Griff Singer

The University of Texas at Austin

Hall of Fame Class of 2016

S. Griffin “Griff” Singer retired in 2003 as a senior lecturer for the University of Texas School of Journalism after 34 years of service. He is the former director of the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund’s Center for Editing Excellence at the university.

Singer’s career centered in the classroom, where he taught courses in newspaper reporting, copyediting, layout and design and computer-assisted reporting.

Singer has long served as a seminar and workshop leader for various journalism organizations, and has been a judge in scores of state, national and international journalism competitions.

He worked as a reporter and editor for newspapers including the Arlington (Texas) Citizen-Journal, 1956-59; The Dallas Morning News, 1959-67; and the San Antonio Light, 1979-81. He helped direct coverage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the investigation and trial of Jack Ruby for the slaying of Lee Harvey Oswald.

From 1988 to 2003, Singer was a news department consultant and part-time assistant metro editor for the Houston Chronicle. He served as primary line editor and rewrite in the first weeks of the story of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children in 2001. He also consulted with Freedom Communications Inc., then a group of 26 newspapers. In 1994, he was on the first team of Western journalists to go the the former Soviet state of Kyrgyzstan to work with Russian-trained journalists in the ways of a free press. In 1996, he was a copy editor for the Olympics Daily published by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution during the Summer Olympic Games.

Friends of the Daily Texan, a group of UT-Austin students, ex-students, faculty and former faculty, on Oct. 17, 2014, sponsored an event to honor “Griff Singer — THE Friend of the Daily Texan.” More than $50,000 was raised for the Innovation Fund to provide assistance to the university’s student-run newspaper.

Singer continues to develop and teach journalism courses for the UT School of Journalism and the Texas Press Association.