Hopkins named VCOG president; Moncure fills McMasters vacancy
Dr. Wat Hopkins (left), professor of mass communications at Virginia Tech, is the new president of Virginia’s Coalition for Open Government, succeeding Paul McMasters.
McMasters retired this year, after serving as First Amendment Ombudsman for the Freedom Forum. He served four years as VCOG’s president.
Tom Moncure, a former Stafford County delegate and clerk of court, was elected to fill out McMasters’ term.
Moncure is a former member of the FOI Advisory Council. He served as a senior deputy to Attorney General Jerry Kilgore and currently is counsel for George Mason University.
Re-appointed to the VCOG board was John Moen, general manager of Fredericksburg radio stations owned by the Free Lance-Star companies.
Associated Press bureau chief Dorothy Abernathy was named to a two-year term as VCOG’s vice president.
Welcome, new members
George Awkward III, W&L
Virginia Barnett, Charlottesville
Jim Brady, Vienna
Heather Buchanan, Suffolk
Lou Emerson, Warrenton
Phil Hahn, Purcellville (Blue Ridge Leader)
Paul Jost, Williamsburg
Lance Kyle – Arlington
Lawyers Weekly
League of Women Voters, Loudoun County
Loudoun Times-Mirror
Bill Oswald, Charlotte Courthouse
Dave Price, Alleghany Bd of Supervisors
Private Investigators Association
Doug Smith, Va. Interfaith Center
Brenda Stewart, Chesterfield
Adrienne Topping, Yorktown
Virginia Education Association
S.E. Warwick, Oilville
York County Professional Fire Fighters Local 2498
McMasters, Landon honored
Paul K. McMasters (below), who stepped down Jan. 1 as VCOG’s president, was presented the 2007 James Madison Award by the American Library Association.
He was given the award for tireless work toward openness in government and was called “a true public servant for openness and public disclosure of government information during his long and distinguished career.”
“From his establishment and direction of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center to his work as First Amendment Ombudsman, he has demonstrated a genuine devotion to Madison’s ideals,” the ALA said.
Frosty Landon, VCOG’s founding director, was selected by the National Freedom of Information Coalition and the Society of Professional Journalists for their Open Government Hall of Fame Award.
Landon is a board member and former president of NFOIC. The award recognizes his long-term contributions to open government in Virginia.
Landon also was given the Virginia Press Association’s inaugural First Amendment Award for his years of work on access for citizens to government information.
The award also was presented to Lou Emerson, former owner of The Fauquier Citizen and the Culpeper Citizen. Emerson’s decision to sue the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors led to last year’s open-government decision by the state Supreme Court.
Smolla takes Lexington post
Rod Smolla became dean of the Washington and Lee University law school on July 1. A First Amendment authority and VCOG board member, Smolla formerly was dean of the law school at the University of Richmond.
VCOG’s 2007 Laurence E. Richardson summer intern
Matt Haynes (below), a rising second year law student at University of Richmond, is serving as the Coalition’s Laurence E. Richardson Legal Fellow for the summer of 2007.
He’s a graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University, where he majored in political science. We met Matt at a public-interest job fair this winter and were impressed with his public service experience, as well as his experience with politics on both sides of the aisle. He was a member of both the College Republicans and the Young Democrats in college, and he worked as an intern for Del. Bill Carrico (R-Independence), as well as a Get-Out-The-Vote field captain for Governor Tim Kaine’s (D) election campaign.
In addition to the usual intern duties of writing summaries of FOI Advisory Council, Matt has been researching how Virginia compares to other states on a number of different issues: access to gun-permit databases; defining what is considered private, personal information; and public-comment periods at local government meetings, for example.
Matt attended two FOI Advisory Council subcommittee meetings and the Coalition’s June 14 board meeting
Matt left for England in early July to participate in a five-week fellowship at Cambridge, but not before running with the bulls in Pamplona. Olé!
Founders Myrtle Barnes, Cole Campbell die
Myrtle Barnes, former Daily Press journalist and editor, died of cancer at age 73. She was a founding board member of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government.
Cole Campbell, former editor of the Virginian-Pilot and dean of the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, was killed in an auto accident in Reno. He was 53.
Like Barnes, Campbell pushed hard for VCOG’s formation when he was a Virginia newspaper editor.
Prior to his move to Reno, he was editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
We’ve got an endowment…
Thanks again to the 84 contributors who helped us successfully match the Knight Foundation’s $200,000 challenge grant. The foundation check arrived just a few weeks ago.
Including three multi-year pledges due before October 2008, the new Endowment totals $450,000.
We raised $200,000 for the match, and shifted another $50,000 into the Endowment from our unrestricted reserves (leaving about $100,000 in the reserve account).
Major contributors included Dominion, Media General, Landmark Newspapers, the Laurence and Catharine Richardson family, the Daily Press, the Free Lance-Star, Appalachian Power, VCOG’s board of directors, the state’s media associations, Freedom Forum, Christian & Barton, and WTVR-Richmond.
A special thanks, of course, to the folks at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The foundation promotes excellence in journalism worldwide and invests in the vitality of 28 communities. Earnings from the VCOG Endowment will enable the Coalition to offer competitive salaries to its two-person staff and expand its open-government work throughout the state.
…But we still need your support
When you’re making charitable gifts, remember VCOG!
Publications, Web site work, coalition-building, daily listservs, e-mail hot-lines and all the other services VCOG provides cost money. And a non-profit, public-benefit group is only as strong as the generosity of its supporters.
All contributions, including dues memberships, are 100 percent tax deductible. Go to our Web site for membership information
Yelich retires, Treadway moves up
Librarian of Virginia Nolan T. Yelich (below) retired on June 30 after nearly 40 years in state government. Yelich was appointed to the state’s top library job by Gov. George Allen in 1995. The Code of Virginia was changed a year later to give the Library Board appointment authority.
The new head librarian is Dr. Sandra Gioia Treadway.
Under Yelich’s leadership, he and the library became VCOG members. The library hosted the Coalition’s 10th anniversary gala last November.
Yelich (above) oversaw construction of the $43 million library on Richmond’s Broad Street and a new $8 million State Records Center in Henrico County.
Yelich also served on the Freedom of Information Advisory Council.
Librarians’ big challenge, he recently told the council, is managing the transition from paper records to new storage media. He commended the council’s staff for exceptional work in its first seven years. “We knew 15-20 years ago that the FOI office was needed; it took awhile to get there,” he said.
Yelich and the library were the 2002 recipients of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government’s FOI award for ensuring public access to the papers of former Gov. Jim Gilmore. In 2004 he was given the American Library Association’s top award for supporting intellectual freedom.
Dr. Treadway has been a co-editor of the library’s “Dictionary of Virginia Biography” since 1983. In 1991, she became director of the publications and cultural affairs division. In February 1996, she became deputy state librarian. She holds a master’s degree and a doctorate in history from the University of Virginia; her expertise is in the field of women’s history.
New Hall of Famers
Ginger Stanley, executive director of the Virginia Press Association and ex officio VCOG board member, recently was named to the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame.
Marvin Lake, a VCOG director and public editor of the Virginian-Pilot, also was honored in a ceremony held by Virginia Commonwealth University’s school of mass communications.
New coalitions
The Vermont Press Association has joined with librarians, genealogists, private detectives and others to form the Vermont Coalition for Open Government. FOI coalitions also were formed recently in New England, Delaware and Pennsylvania.
Indiana’s coalition unveiled a new Web site at www.indianacog.org/main.php . Indiana’s new public access counselor is Heather Willis Neal, former chief of staff to the Indiana Secretary of State.
Florida’s Gov. Charlie Crist created an open-government office, headed by Pat Gleason, the state’s long-time FOI mediator.
Elon University’s School of Communications became the academic home of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition on Jan. 1.