The Friends of The Daily Texan, Inc. board of directors has elected three new board members: veteran journalism instructor and journalist Griff Singer, Texas state politics reporter Madlin Mekelburg and long-time New Orleans journalist John Pope.
Please take a moment to review their stellar bios below and check out the board of directors page here.
Madlin Mekelburg
Madlin is a state politics reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, where she writes about environmental issues and state spending. Madlin is a recipient of the Friends of The Daily Texan Rising Star award. She has previously worked for PolitiFact Texas and the El Paso Times. At the Times she worked as an Austin-based
reporter for the Times and the USA Today Network, where she covered politics, border issues and all things Texas. Before joining The Times, Madlin was a fellow in the Austin bureau of the Dallas Morning News where she covered the Texas Legislature and wrote about women’s health, guns and mental health. Madlin previously held internships at the Houston Chronicle, Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman. She studied journalism and French at the University of Texas and graduated in 2016. At The Daily Texan, Madlin worked as a senior reporter, associate news editor and special ventures editor. She also spent a semester co-hosting The Daily Texan podcast.
John Pope
John Pope, a New Orleans reporter since 1973, was a member of The Times-Picayune’s team that won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He earned bachelor’s and master’s
degrees at the University of Texas, where he worked on The Daily Texan, the student newspaper, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. A contributing writer for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate, Pope is the author of “Getting Off at Elysian Fields,” an anthology of his obituaries and funeral stories, and a co-author of “Building on the Past: Saving Historic New Orleans.” He is serving his second six-year term on the Phi Beta Kappa Senate, and he is a member of the Society of Professional Obituary Writers, whose members refer to themselves as Grimmies.
Griff Singer
During the past six decades, Griff Singer has been a printer, a reporter, editor, teacher and newspaper consultant. While an undergraduate student at UT, he was a reporter and day editor for The Daily Texan. Then at 6:30 p.m., five nights a week, he worked as a printer in the composing room. His first journalism job was news editor at the
Arlington Citizen-Journal (1956-59). After serving as a general assignments reporter for the Dallas Morning News, Griff covered county government and courts. In early 1961, he was named an assistant city editor. Singer returned to UT Austin in 1967 to teach in the School of Journalism. During his teaching career, Singer taught courses in reporting, copyediting, newspaper layout and design. He organized and team-taught the first offering of computer-assisted reporting and later sports writing. Singer’s resume features stints at the San Antonio Light, the Houston Chronicle, Freedom Communications, Inc., The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Dow Jones News Fund’s Center for Editing Excellence. In 2016, he was inducted into the Texas Newspaper Foundation Hall of Fame.