Tom Huang is Sunday & Enterprise Editor at The Dallas Morning News and Adjunct Faculty member of The Poynter Institute, where he oversees the school’s writing program. He has worked at The Dallas Morning News since 1993, first as a feature writer, then as features editor, and now as the Sunday Page One editor. During Huang’s time as features editor, the newspaper’s features coverage was named one of the nation’s best by the Missouri Lifestyle Journalism Awards and by the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors. His reporting has taken him from Bosnia and Vietnam and the Athens Olympics to the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks in New York. At Poynter, he teaches seminar sessions in ethics, diversity, writing and leadership issues, and he was co-editor of Poynter’s Best Newspaper Writing book for 2008-2009. Before moving to Dallas, he worked at The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, where he covered courts, city hall, demographics and general assignments. He is president of the Society for Features Journalism Foundation and serves on the national advisory board of the Asian American Journalists Association. He is a 1988 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and engineering.
Scenes are the building blocks of dramatic storytelling and narrative nonfiction.
As Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark explains in “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer”: “From childhood, we inhale scenes. We experience them from literatures and news reports, from … Read more
For the past four months, I shepherded a Dallas Morning News project on the lasting impact that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had on North Texans and the rest of the nation. The eight-day series includes several Page One stories on … Read more
I am a quiet leader, fumbling and stumbling along, barely able to figure out how to do the leadership thing some days.
Writing has always been my solace — the best way for me not only to lose myself, but … Read more
Finding your voice. It’s one of the hardest things to do, whether it’s developing your writing style, establishing your role in a relationship or leading others through difficult times.
Finding your voice in the chaos of the newsroom is especially … Read more
As an editor, I try to ask good questions. That’s because I’m a curious person, overflowing with sentences that end in question marks.
It’s also because, as Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark once wrote, “Teachers and editors best operate as resources … Read more
A master narrative has developed around the media’s coverage of Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, leading us to believe that there are cultural roots in the Japanese citizens’ stoic response to all the horrors of the past few weeks.… Read more
Working with reporters from afar is something I’ve often struggled with. Not seeing each other on a daily basis makes it harder for the editor and reporter to communicate. E-mails get misinterpreted. Periods of silence — we all get busy … Read more
In a previous column I wrote about how, as an editor, it’s important to build your relationship with a reporter before critiquing his or her stories with candor. You want to lay down a foundation of trust, so the reporter … Read more
Your first few months as an editor can be tough. A couple of things dawn on you. You realize that editing is really an art (perhaps even a dark art), not a science. And you realize that you can’t take … Read more
For the editor, coaching means engaging the writer in an ongoing conversation about the story, from the conception of the idea to the final edit. The more the editor can invest time and thought in this conversation, the less work … Read more