Talia Buford, editor-in-chief of Hampton University’s Hampton Script, is one of 10 winners of this year’s Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award.
Buford got the $5,000 prize “for serving as an inspiration to student journalists everywhere when she won the university’s promise of an uncensored student newspaper.”
Buford said, “I have a staff of about 15 great people who stood right along side me through the whole thing and a whole slew of people in the journalism world who stood behind us. It really was a group effort and it really was all of us.”
Buford said she plans to use the cash prize to pay for part of her tuition, but she would also like to give part of it to her staff.
Hampton administrators and a special task force reached an agreement Dec. 19 that established a new set of rules to ensure free speech on campus and prohibits anyone in the future from confiscating The Script.
Acting President JoAnn Haysbert seized copies of the student paper in October, after Buford published a letter Haysbert had written on the third page rather than on the cover, as Haysbert wanted.
The confiscation ignited a firestorm of criticism from the journalism community and prompted the American Society of Newspaper Editors to pull funding from the school.
The task force said no administrator, faculty member, student or university-affiliated organization should halt distribution of the paper. The 11-member group also suggested that the newspaper’s faculty adviser have a background in journalism. It supported creation of an advisory board made up of faculty and students to resolve conflicts between editors and advisers, and said that the freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution extends to student journalists.