Three new Rising Star Award winners will be honored April 17 at the annual Daily Texan Hall of Fame gathering, sponsored by Friends of The Daily Texan, Inc. on the UT campus.
In addition 8 new members of the Daily Texan Hall of Fame will be inducted and scholarship grants from the Friends of The Daily Texan group and donors will be presented to 16 Daily Texan staffers.
Register to attend at:
https://friendsdailytexan.wildapricot.org/event-6522425
The event on the plaza will begin at 5 p.m. with an outdoor reception on the Walter Cronkite Plaza, located between the Texas Student Media building and the Moody College of Communication complex. There will be a variety of food and beverage stations.
The adjacent Daily Texan newsroom will available for tours at 4 p.m. and will remain open to any attendees up until the start of the formal program.
The reception ends at 6:45 p.m., and then moves to a comfortable Moody auditorium for Hall of Fame inductions and awarding award of scholarships to Daily Texan staff members. The event will begin at 7:15 p.m. and end at 9:30 p.m.
Rising Star honorees
Megan Menchaca
Megan Menchaca is the senior education reporter for the Houston Chronicle, where she covers Houston ISD — the state’s largest school district — and K-12 education news.
She previously has worked at the Austin American-Statesman, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, The Texas Tribune and other major media organizations in Texas.
She held 12 different positions during her tenure at The Daily Texan, including news editor, director of digital strategy and managing editor.
Under her leadership, the Texan received honors from the College Media Association and the Texas Intercollegiate Press Association as one of the best newspapers in its category. She earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and government from the University of Texas in 2021.
Sami Sparber
Sami Sparber is a real estate reporter and newsletter writer at Axios, where she’s worked as a journalist since March 2022.
Sparber has previously reported for the Dallas Morning News, the Wall Street Journal, The Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle and various other media outlets, where her coverage focused largely on state politics.
Before graduating in 2021, she held several positions at The Daily Texan, including projects editor, news editor and a senior news reporter covering local and state politics.
She also led the paper through the COVID-19 pandemic and social justice protests as Managing Editor during summer 2020.
Catherine Marfin
Catherine Marfin attended the University of Texas at Austin from 2015 to 2019, where she majored in journalism and public relations and earned a minor in sociology and a certificate in forensic science. She worked for The Daily Texan for 13 semesters, starting as a general news reporter and eventually serving as managing editor during the summer and fall of 2019.
Catherine was selected as a breaking news fellow for the Dallas Morning News in January 2020, and was elevated to full time status in January 2021. During her time at the Morning News, she served as the paper’s primary COVID-19 reporter, writing hundreds of explainers and in-depth analyses that explained the novel virus and the county’s management of the pandemic.
During this time, her reporting brought in 761,000 returning visitors and over 9.3 million page views to the Morning News website, earning her the distinction of the paper’s 2021 Breaking News Reporter of the Year. She was additionally among a group that received the paper’s 2021 Team Effort of the Year award for her coverage of the pandemic.
In September 2022, Catherine began working as the Houston courts reporter for Law360, covering corporate litigation for attorneys in Texas. Her work during this time included gavel-to-gavel coverage of the impeachment of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, numerous oral arguments at the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and in-depth coverage of 2023 Texas legislation affecting the First Amendment that was challenged up to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Catherine currently works as senior media relations specialist at UTHealth Houston, where she advocates for doctors in the university’s neurology, psychiatry and critical care departments to share patient success stories and research advances with local, state and national media. She is currently pursuing a master of law at St. Mary’s University with an emphasis on health policy.