Paul O'Donnell

Paul O’Donnell is an accomplished editor, innovator and mentor with over four decades of experience guiding high-performing teams in newsrooms small and large.

He joined the journalism faculty at Texas A&M University in August 2024 after serving nine years as business editor of the Dallas Morning News. At The News, his team earned multiple national, regional and state awards for breaking news and enterprise reporting, including SABEW’s prestigious Best-in-Business general excellence award and honors in the highly competitive National Headliners and Best of the West contests.

Prior to The News, he led a digital transition at the Dallas Business Journal as editor-in-chief and served as business editor and deputy metro editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. In Cleveland, his business news team twice earned SABEW’s Best-in-Business distinction and captured the National Press Foundation’s Thomas Stokes award for energy and environmental reporting.

As an innovator, he’s directed digital-first transitions in two newsrooms, launched the Dallas Morning News’ inaugural flagship iPad app as its founding editor and helped incorporate interactive storytelling on Dallasnews.com. Earlier in his career, he rose to executive editor of a mid-sized Ohio newspaper by age 30 and directed award-winning reporting of an elementary school shooting, a religious cult killing and a series of fatal highway crossover accidents that resulted in the installation of median barriers.

Throughout his career, he built a track record of success in mentoring and coaching early-career journalists, with former reporters and interns going on to join the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, CNBC, Fox News, Politico, The Information and other national newsrooms.