Donna Stephens, a member of the journalism faculty at UCA, has been selected to receive the Arkansas Activities Association’s 2010 Distinguished Media Service Award.
Stephens has been a member of the journalism faculty since 1999 and currently is a freelance sportswriter. She is scheduled to receive the award at the 2010 AHSCA-AOA Hall of Fame banquet in Hot Springs on July 16 at the Hot Springs Convention Center.
To be eligible for this award, the recipient must have contributed in an official capacity or have made a special contribution in the area of news media service to the Arkansas Activities Association, its member schools and the students attending them, for a period of a minimum of three consecutive years.
Stephens has been a sportswriter in Arkansas since 1984. She covered high school sports, golf, the Arkansas Intercollegiate Conference and the Arkansas Razorbacks, among other beats, for the Arkansas Gazette until October, 1991. She continues as a freelance writer for the North Little Rock Times, Maumelle Monitor, 501 Life magazine and the River Valley & Ozarks and Tri-Lakes sections of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
She is the producer of the acclaimed 2006 documentary film “The Old Gray Lady: Arkansas’s First Newspaper,” which tells the story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gazette, and “The Crisis Mr. Faubus Made: The Role of the Arkansas Gazette in the Central High Crisis” (2010).
Stephens taught in public schools for seven years at West Fork, Pulaski Oak Grove, Arkansas School for the Blind and Mayflower. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Mass Communication at the University of Southern Mississippi and is in the research stage of her dissertation, which will be on the history of the Arkansas Gazette.
— From the Arkansas Activities Association