The director of the embattled Voice of America, its very existence under threat from the current administration; a lifetime advocate for diversity in newsrooms, and the publisher of one of Washington’s oldest news organizations serving African Americans are the 2025 Hall of Fame Honorees, chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists Washington, D.C. Chapter.
The honorees will be feted at the DC chapter’s Dateline Awards Dinner Tuesday, June 10 at the National Press Club. Master of Ceremonies for the evening will be Kojo Nnamdi, host of WAMU Radio’s Politics Hour.
At the dinner, SPJ DC also will announce the winners of its 2025 Dateline Awards competition, honoring the best journalism produced in the DMV, and will give a Distinguished Service Award to a journalist whose work and actions have made a positive difference on our craft and society.
Hall of Fame Honorees are:
Michael Abramowitz, who has devoted his career to journalism and protecting press freedom and human rights. He worked for 24 years as a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, where he covered City Hall, Maryland politics and the White House and also served as National Editor.
Abramowitz subsequently held senior positions at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and then became the president of Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit focused on defending democracy. During his tenure, Freedom House established the Fred Hiatt Program to Free Political Prisoners. In 2024, he was appointed director of Voice of America.
Richard Prince, a veteran journalist who writes “Richard Prince’s Journal-isms,” the news column on diversity issues in the news media. It appears on journal-isms.com.
He was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2019 as a member of the Washington Post Metro Seven, which filed a complaint against the Post in 1972 charging racial discrimination.
In 2013, Prince received the Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and the Medill School at Northwestern University, “given to an individual who has made outstanding efforts to make newsrooms and news coverage more accurately reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.”
Denise Rolark Barnes, the publisher and second-generation owner of The Washington Informer, succeeding her father, the late Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, who founded the newspaper in 1964. Under her leadership, the Informer has become a multi-media organization serving the African American community in the Washington metropolitan area.
Rolark Barnes is also president of Washington Informer Charities, a non-profit organization that promotes 21st-century literacy and sponsors writing competitions, internships, scholarships and other events promoting African American history, culture, and literature.
She is past chair of the National Newspaper Publishers Association – the Black Press of America — and serves on the boards of the National Newspaper Publishers Association Fund, the Maryland, Delaware, DC Press Association, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Stephenie Overman is the recipient of the DC Chapter’s Distinguished Service Award.
Overman is a freelance journalist specializing in labor and workplace issues. Her career as a writer and editor spans more than three decades, and her work has appeared in many publications including Virginia Business, Fortune.com, Forbes.com, Washington Post Express, Salon, and the Los Angeles Business Journal.
She currently is SPJ Region 2 coordinator, and is a recipient of SPJ’s Howard S. Dubin Outstanding Pro Chapter Member Award. Well known in the freelance community, she “wrangles” SPJ DC’s longtime freelance writers’ group. In 2021, Overman was inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame of Ball State University, her alma mater.
Tickets for the Dateline Dinner will go on sale soon.