Sarah McLendon
Tyler Junior College
Sarah McClendon (deceased) graduated from Tyler Junior College
in 1928 and began her journalism career at the Tyler Morning Telegraph and Beaumont Enterprise. She served in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs) public relations department. After serving in the military, she joined the Philadelphia Daily News as a Washington correspondent and attended White House press conferences on behalf of the McClendon News Service. She was a White House reporter from the FDR administration to George W. Bush. In 1998, she received the Tyler Junior College Distinguished Alumni Award, “recognizing individuals for their distinguished professional achievement and distinguished contributions to society, which have brought honor to the College.”
Mike Godwin
University of Texas – Austin
Mike Godwin is director of innovation policy and general counsel for the R Street Institute, leading the institute’s research and advocacy efforts in the areas of patent and copyright reform, surveillance reform, technology policy, and freedom of expression. Before joining the R Street Institute in 2015, he served as a senior policy advisor at Internews, advising the organization’s public-policy partners in developing and transitional democracies, as part of the Global Internet Policy Project. He was general counsel for the California-based Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia. He created and directed anti-censorship, privacy, trademark and copyright strategies and policies including Wikimedia’s responses to the SOPA and PIPA initiatives. Godwin was the first staff counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he advised on legal issues centering on freedom of expression and privacy rights during the growth of Internet access in the United States. He has been a contributing editor at Reason Magazine since 1994 and is the originator of “Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies,” which in 2012 was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.
He was a reporter and editor-in-chief of The Daily Texan at the University of Texas – Austin.
Bob Ray Sanders
University of North Texas
Bob Ray Sanders’ journalism career has spanned four decades and three media: newspaper, television and radio. He is Associate Editor and Senior Columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He joined KERA-TV in 1972 as a reporter and then as vice president of KERA-TV and host and producer of the station’s award- winning program, News Addition. He also was executive producer of the PBS series, “With Ossie & Ruby.” He is past president of the Press Club of Fort Worth, is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the National Association of Black Journalists and the Dallas/Fort Worth Association of Black Journalists. He has served as “Professional in Residence” in the Schieffer School of Journalism at TCU and received awards from the Houston, New York and Chicago film festivals, five Dallas Press Club KATIE Awards, three Corporation for Public Broadcasting Awards; a regional Emmy Award; a National Association of Black Journalists award for Best TV Sports Feature, and a National Headliner Award.
He was a 1969 graduate of North Texas State University (now University of North Texas) and worked for the campus newspaper and yearbook.