Carlos Rodriguez

Recipient of the STAR opinion writer OF THE YEAR award in The Charles E. Green Awards (2022)

Carlos rodriguez
The Brownsville Herald

Judge’s Comments:

In an era of hyper political division and misinformation, the responsibility of analyzing complex issues for the public has never been greater. The Brownsville Herald responded with a series of editorials that deconstructed our most pressing issues with thoughtful, well-written and well-researched pieces that peeled back the layers of complexity on a broad range of issues, from border security and immigration, the state’s drought and water conservation, the death penalty and the governor’s tepid response to gun safety following the Uvalde school shootings. The Herald’s editorials were written simply and elegantly, argued the daily’s positions well, and they were strongly anchored by context, sometimes missing from daily reporting because of the speed dictated by digital deadlines and audience demands. If the news pages represent the spirit of a news organization, the opinion and editorial pages represent the soul of the organization speaking for and guiding its community. In the sometimes bewildering chaos that is a hallmark of our times, the Herald provided its readers with clear-headed explanatory and opinion journalism that served its Rio Grande Valley readership extraordinarily well.

Bill Celis
Journalist, Educator, Author

Judge’s Bio:
Bill Celis is a journalist, educator and author. For 20 years he worked at leading Texas and U.S. dailies. He is a former national correspondent for the New York Times and a former reporter and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He also worked for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram as a general assignments reporter and for the El Paso Times State staff.

For 25 years he served as a professor of journalism, first at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where over 21 years he earned tenure and served as associate director, program director and associate dean responsible for undergraduate and graduate curriculum, assessment, recruitment, diversity in the classroom and the recruitment of diverse students, staff and faculty.    

In 2010 he led the school-wide committee that produced the first diversity audit of any USC school, winning the 2012 Diversity and Equity Award from the Association of Educators of Mass Communication and Journalism.

Among other teaching awards he won the 2018 Barry Bingham Fellowship, awarded annually to journalism educators for their work in diversity.

He is the author of, "Battle Rock: A One-Room School in America's Vanishing West" (Public Affairs, 2003), and is working on another book about disenfranchised children.

He earned his undergraduate degree in 1978 in journalism at Howard Payne University (Brownwood, Texas) and a master's degree in 1982 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  He lives in San Antonio, his hometown.

To see writing from award-winning journalist Carlos Rodriguez, click on the PDF links below:

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