Last print: The Talon moves purely online

Photo by: Abby Bellow

 

After 56 years of producing a physical paper product, The Talon is taking its first definitive steps toward a unified Oklahoma Christian University news outlet: Eagle Media.

Starting March 29, every story The Talon publishes will run only on its website, talonatoc.com. The Talon’s change to a purely online publication comes as a logical move forward, according to Distinguished Professor of Mass Communication Philip Patterson.

“The future of journalism is not print,” Patterson said. “In fact, the only way journalism is going to be saved is if you can get rid of the burden of print, and get people to pay you money for virtual. If you get rid of that hard cost, journalism will probably survive. Advertisers have finally gotten comfortable with their ads being online, and now that advertisers are online, the model is set to work again.”

Chair and Professor of Mass Communication Larry Jurney echoed Patterson, noting that the current media landscape is less divided than it has been in the past. Individuals who used to specialize solely in print publications can no longer ignore the necessity of broadcast training, and broadcasters increasingly require the skill set of a devoted writer.

Jurney and Patterson sketched their vision to gather all of Oklahoma Christian’s student-produced media under the single Eagle Media banner five years ago. Due to unexpected personal circumstances and a lack of funding, however, initial progress was slow. In Jurney’s opinion, the setbacks were merely bumps on the road to inter-media cooperation.

“That’s where the future’s lying,” Jurney said. “We see this whole thing merging together – it’s not that one skill set really goes away, but it’s a merged skill set, so we want everybody that goes through our program to do both.”

Eagle Media will be a three-pronged enterprise made up of The Talon, Eagle Angle and their future Public Relations organizational equivalent. Jurney sees the move online – and The Talon’s future publication through a tablet-focused app – as the next step in uniting the communication department’s different media sources.

Former Talon editor-in-chief Kelsey Frobisher said an online newspaper has been in discussion for several years.

“We were already moving that way; we were doing every other week online, every other week in print, so we wanted to start stepping up our online presence, but at the time, I kind of felt the campus wasn’t ready to not have a physical paper,” Frobisher said. “It was a change that was going to need to be gradual, that way the students would get used to looking for The Talon online.”

For the past several years, The Talon has had both a print and an online presence. Now it is time to combine the two into one.

“It’ll be an app [that] will look like a paper,” Jurney said. “We will still need to teach layout and all those kinds of things, but we will be able to embed video in it – we will be able to put interviews in it. So if you read a section in the paper and go, ‘I wonder what the whole interview is like?’ you can just click on it, if the student has embedded the whole interview they shot. It’s just absolutely marvelous – it’s kind of the best of both worlds.”

Patterson estimated the app could be in the later stages of production by summer.

“Rather than fewer opportunities, this is actually going to create more opportunities,” Patterson said. “As soon as we kind of unburden ourselves of the need to deliver a print product at a predesigned time with old stories in it, this is going to free us up and give us more opportunities to be what media is supposed to be – which is telling people what they don’t already know.”

Before focusing on The Talon’s future, however, it is necessary to understand its past.

Formerly known as The Tower, The Talon’s roots originated in Bartlesville, Okla., where Oklahoma Christian University first began in the 1950s as Central Christian College. Oklahoma Christian’s move to Oklahoma City in 1958 marked the birth of The Talon, and a new era began.

Bailey McBride, now a professor of English at Oklahoma Christian, wrote for The Tower when he was a student.

“We only had about 100 students, and so we were all really close,” McBride said. “The Tower advisor when I was student was Dr. [Stafford] North, and so it had been strong. I think The Tower flourished because of student leaders.”

When McBride joined the Oklahoma Christian faculty in 1966 as the Chair of Language and Literature, the journalism courses were included in the department. McBride noted that The Tower was a stronger paper in 1958 than the Talon was when he came back to Oklahoma Christian in 1966.

In the late 60s and early 70s McBride initiated editors’ scholarships. He also remembers pushing for better journalism teachers; he credits The Talon’s growth at that time to Joy McMillion, now the associate editor for The Christian Chronicle, for taking the reporting to the next level.

“I became advisor when the publication had a strong tradition,” McBride said. “Of course, all the years I was involved the staff got better and produced good papers. But The Talon today is far superior in most ways. During my first semester at OC, no more than three issues were printed. … By the spring semester we had 10 issues.”

In the mid-70s, Charles Branch Jr. – a pre-med student – agreed to edit The Talon. He was involved in many activities, a strong writer and recruited a varied group of reporters, according to McBride.

“Charles became a medical doctor and today is Chair of Neurosurgery at Wake Forest Medical School,” McBride said. “He was followed by two other pre-med editors and they made greater connections with public newspapers in the region.”

Scott LaMascus, vice president of academic affairs, also served as The Talon’s editor-in-chief for a time. LaMascus not only has a rich history with The Talon, but so does his family. His family history with the student newspaper reaches back to The Tower days.

Richard LaMascus, Scott LaMascus’s father, was a reporter for The Tower in the 1950s.

LaMascus would eventually follow in his father’s footsteps working for the student paper. He started his freshman year working on The Talon as a reporter in 1980. In 1982, he became editor-in-chief as a junior. In 1983-84 he wrote for The Christian Chronicle, which was in its second year under the support of Oklahoma Christian and has gone on to employ several Talon graduates.

Lana Reynolds, vice president at Seminole Junior College, was a major player in strengthening the paper. Lana was an English major and editor under alumna Lindy Adams, who worked in public relations but took time to sponsor The Talon.

Adams advised The Talon from 1978-1981 and remembers working from a room in the Student Center, going back and forth from that room to the Oklahoma Christian print shop in the Davisson American Heritage Building to have print galleys made – not pirate ships, but rather an uncorrected proof, also known as advance reading copies.

“Thanks to the help of Dr. Bailey McBride, we moved to a classroom in the new Garvey Center and bought a Compugraphic,” Adams said. “That was a marked improvement. The age of computer design didn’t begin until a number of years later.”

Adams’ most notable memories were more about the mechanisms of operating the student newsroom as well as the staff.

“I remember Dr. LaMascus as a freshman,” Adams said.

“He came to the first meeting of the newspaper workshop … and took down each and every instruction. I remember thinking, ‘He’s a freshman and that diligence won’t last long.’”

Adams later acknowledged LaMascus as being a leader throughout his college career and beyond.

LaMascus gave credit to Adams for advising them into great writers until 1982, and said he is proud of the fact that he was Phillip Patterson’s very first editor-in-chief.

Like most press rooms, The Talon saw some of its most memorable moments in the last hours before the copy went to press, an expression that seems to be fading away with “the paper,” and will soon no longer be synonymous with The Talon. Former staff remember The Talon memories and the family-type relationships that working on staff created over the years. Wednesday evenings at The Talon were filled with treats: from homemade brownies, to pizza to laughter.

“Most of my best friends were Talon folk,” LaMascus said.

Jesse Olivarez, a Talon staff writer in 2000, has bittersweet memories of his Talon days, however.

“I cannot think of The Talon without thinking of my friend, Kyle Seitsinger,” Olivarez said. “He was really determined to make his post-military career go and he put all his heart into it. When he passed, I cried not just because I lost my friend, but because he would have done tremendous things.”

To this day Olivarez meets up with former Talon writers every now and again – and when they do, they toast their beloved friend Seitsinger, who died in 2004 during his active duty deployment in Afghanistan. Seitsinger was a student at Oklahoma Christian and a writer for The Talon.

McBride claimed some of the strongest relations he had with students developed while they were working with The Talon. To many, The Talon legacy reached beyond the newsroom and the craft of writing and into the lives of those who dared to be a newshound.

Olivarez also credited Patterson for planting the seeds in his life that would grow and produce the confidence that he lacked.

“The greatest and most profound relationship I had there was with Dr. Philip Patterson,” Olivarez said. “He’d probably the smartest man I’ve ever met and one of the most decent men I’ve ever known. He never sat down and gave me any life lecture, but he did gently steer me onto a career in writing. I will die forever in his debt, not only for teaching me how to do my craft but also for showing me how a real Christian man should be.”

As The Talon transitions into an online format and leaves behind a printed legacy, LaMascus will have to adjust to life without grabbing a paper copy in line outside of the caf.

“No more printed Talon?” LaMascus said. “That’s like taking peanuts out of Cracker Jacks. I admit it makes me sad to see the print edition go.”

Patterson started working as a staff advisor for The Talon 33 years ago, and guided the newspaper for all but eight of those years. Looking at how the media has changed over his time, his reasoning for the shift online is to graduate a “converged” journalist – he remains adamant that a position as a solely print-focused journalist will not even be available.

“The job won’t exist,” Patterson said. “There will be reporters who will do print and small video, there will be people who feed the web, but it’s going away – and we would rather be riding the front edge of it than the back edge.”

But The Talon’s effect on its students and staff are not limited to just a career in journalism, however. Frobisher pointed to her time on staff as vital to her current efforts in law school.

“It was absolutely one of the most helpful things I did in undergrad,” Frobisher said. “My degree was in English writing and so that gave me a really core foundation in being able to write and think critically, but writing from a journalistic style helped bridge the gap between the theoretical and the practical. … It helped me learn to be more concise and more pragmatic with my writing style, and that’s something that translated well into legal writing, and helped me pick that up with less of a learning curve.”

Former editor-in-chief Juliana Vadnais asserted that her tenure provided more of a generally applicable skill.

“The biggest thing I would say that The Talon provided for me was experience – yes, journalism experience, but also leadership experience and teamwork,” Vadnais said. “I really walked away being able to be in charge of a group of people who don’t always want to listen, and really being able to know what you’re doing and be able to teach and help other people; those are skills that you need no matter what you’re going into.”

In losing the paper edition’s presence, however, Vadnais cautioned that the The Talon needed to continue pushing a physical presence on the Oklahoma Christian campus.

“My biggest thing is to keep that ‘in your face,’ whether it’s a poster or something that can show somebody, ‘Oh, you have a phone in your hand, so why not go look at this?’” Vadnais said. “Anything to get people subscribed to the website so that they go ahead and automatically get those updates is really nice.”

Patterson agreed, but noted that ultimately, the step forward into The Talon’s future will yield results beyond just the borders of Oklahoma Christian.

“I’m going to feel a sense of loss,” Patterson said. “I mean, I’ve been at this 33 years and I’m going to feel a sense of loss too. But when you can read The Talon while you’re waiting for a table at a restaurant, when you can read The Talon when you’re anywhere off-campus, that’s going to be a tremendous advantage to us.”

Vadnais elaborated on the positive features of the transition.

“I’m really sad to see the print aspect of it go away, but I think journalism is changing  and I think that is what we are doing here at OC. I think it is fantastic because it shows that we are really stepping up and we know what is going on in the future.”

While The Talon will no longer pursue a paper publication, this move to break the shackles of time and space on its newsgathering is an important step in not just The Talon’s ability to report the news, but its ability to serve Oklahoma Christian as their eyes and ears for all the news students can use.

 

Written by Lane Robles and Linda Sacks