Two annual awards for Daily Texan staff members have been created in honor of journalism professors at the University of Texas at Austin.
The Faculty Recognition Award is a cash award designed to honor the extraordinary efforts of outstanding faculty, and the awards go to Texan staffers who have made significant contributions working for The Daily Texan in spite of financial hardship.
This is made possible by award-winning photojournalists John McConnico of Texas and Jean-Marc Bouju of France, both former Daily Texan staffers and both Pulitzer Prize winners and members of The Daily Texan Hall of Fame, sponsored by Friends of The Daily Texan.
Jean-Marc Bouju and John McConnico
McConnico and Bouju created the McConnico-Bouju awards in 2020, and each year since have awarded two cash grants annually to Daily Texan staffers. In 2023 they decided to rename the awards in honor of outstanding faculty members, naming them The School of Journalism and Media Faculty Recognition Awards.
Each year the awards will be presented to two Texan staffers in honor of two faculty members.
This year’s awards will be presented March 22 at the annual Friends of The Daily Texan dinner. Learn more here.
And register here to attend the event.
The awards are intended to encourage young people to choose careers in journalism to continue the Texan’s tradition of creating truth seekers and storytellers, just as the newspaper has since 1900.
The awards should go to the staff members who are in the most need and whose lives may change because of what they experienced at the newspaper. Students eligible for the Faculty Recognition Award can major in any degree-conferring college at the university.
FACULTY RECOGNIZED IN 2024: JULIANNE H. NEWTON and MAGGIE STEBER
Julianne H. Newton is Director of the Communication and Media Studies Doctoral and Master’s Program and Professor of Visual Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon. Newton has worked as a reporter, editor, photographer and designer for newspapers, magazines, electronic media and organizations. She is author of more than 100 publications about visual ethics and communication, and her documentary photography has been exhibited and published widely. Her scholarly work applies ethics and cognitive theory to the study of visual behavior, focusing on visual journalism and media. She teaches courses on digital ethics, research methods, visual theory, and media and society.
She is author of the award-winning book The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality and co-author (with Rick Williams) of Visual Communication: Integrating Media, Art and Science, which was named one of the top 10 books in visual communication by Designer’s Library and won the Marshall McLuhan Award for Outstanding Book in Media Ecology. Her recent work includes chapters in the Handbook of Media Ethics, Handbook of Visual Communication Research, Routledge Companion to Journalism Ethics, The Handbook of Global Media Ethics, and A Companion to Television. Newton was editor of Visual Communication Quarterly, establishing the publication as a stand-alone journal, and serves on multiple editorial boards.
Newton’s honors include the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Award from the University of Oregon, National Press Photographers Association Garland Educator of the Year Award, National Communication Association Visual Communication Research Excellence Award, Marshall Award for Teaching Innovation, President’s Citation for Service to the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and the AEJMC Distinguished Contributions to Visual Communication Award.
Newton was born in Dallas, Texas, and spent most of the first five years of her life in Colombia and Ecuador. She also has lived in California and Mexico. Newton holds the Ph.D. and M.A. in Journalism from UT Austin and B.A. in Journalism from Baylor University. She enjoys her nine grandchildren and walking in the woods.
Maggie Steber is an internationally known documentary photographer, educator and photo editor whose work has appeared in major magazines, newspapers and book anthologies as well as national and international exhibitions.
She has worked in 71 countries specializing in telling the stories of underrepresented people. Best known for her photo essays in National Geographic Magazine and her humanistic documentation of Haiti, she published Dancing on Fire: Photographs from Haiti with Aperture.
Photo of photographer Maggie Steber
Her nine-year project on her mother’s melancholic voyage through memory loss was made into a multimedia presentation by MediaStorm and won a Webby award. In her career Steber has worked as a picture editor for Associated Press, a contract photographer for Newsweek, and as the Director of Photography at The Miami Herald.
Steber is a member of VII Photo Agency. Her photographs are included in the Library of Congress and she exhibits internationally. She has received three grants for her work and numerous awards including:
—2019 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Nat Geo Face Transplant Story
—2019 Lucie Foundation Award for Photography
—2017-2018 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow
—2007 Knight Foundation grant for New American Newspaper Project
—2003 Medal of Honor for Contribution to Journalism, University of Missouri
—2001 Pulitzer Prize for Miami Herald coverage of Elian Gonzalez story
—First Prize Spot News World Press Photo Foundation for Haiti
—The Leica Medal of Excellence
—Olivier Rebbot Award from the Overseas Press Club
—First Prize Magazine News/Documentary NPPA PICTURES OF THE YEAR
—Recipient Alicia Patterson Foundation Grant
—Recipient Ernst Haas Photography Grant
—Three-time finalist for the Eugene Smith Grant for Humanistic Photography
Clients include National Geographic Magazine, the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Aperture Quarterly, Fortune, Smithsonian, People Magazine, Time Magazine, Stern of Germany, Newsweek Magazine, U.S. News and World Report, CARE, , Der Spiegel, DU Magazine of Switzerland, Merian Magazine of Germany, The Independent in Bitain, and French Geo, as well as many others. She teaches workshops through the Leica Akademie USA. Her work has been seen in 70 exhibitions in 35 countries.
AWARD SPONSORS DISCUSS THEIR MENTORS IN UT J-SCHOOL:
From John McConnico:
I can tell you when Julie first brought Maggie to the program, it was like having a rockstar of the photojournalism world arrive. The two of them had such incredible admiration for one another that every student in the program rose several levels in one semester. We suddenly shifted from competition among one another to seeing how Julie and Maggie approached their work, and indeed their lives. Most of us had not experienced anything like that in the cutthroat world of photojournalism and it is safe to say that was one of the few times it happened to any of us.
So proud to have them as mentors and to have their names on the award. No one is more deserving of recognition than these two.
From Jean-Marc Bouju:
Maggie Steber influenced my career as a photojournalist. I came to UT Austin as an exchange teacher of French. I hadn’t intended to study photography, but I was interested in journalism, and I was inspired by students’ work in the Daily Texan. I joined the newspaper staff, and luckily for me, Maggie taught one of my first classes. She showed how to approach storytelling intellectually and emotionally. I was very competitive, so I worked hard on her assignments. One assignment was to shoot shapes. I took a round white paper light shade around Austin, photographing on the steps of the Capitol and elsewhere. For another assignment, I told the story of a Black sorority. Under Maggie’s guidance, I learned the importance of varying shots to create visual appeal and stronger storytelling. Because Maggie was a working professional, she was able to show me not just the theory of photography, but also the practice. I was Impressed by her compelling portrayal of life in Haiti.
I remember Julie Newton as a positive influence on so many students. She often guided and always encouraged my photography for the Daily Texan.