School of Media News

Annalee Hubbs, a Mahurin Honors College student at Western Kentucky University and journalism major, is the third annual winner of the Bill Walsh Scholarship, named for the late author of three books and editor of news at The Washington Post.

Hubbs wins $3,500 plus financial support to learn more from hundreds of professionals at the national conference of ACES: The Society for Editing this spring.

She is an editor of the university’s Talisman, an online and in-print life, culture and news outlet. She also works as a trainer for Panera Bread and is a student ambassador for the university.

As part of her application for the Walsh Scholarship, which goes to a student who aspires to edit news, Hubbs responded to a question regarding the worst thing a news copy editor can do: “ignore a claim made in a story that could be false information … The most important job of a copy editor is to make sure all information sent out to the public is fact-checked and true. If a copy editor fails to do this, he or she is going against the ethics of journalism and is risking the integrity of his or her news outlet.”

Finalists for the 2020 scholarship also had to write a solution for a newsroom deadline dilemma, correct a news lead, write brief summaries for a variety of news reports and take a timed editing test.

Support for the Walsh Scholarship comes from individual donations from the Walsh family, ACES members and other contributors. The competition is administered by the ACES Education Fund, of which Bill Walsh was a board member.

The judging panel was made up of three members of the Walsh family who are professionals in the editing/writing field and two editors who are members of ACES.

For more information: https://aceseditors.org/awards...