Michaela Towfighi '18 is named New Hampshire Journalist of the Year

Michaela started her journalism career as a Scroll reporter in middle school, and graduated from ASL six years later as the Standard’s editor-in-chief for print. Now a Report for America fellow at the Concord Monitor, Michaela was named New Hampshire journalist of the year in June, and won first place awards in two reporting categories.

To Michaela Towfighi ’18, joining the staff of the Scroll as a Grade 7 student midway through her first year at ASL seemed as good a way as any to hang out with new friends on the weekends and enjoy St. John’s Wood reigning pastry of the era: sugar-coated quarkinis from The Bread Shop, the high street staple of bygone days.

“I stuck with [the Scroll] for Grade 8 because I thought, ‘This is fun,’” Michaela says. “And then there was the bomb scare.” 

It was a Wednesday morning in early January, 2014, when Colin Bridgewater (ASL 2000–present), faculty advisor to the Scroll, pulled Michaela out of Spanish class. “He said, ‘By the way, there’s going to be an announcement on the loudspeaker in the next five minutes. They’re about to evacuate the School. Don’t freak out, but there’s a potential bomb threat from across the street [...] and you’re on the school newspaper. So here’s a notebook, and as you walk out, just write down what you’re noticing and what people are saying.’

Michaela, and three or four other Scroll reporters who’d gotten the same tip from Mr. Bridgewater, did just that. During the school-wide evacuation, they found purpose in interviewing classmates. “While everyone was asking, ‘What is going on?,’ I was the one who got to say, ‘Okay, here’s what I know,’” Michaela says.

By the time students were brought back to school, the bomb threat was a known false alarm. “The BBC had tweeted out that the Metropolitan Police had diffused a bomb right outside ASL—but that wasn’t true; it was Christmas lights,” says Michaela. “I didn’t understand how or why they could say that, when it obviously didn’t happen, and anyone who was at school that day knows it didn’t happen.”

With Mr. Bridgewater’s support, Michaela and another Scroll reporter called the BBC editor who had run the story. He admitted that wrong assumptions based on tweets from the Met Police had led to a misleading report. “So we wrote a story that corrected that, and to me, it was so important: It was a day of complete confusion and uncertainty, and we had so few facts—but they were really important facts,” Michaela remembers. “So then I realized that journalism is awesome, and this is what I want to do.’”

One decade later—this past June—Michaela was named journalist of the year in New Hampshire, where she is in her third and final year of a Report for America (RFA) fellowship at the Concord Monitor. In the same ceremony, Michaela was honored by the New Hampshire Press Association with first-place awards in government reporting, for a series on juvenile justice in the state, and in feature writing, for a series called “Portraits in Diversity.” Previously, she was heralded as the New Hampshire Press Association’s rookie of the year.

Asked how it felt to be named ‘journalist of the year,’ Michaela was characteristically humble; quick to credit her editor and the Monitor for the unique beat they crafted when hiring her: “The Two New Hampshires.” Michaela’s beat covers the New Hampshirites who otherwise would not end up in the paper, but whose stories represent those of many in the state—and the country. It’s all about “regular people who are falling through the cracks, or they're struggling to make ends meet,” she says. 

Sometimes, these people are New Americans, like Kayitani Ndutiye, whose journey to citizenship Michaela followed closely. She accompanied Mr. Ndutiye to his first-ever citizenship class, where a local volunteer ran through the English alphabet with him. A year later—in January—he became a US citizen. “I went to the polls the next day to vote with him. He voted for the first time in the New Hampshire primary.”

Michaela has tailored her beat to her interests, which, recently, involve homelessness and housing policy. She just completed a five-article series on a New Hampshire law that allows the state to repossess homes after three years of missed property tax payments—a passion project that Michaela researched and reported, sometimes by knocking on door after door from a list of soon-to-be-repossessed addresses dug up at a city council meeting, over the course of a year, in between meeting her day-to-day deadlines.

The Monitor is a small, family-owned shop, and Michaela has enjoyed quite a bit of “free rein” in her first job out of college: from shaping her own beat and chasing down her own stories, to helping get the paper’s Instagram off the ground in a bid to increase digital readership and subscriptions. Michaela has quickly risen the ranks at the Monitor, and has helped mentor younger reporters as they joined the team.

Leadership in the newsroom isn’t new to Michaela. From the quiet underclassman who loved sitting in high school journalism classes absorbing everything the passionate, experienced juniors and seniors on staff at the Standard had to say, Michaela became, by her senior year, the paper’s editor-in-chief for print. 

“It was so fun to have younger people on staff, and my brother [John Towfighi ’20] and I overlapped for a year,” Michaela recalls. John, who graduated from Columbia University in May and began a business reporting fellowship at Business Insider, was the Standard’s editor-in-chief two years after his sister held the role. He would call Michaela for advice from time to time. “He was a sophomore when I was editor-in-chief,” Michaela says, “And obviously I would be on his case about coming to layout and doing things.” Once John was in her shoes, Michaela laughs, he finally understood that it’s hard to be the boss.

After the Standard and ASL, Michaela went on to study public policy and journalism at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Rather than joining Duke’s student-run paper, Michaela joined forces with a professor whose reporting project, The 9th Street Journal, centers Durham and its politics, using student journalists to help fill a gap in local news. Her professor put her in touch with a contact of his at the Monitor, and Michaela spent the summer after her junior year of college as a reporting intern in Concord, later getting hired full-time as an RFA fellow. Michaela, along with a cohort of about 100 early-career journalists stationed across the country, is focused on supporting local news in the United States at a time when its infrastructure is steadily eroding.

“People are realizing that the decline in local news is detrimental to access to information when it comes to civic engagement, voting and knowing who you’re voting for—and also just community trust and camaraderie,” says Michaela. But on the ground in New Hampshire, she sees a different (and happier) picture: “I walk around downtown Concord and people do read the paper. They’ll call us saying, ‘I really liked your story,’ or, ‘I have an idea for you here.’ Or we’ll see reporting that then trickles into the State House, and legislators are making decisions off of it.” 

Last year, one part-time local resident—Shannon Miller—was reading a Monitor article about the small town north of Concord where her family has owned a lakeside cottage for decades. “As I read, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ‘voice’ coming through was familiar and when I scrolled up to check the byline, I wasn’t entirely surprised to see Michaela’s name,” says Ms. Miller (ASL 2004–19), who served as ASL’s high school journalism teacher all throughout Michaela’s tenure on the Standard.

“Michaela’s passion, enthusiasm and commitment to excellence in all she did as a writer and editor for the Standard have always inspired her peers and me,” Ms. Miller says. “I am thrilled to see this continue as her work reaches a wider audience.”