Half a Century Later: My Odyssey in Journalism by Steve McFadden

HALF A CENTURY LATER PHOTO – While digging in the garage over Memorial Day 2025, looking for a family photo, I came upon this one. It shows some fellow staffers at The News (Boston University) late one night in 1975. It’s a photo that I took as a deadline was looming for the next edition. I was completing a photojournalism assignment for a group photo. Just about everyone else on staff had the same homework, and the group had already been assembled over and over again as the week went on. I think I was about the last person to implore folks to get together so I could complete the assignment. They were tired, fed up with posing yet again, and wanting to get it over with and go home. But they let me click the shutter and record their exasperation for posterity.

A HALF CENTURY LATER – From the Sandia foothills of New Mexico, I send greetings to all, and a brief message about the art and craft of reporting. I’m a graduate of Boston University’s 1975 journalism program at what is now the College of Communication (COM).  I’m still standing. Still writing. Still passionate. Still reporting on the Beauty Way paths integral to our land and our lives.

Fifty years ago as a student, I had the good fortune to be a small part of The News, a valiant student newspaper that in my era had been defunded and kicked off campus. The paper’s great offense? Reporting facts and opinions that embarrassed what we regarded as an increasingly authoritarian BU administration. In other words, putting the skills we were learning in the classroom to the test, and learning that they were often unwelcome.

Vibrant and cheeky, The News persevered through the late 70’s as I recall. Then soon enough – scorned by the admin and depleted of resources (yet possessed of unforsaken integrity) – The News faded away into the vast and ever-expanding morgue of yesterday’s stories. For me, though, the excitement and learning that came from having been part of that honorable student effort endures as a soul satisfaction, a pearl of great price.

This snippet of COM history comes to mind for me now in parallel as the current Administration in Washington intensifies its attacks on all forms of media that exercise their First Amendment Rights (and Responsibilities) by reporting facts or opinions that do not conform to government desires. The stakes are obviously far higher now in the present challenge, far more consequential. The attacks are real, immediate, and impacting every communications professional.

I expect that there’s much ongoing discussion and debate at journalism schools about all of this: the many systematic, focused efforts to muzzle or otherwise control the press. There better be discussion and a great many waves of wise courageous journalism, or we’re in for a long, hard season of thought control, domination, and abuse of power.
My COM professor for JO 101 was Jeremiah (Jerry) Murphy, an affable old-school writer for The Boston Globe. In various ways over that first semester in 1973 he asked us to ask ourselves, “Who am I as a professional? What do I stand for? How can I best fulfill my mission?” Damn good questions.

I’ve had five decades to engage. At age 76 my responses are known: I’m a maverick independent journalist; I stand the best I can for honesty, caring, sharing, and respect for all the people and all the creations in the Sacred Hoop of life; I best fulfill my mission by asking, listening, and reading carefully, then deliberating to sort out what I have found to be worthy, ennobling, and possessed of potential to endure in goodness for the next Seven Generations of our children, and more.

Thus now at graduation season 2025, as is the prerogative of elders, I hereby raise my medicine song into the ethers, extending my blessings to the COM community, to those who are studying and graduating, and to all working journalists. May your education, Jeremiah’s questions (and a thousand other meaningful ones), serve you in cultivating worthy insights and good work for yourself, your colleagues, your communities, and our world. We need you to be strong and true.

Good luck, Steven McFadden

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