of real distinction , a duPont-Columbia Award is not a teaching prize , who then spent a quarter-century teaching the craft to students and running a student newsroom that won on its own merits. The WTBU record is the clearest evidence. A station that wins AP awards and consecutive CMJ Station of the Year honours is not being run as an extra-curricular club; it is being run as a newsroom with standards.
Her reporting specialisms were, for a long time, unfashionable ones. Women and AIDS, reproductive health, and the treatment of girls in the developing world were not beats that broadcasters were competing for when she began covering them. That she won awards for them anyway says something about both the quality of the work and her judgement about what mattered.
That judgement is what makes her useful for manuscript review. Journalism and media-studies submissions fail in characteristic ways: a claim about audience or impact is asserted rather than evidenced, the reporting method is not described in enough detail to be assessed, or a global-health story is written from a single vantage point. Prof. Donohue has spent decades making exactly those judgements in a medium where the deadline does not allow for hedging, and she brings that discipline to the manuscripts APC reviews.
The APC Leadership Team American Publication ConsultantsTell us about your manuscript and we will match you with the right expert from our team.
Get A Free Quote