The Friends of The Daily Texan is proud to announce the second class of Hall of Fame inductees, which include a Pulitzer Prize winner, the founding editor of The Texas Observer, a five-time Emmy winner and other outstanding alumni and friends of the student newspaper.
Editorial Award inductees include Ronnie Dugger, John Pope, Jan Jarboe Russell and Mary Walsh. Liz Smith is being honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award, and Lomi Kriel will be recognized as a Rising Star. These editorial awards were chosen based on the accomplishments of their post-Texan career and their commitment to the Texan, either while working at the newspaper or as an alumni.
DeWitt Carter Reddick will be recognized with the Griff Singer Award, which honors individuals who are not Daily Texan alumni, but who have demonstrated extraordinary support for The Daily Texan and its student journalists.
Legacy Award recipients include George Christian and Granville Price.
The recipients will be honored at a luncheon on Friday, Oct. 16 at The University of Texas at Austin. BUY TICKETS NOW.
All proceeds from the event will support the Innovation Fund, created last year to support a sustainable future, quality journalism and innovative work at the student newspaper.
The Friends of The Daily Texan inducted its inaugural class—which included Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Liz Carpenter, among other luminaries—in 2013. Last year, the group held a fundraiser luncheon to honor and celebrate the contributions of Griff Singer, retired journalist and instructor at the journalism school at UT-Austin.
Learn more about this year’s class below:
EDITORIAL AWARDS
Ronnie Dugger
Dugger attended UT and was editor of The Daily Texan 1950–1951. He was the founding editor of The Texas Observer from 1954 to 1961. Later he served as the Observer’s publisher, spending more than 40 years with the political newsmagazine. Dugger has published hundreds of articles in Harper’s Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Progressive and other periodicals. In 2011 Dugger won the George Polk Award in recognition of his lifelong achievements in journalism. The following year he was dubbed the “godfather of progressive journalism in Texas.”
John Pope
John Pope, a reporter for The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, is a member of the newspaper’s team that won two Pulitzer Prizes, a George Polk Award and a National Headliner Award for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. A medical/health reporter for 20 years, he has held fellowships in public health at the University of Maryland’s Knight Center for Advanced Journalism and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and he was a Hearst Foundation visiting fellow at the University of Texas.
Jan Jarboe Russell
Jan Jarboe Russell is a former Nieman Fellow and a writer at large for Texas Monthly, and has written for The San Antonio Express-News, The New York Times, Slate and other publications. She is the author of “The Train to Crystal City: FDR’s Secret Prisoner Exchange Program and America’s Only Family Internment Camp During World War II” and “Lady Bird: A Biography of Mrs. Johnson” and compiled and edited “They Lived to Tell the Tale.”
Mary Walsh
Mary Walsh is the national security producer for CBS News; her work includes producing stories for the CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning and 60 Minutes. She has been assigned to the Pentagon since 1993 and has covered the American military all over the United States and in many parts of the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Turkey, Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, Germany, the Philippines and Korea. As CBS News producer in Tokyo from 1989 to 1993, Walsh was responsible for news coverage in all parts of Asia—with focus on China, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and Japan. She has won five Emmys. A graduate of the University of Texas where she was editor of the Daily Texan in 1976-77. Walsh began her career as a journalist at the Rome Daily American in Italy in 1977.
RISING STAR AWARD
Lomi Kriel
Lomi Kriel covers immigration and demographics for The Houston Chronicle. At The Chronicle, she has written about the influx of unaccompanied Central American children into Texas, Chinese investment in Houston’s real estate and Cubans crossing the Mexican border. Prior to her arrival at The Chronicle, Kriel spent two years as the Panama bureau chief for Reuters, assisting in coverage of Central America and Mexico. She has been published in myriad other publications including The Miami Herald, The Los Angeles Times, Time magazine, PBS NewsHour and The Global Post. Early in her career, Kriel was a crime reporter for The San Antonio Express-News. Her reporting has been recognized by U.S. national and state awards, including various Associated Press Managing Editors awards, and she was the 2015 recipient of the East-West Center’s China fellowship. In 2011 she received her master’s of arts degree in political and international journalism and spent three months researching a civil war massacre in Guatemala. Kriel is a 2004 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin, where she worked at The Daily Texan as a reporter and editor.
GRIFF SINGER AWARD
DeWitt Carter Reddick
DeWitt Carter Reddick was the first dean of the College of Communication. He also was director of the School of Journalism from 1959 to 1965, and taught thousands of journalism students, including Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Ben Sargent and Karen Elliott House, from 1927 until his retirement in 1975.
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Liz Smith
Liz Smith is best known as the gossip columnist for The New York Daily News, with her work syndicated in 70 newspapers. She also worked as a reporter and producer for CBS Radio, NBC-TV, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Sports Illustrated, Newsday and The New York Post. She wrote for The Daily Texan and the campus magazine, The Texas Ranger, in the late 1940s.
LEGACY AWARDS
George Christian
George Christian was press secretary for Gov. Price Daniel, Gov. John Connally and President Lyndon Johnson. He served as The Daily Texan sports editor in the late 1940s and went on to work as a capitol correspondent for International News Service. A prolific writer since his teens, Christian wrote hundreds of speeches for public officials, authored a book, “The President Steps Down,” commissioned by Macmillan in 1969, and edited or contributed to a number of others, including “The World of Texas Politics” and “LBJ: The White House Years.” He was guest columnist for the Dallas Morning News for many years and also wrote frequently for the Houston Post and the Houston Chronicle. He was a frequent guest on television, news and history programs, both nationally and in Texas.
Granville Price
Granville Price, a onetime associate professor of journalism, received bachelors and master’s degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in 1926 and 1930, respectively. He served as the editor of The Daily Texan in 1927. He joined the faculty of the university in 1936 and taught until 1953. As the advisor to The Daily Texan, he guided the newspaper to 12 consecutive Pacemaker awards, which recognized outstanding college newspapers. A former city editor of The New York Herald-Tribune, he became an adjunct professor of journalism at the university in 1933.
The Friends of The Daily Texan is an association for alumni of The Daily Texan and others interested in promoting the publication’s long-term sustainability as a site of student press innovation. Through mentorship, fundraising, networking and public education, Friends of The Daily Texan works alongside current Texan staffers to continue the publication’s rich tradition of journalistic excellence into the future.