2025 Mike Quinn Awards Luncheon
Please join the Headliners Foundation at our annual celebration of Texas journalism! We will recognize the 2025-26 scholarship recipients, along with professional journalism contest winners for outstanding work produced in 2024.
Saturday, November 8, 2025
11:00 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.
Headliners Club
221 W. 6th St., 21st Floor
Austin, Texas
$50 per person
11:00 a.m. - Reception
11:30 a.m. - Luncheon Begins
12:00 p.m. - Program Begins
Cannot attend but would like to support the event? Please click below to sponsor a scholarship recipient or journalism contest award-winner's attendance at the event.
Questions? Please contact Alison Unger or call the Foundation office at (512) 445-4520.
Keynote Panelists Announced!
Papering the State: Hearst's Expanding Role in Texas
This year's panel discussion will explore the expansion of the Hearst media company in Texas and its effect on gathering and delivering local news.
Marc Duvoisin, Editor in Chief, San Antonio Express-News
Marc Duvoisin is editor-in-chief and senior vice president of the San Antonio Express-News. He joined the paper in 2018. Previously, he was an editor-at-large for the Houston Chronicle. From 2001-2017, he was a senior editor at the Los Angeles Times, serving as managing editor for the last five years of his tenure. In that role, he oversaw all news gathering by the local, national, foreign, business and sports staffs, supervising the work of more than 400 journalists. Projects he edited or co-edited at the Los Angeles Times won three Pulitzer Prizes and numerous other national journalism honors. Earlier in his career, he was a reporter, editor and foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Kelly Ann Scott, Editor in Chief, Houston Chronicle
Kelly Ann Scott is the editor in chief and senior vice president of the Houston Chronicle. During her more than 25-year career, Scott has guided local newsrooms to innovate and earn national recognition, earning multiple Pulitzers for reporting, a national Edward R Murrow Award for podcasting, and Emmys for video work. Since joining the Chronicle in 2023, the team has expanded investigative reporting, launched new digital initiatives, and driven significant video and digital subscriber growth. The Houston Chronicle now has the largest digital subscriber base in Texas. Before joining the Chronicle, Scott served as editor in chief of AL.com, where she led the newsroom to win three Pulitzer Prizes and national acclaim for innovation and storytelling. She worked for Gannett for almost 20 years, including as executive editor of the Reno Gazette Journal with oversight of other Gannett sites, and has taught journalism at the University of Nevada and St. Cloud State University.
Courtney Sebesta, Editor in Chief, Austin American-Statesman
Courtney Sebesta began her professional journalism career 22 years ago at the Austin American-Statesman working her way from Editorial Assistant to Managing Editor to Editor in Chief. Her team collaborations have won Edward R. Murrow Awards, the prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and most recently, Sebesta's team was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Public Service for coverage of the Uvalde mass shooting. In addition, her teams have garnered numerous Online News Association Online Journalism Awards, an International News Media Association Award, Local Media Association awards, multiple Headliners Foundation awards, and Texas Managing Editors awards.
Michael Hardy, Senior Writer, Texas Monthly
Michael Hardy is a native Texan and a senior writer at Texas Monthly, where he has written about viticulture, lepidoptery, opera, wrestling, graffiti, tattoo parlors, state politics, and Sugar Land’s selfie statue. Before joining TM he worked as arts editor for Houstonia magazine, where he won the 2015 City and Regional Magazine Association award for best arts writing. His reporting has appeared in the Texas Observer, Wired, the New York Times, and Playboy. He lives in Houston.
Moderator - Headliners Foundation Board member John Schwartz
John Schwartz is a professor of practice in journalism at the UT Austin School of Journalism and Media. Schwartz attended UT Austin and graduated with honors from the Plan II liberal arts honors program in 1979. While attending law school at UT, Schwartz served as editor of the student magazine, UTmost, and of The Daily Texan. Schwartz retired in 2021 from a 36-year career in journalism at national publications including Newsweek Magazine, The Washington Post, and The New York Times.