John D. "Dave" Bonner

BS 1962, Journalism		With his journalism degree in hand, Dave Bonner wasted no time beginning his 30-year love affair with the newspaper business. At age 23, he became co-publisher of the Powell Tribune, which he's published ever since. It was the UW Branding Iron that gave Bonner his first experiences in the news field, and he still remembers the dreaded Shape Up Sheet the BI editor publicly posted to inform his writers -- and everyone else -- of their mistakes. News editor Hugh Ellis, says Bonner, "took great delight in berating the troops. Members of my freshman English class took great delight in seeing me squirm." Bonner himself edited the BI from 1961 to 1962. Bonner has taken his role as newspaperman and citizen seriously. His long list of accomplishments include past president of the Wyoming Press Association, a National Endowment for the Humanities Professional Journalism Fellowship at Stanford (one of only 12 mid-career journalists in the nation selected for a year of postgraduate study), chairman of the National Newspaper Association's 1988 National Better Newspaper Contest, and Wyoming State Chairman for the NNA, a position he has held for 13 years and for which he serves as a continuing ex officio board member of the Wyoming Press Association. Keenly interested in education, he served on the Blue Ribbon Panel on Education to recommend state-level educational reforms in the wake of the national report, A Nation at Risk, and he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Northwest College Foundation and the UW Board of Trustees. Of Hugh Ellis, he says, "Now as I look back, I can appreciate that for those of us who stayed in the business [of journalism], he was shaping us up for the moment ... and for a lifetime."