Suzanne Arnote Holloway is a native of Antlers, Oklahoma and graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor of arts in journalism in 1936. Holloway blazed the trail for women journalists from the beginning. She was only the second woman editor of The Daily campus newspaper and began her career at The Oklahoman covering the struggles of fellow Oklahomans during the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. She took 30 years off from the news field to raise her family, but returned in 1976 to be the food editor and restaurant critic at the Tulsa World where she worked for 24 years never missing a deadline.

Holloway was honored in 2000 by the Tulsa Chapter of the Association for Women in Communication with the Saidie Lifetime Achievement Award given to women who have made significant contributions to Oklahoma during their careers in the communication field. In 2003, Holloway was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

Bob Bernstein is president and CEO of Bernstein-Rein Advertising. He left OU in spring 1960 after changing his major to journalism from radio and television in his final year. Bernstein worked for several regional film and advertising companies in the Kansas City area before founding his own company, Bernstein-Rein Advertising in 1964. Along with his partner, Skip Rein, he grew the agency from the ground up to include clients such as Blockbuster, Thrifty car rental, McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. His agency is recognized as the inventor of the McDonald’s Happy Meal.

Bernstein serves on the boards of several Kansas City museums and philanthropic interests and has been instrumental in establishing regional non-profits such as The Children’s Place and Ronald McDonald House Charities.

Ambassador James Jones is partner of ManattJones, an international firm providing international business development, public affairs, and political and economic risk assessment services to clients in Mexico and Latin America. Jones served as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 1993 to 1997 during the Mexican peso crisis and the passage and implementation of NAFTA.  Jones received his bachelor of arts degree in journalism from OU in 1961 and a law degree from Georgetown University in 1964.

Prior to his ambassadorship, Jones was President of Warnaco International and Chairman and CEO of the American Stock Exchange from 1989 to 1993. Jones also served in the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1987. Jones was only 28 when President Lyndon Johnson selected him as appointments secretary, the position presently entitled Chief of Staff. he was the youngest person in history to hold this position.

Jones was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame in 1994 and received the Aztec Eagle Award, the highest honor the Mexican government can bestow on a non-Mexican, in 1997.

Holly Bailey is the recipient of the 2009 JayMac Young Professional Award. The award is bestowed upon alumni under the age of 40 who have made great achievements in their careers. Bailey attended OU from 1993-1996 and started her career as a staff writer at the Oklahoma Gazette and assisted CNN with their coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

During the spring semester of her junior year she interned for the Chicago Tribune through the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism and during what should have been her senior year, she took a job as an investigative reporter at the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. and there was no looking back.

Bailey moved to Newsweek in 2003 as an intern in the Washington bureau and was quickly promoted to reporter/researcher the same year. She covered the presidential campaigns of Sen. John Kerry and former Rep. Dick Gephardt during the2004 presidential campaign. In January 2005 she was promoted to White House Correspondent and traveled the country covering Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Bailey has also contributed articles to Slate.com, Salon.com, Entertainment Weekly and the Washington City Paper. In 2002, she won first place in business reporting from the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists for an article on a Washington developer for the Washington City Paper.