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Long-time Baton Rouge Advocate environmental reporter Mike Dunne died at age 58 in early July after combating cancer "with courage and humor," as the newspaper’s article on his death reported.

A seasoned reporter and major contributor of time and effort to the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) as a contributor to its newsletter SEJournal, Dunne had won awards for his reporting on threats to Louisiana wetlands and for reporting on city hall, the courts, police, and education. He was a two-time winner of the Scripps-Howard Foundation's Edward J. Meeman Award, and along with fellow Advocate reporter Bob Anderson, he received three national honors in the late 80s for stories on coastal erosion and on air pollution in Baton Rouge.

An Army veteran and graduate of Louisiana State University in broadcast journalism, Dunne for three years in the early 90s had left the Advocate to work as an investigative reporter for WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge. Like Anderson – whose wife Laurie Anderson died of cancer earlier this year after a career as an Advocate reporter – Dunne was married to a fellow journalist – Freda Yarbrough Dunne, the paper's new media director.

Dunne was covering the legislature for the Alabama Journal when the now-defunct State-Times in Baton Rouge hired him in the 70s. In the early 80s, he moved to general assignment and the copy desk with the Advocate.

With a distinctive drawl characteristic of his native and beloved Louisiana, Dunne carried a sharp wit and quick mind. After participating in a journalism tour of the Baltic countries along with then-Buffalo News environmental reporter Paul MacClennan after the fall of the Soviet Union, Dunne joked that MacClennan's and his own politics led the eastern Europeans "to think that we were the communists."

Along with Anderson, Dunne was active in the early 1990s in the Central European Environmental Journalism Program, managed by the then-publisher of this newsletter, and he accompanied Central European reporters to meetings all along the Louisiana "chemical corridor" and to the state's spectacular Little Pecan Island, with its scenic bird sanctuaries and numerous alligators.

Commenting on his years working with Dunne at the Advocate, the paper's executive editor, Carl Redman, said Dunne "was tenacious when he was onto a story. He was prolific and really knew how to develop sources. Little happened on his beats that Mike didn't know about and get into the paper. Readers were well-served when Mike was on a story."

The Advocate's current environmental reporter, Amy Wold, was quoted in the newspaper as saying Dunne "was an amazing mentor to me because his knowledge of environmental issues in Louisiana was so extensive."

The paper reported also that Dunne had been active in scouting in Louisiana.