Advocate reporter Mike Dunne, 58, dies

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Jul 9, 2007

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Mike Dunne, whose reporting from Louisiana’s marshes to city hall won national awards, died Sunday.

He was 58.

Dunne, a native of New Orleans and a resident of Baton Rouge, endured cancer treatment with courage and humor. He shared his ups and downs in e-mails to colleagues.

His survivors include his wife, Freda Yarbrough Dunne, New Media director of http://www.2theadvocate.com, and sons Dylan and Brad.
Dunne, who served in the U.S. Army, earned a degree in broadcast journalism from LSU in 1974.

He was covering the Legislature for the Alabama Journal when he was hired by the State-Times in Baton Rouge.

He was second assistant city editor on the State-Times until he moved to general assignment reporting and the copy desk of the Morning Advocate in the early 1980s.

Dunne left the newspaper in 1990 to become an investigative reporter at WBRZ-TV.

He returned to newspaper reporting in 1993.

This spring, Dunne received the first America’s Wetland Conservationist of the Year award for stories on threats to Louisiana’s coast.
Dunne and photographer Bevil Knapp are the authors of “America’s Wetland: Louisiana’s Vanishing Coast.”

R. King Milling, chairman of America’s Wetland Foundation, praised Dunne for his “no-nonsense approach to reporting on the issue of coastal land loss and his continued focus on the environmental issues surrounding its loss.”

Dunne won journalism awards for general assignment reporting, as well, covering police, courts, education and city hall.

In the late 1980s, Dunne and Advocate reporter Bob Anderson received national honors three times in one year for stories on coastal erosion and a series of stories on air pollution in Baton Rouge. Dunne was a two-time winner of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Edward J. Meeman Award.

“I worked side by side with Mike for several years on the city hall beat in the early 1980s,” Advocate Executive Editor Carl Redman said.
“Mike was tenacious when he was onto a story. He was prolific and really knew how to develop sources.