Lawyer Kim Greene wins UK's James Madison Award for service to the First Amendment

Kim Greene, who was one of Kentucky's leading First Amendment lawyers, received the James Madison Award tonight from the Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. The center presents the award for outstanding service to the First Amendment by someone with ties to Kentucky.

Greene, of Louisville, was instrumental in starting the Freedom of Information Hotline for the Kentucky Press Association in 1986. It remains the only such free hotline for newspapers in the U.S. In 1996 she helped start KPA's Legal Defense Fund Hotline. She was named KPA's most valuable member in 2001.

Greene represented many Kentucky newsrooms. Max Heath, who was executive editor of Landmark Community Newspapers, said in his nomination that she was "a velvet hammer" as an attorney, always smooth and professional but firm in her advocacy. She won the First Prize from the Louisville Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists in 2005 for her First Amendment work.

Greene, a native of Ashland, told the crowd at UK's Young Library Auditorium that she fell in love with the First Amendment when she was in law school, then with journalists who used it to serve the public. "The First Amendment is just that special ingredient that makes our country so different from all others," she said.

Greene told the student journalists in the audience, "there's hardly any more important work in our country that you could be doing." She is married to First Amendment lawyer Jon Fleischaker, won won the Madison Award several years ago.

Grayson, left, speaks with UK accounting
senior Aleksey Graboviy after his speech.
(Kentucky Kernel photo by Tessa Lighty)

The award was presented at the center's annual Celebration of the First Amendment. The annual "State of the First Amendment" address was given by Trey Grayson, director of the Institute on Politics in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and Kentucky's secretary of state from 2004 to 2011.

Grayson spoke on occasional conflicts of the First Amendment with the right to vote, as seen in news-media coverage of voting and the ubiquity of cameras, which pose threats to the privacy of voting, and Kentucky's law on electioneering near voting places, passed after a federal appeals court struck down a ban on electioneering within 500 feet of the polls, with an exception for private property. Current law sets a 300-foot limit with no private-property exception, and "That strikes me as still being a little broad," Grayson said.

Nominate a local open-govermnent hero for national recognition during Sunshine Week

For the observance of Sunshine Week, March 11-17, you are invited to nominate individuals who have played significant roles in fighting for government transparency. Get the nomination form here. All nominations must be received by Feb. 20.

The 2012 Local Hero will win an expense-paid trip to the American Society of News Editors convention April 2-4 in Washington. Second- and third-place winners will receive $500 and $250, respectively. ASNE and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press sponsor Sunshine Week. For more information and the free materials available to all participants, visit the Sunshine Week website.

Two leading open-government advocates among 2011 Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame inductees

Two leading advocates of open government are among six people in the 2011 class of the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, announced this week: Tom Loftus, longtime chief of the Frankfort bureau of The Courier-Journal, and Robert Carter, retired publisher of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville.

Bob Carter, left, was president of the Kentucky Press Association in 1976 when the legislature passed the Open Records Act, and was on KPA's leadership ladder in 1974 when it passed the Open Meetings Act. For his work on that and other projects, he was named KPA's outstanding member in 1975. "Carter began his career on the advertising side of the newspaper business, and he thrived there, but countless journalists have benefited from his role in getting the Kentucky General Assembly to adopt the open-meetings law and the open-records law," New Era Publisher Taylor Hayes wrote in his nomination letter.

One of the leading users of the act, to the benefit of his newspaper and the public, has been Tom Loftus, right. Chief of the Louisville newspaper's state-capital bureau since 1987, "He’s an ardent watchdog who has made use of those laws than perhaps any other journalist in the state, as signified by the James Madison Award from the [UK journalism] school’s Scripps Howard First Amendment Center in 2008," said the nomination by Al Cross, his former C-J colleague, now at UK's Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, and Bill Straub, his former colleague at The Kentucky Post, now Washington correspondent for the The Gleaner of Henderson and the Evansville Courier and Press.

Others elected to the Hall of Fame, overseen by the UK Journalism Alumni Association, are Bill Bartleman, recently retired reporter for The Paducah Sun; Jackie Hays Bickel, retired anchor for Louisville’s WAVE-TV; Ed Shadburne, former general manager of WLKY-TV and of WHAS-TV-AM-FM in Louisville; and the late Albert Dix, publisher of The State Journal of Frankfort. The six will be inducted at a luncheon April 5 in Lexington.