Tom DeFrank
Texas A&M
One of Washington’s most respected president-watchers, Tom DeFrank is a political journalist and author and is the senior correspondent covering the White House regularly. He is a contributing editor at National Journal and was Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News from 1996 to 2012. He is a former president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the Gridiron Club, the most prestigious journalist’s organization in the nation’s capital.
DeFrank was Newsweek’s senior White House correspondent for a quarter-century and has covered 12 presidents and 15 presidential campaigns. He has reported on the resignation of one president, the impeachment of a second, and was an eyewitness to both assassination attempts against a third.
His 2007 book on 30 years of private conversations with President Ford, “Write It When I’m Gone,” was a New York Times and Washington Post bestseller. The received a citation for the Gerald R. Ford Prize for distinguished presidential reporting.
DeFrank also co-authored Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s memoirs and “Quest for the Presidency 1992,” Newsweek’s critically acclaimed look at the 1992 Clinton-Bush election.
He has been a student of the Presidency since 1968, when he took his first presidential trip with Lyndon Johnson as a Newsweek intern. He traveled extensively with Richard Nixon and was assigned to Vice President Gerald Ford in October 1973. A few weeks before Nixon’s resignation, he was reassigned to the White House and remained when Ford became president in August 1974.
In October 2014 he was honored by the White House Correspondents’ Association for more than 40 years of distinguished presidential coverage. He has been a visiting fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute of Politics at Harvard University and a media fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.
DeFrank was on active duty at the Pentagon from 1968 to 1970 as a public affairs officer. Before joining Newsweek, he was a reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Bryan (Texas) Daily Eagle and Minneapolis Star. A native of Arlington, Texas, he is a 1967 high honors graduate of Texas A&M University, where he edited The Battalion, and earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota.
Azenett Cornejo
UT Rio Grande Valley
With more than 20 years devoted to student media, Azenett Cornejo grew the UT-Brownsville Student Media Department from the publication of a single medium (newspaper) to a multimedia program. That carried over and grew after the consolidation between UT-Pan American and UT-Brownsville to create the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley.
Cornejo was born and raised in Brownsville, Texas. She attended Texas Southmost College and served on the staff of the monthly student newspaper, The Collegian. In 1979, Azenett transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where some of her articles were published in The Daily Texan. She graduated from UT-Austin with a Bachelor of Journalism degree in 1981.
Cornejo returned to Brownsville and worked for Cameron County before being hired as a reporter for The Edinburg Daily Review in 1984. She joined The San Antonio Light as a copy editor in 1988. When the Hearst Corp. announced plans in 1992 to close The Light, she took a job as a copy editor at The Chicago Sun-Times from 1993 until mid-1997.
In 1997, Cornejo was hired by the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College as the student publications coordinator and was promoted to student media director in 2009. In 2015, she was hired as the student media director at the newly established University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, overseeing the merger of student media programs from legacy institutions University of Texas at Brownsville and University of Texas-Pan American. Those programs became The Rider newspaper, Vaquero Radio, Pulse magazine and KVAQ-TV.