Bill Mercer
University of North Texas
Bill Mercer began sports broadcasting in Muskogee, Okla. He broadcast professional wrestling on radio and in 1953 and became a wrestling announcer for KRLD-TV in Dallas. His sports career included broadcasting Highland Park High School football, announcing North Texas State University football, and being the voice of the Dallas Rangers, (Triple A minor league baseball), the Dallas Texan, Dallas Cowboys, CBS Cotton Bowl the Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, the new major league Texas Rangers and the Chicago White Sox in 1974 with the famed Harry Caray. He began teaching at UNT in 1966 and started the university radio station KNTU and managed it for several years before retiring in 1996. During the Kennedy assassination in 1963, Mercer was a news reporter for KRLD radio and TV. Forty years later, he and fellow reporters, Bob Huffaker, Wes Wise (former Dallas mayor) and George Phenix wrote “When the News Went Live,” a recounting of their experience covering the aftermath of the assassination. Rowman and Littlefield Publications released Mercer’s history of the development of sports broadcasting, his memoir and a look at more than 50 years of sports in Dallas: “Play-by-Play.”
Dan Malone
University of Texas – Austin
Dan Malone’s journalism students at Tarleton State University and the University of North Texas won national, state and local journalism awards for news stories about questionable crime reporting on college campuses and police conduct around the state. As a teacher, Malone was recognized with a shared James Madison Award from the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas. Before leaving the newsroom for the classroom, he received numerous awards for his own writing, including a Pulitzer Prize with a colleague for investigative reporting. He was a reporter for the Corpus Christi-Caller Times, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News. He is a graduate of the University of Texas-Austin — where he was editor of The Daily Texan — and of the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism at the University of North Texas.
Scott Pelley
Texas Tech University
Scott Pelley has been a “60 Minutes” and “60 Minutes II” correspondent and chief White House correspondent for the “CBS Evening News.” He has been a war correspondent in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait and the former Yugoslavia. He has covered presidential campaigns, reported from the World Trade Center as Tower One collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, covered the impeachment of President Clinton, the war in the Balkans, child slavery in India, orangutans in Borneo, adventure in Antarctica, the Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, earthquakes in California, the Branch Davidian raid near Waco, hurricanes Andrew and Hugo and NASA shuttle missions. He received Emmy Awards in 1994, 1996 and 2001. He received the Investigative Reporters and Editors award and the Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism Award. Before joining CBS, Pelley was a producer/reporter for WFAA-TV in Dallas, KXAS-TV in Dallas and KSEL-TV in Lubbock. He began his journalism career at age 15 at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.