Editor’s note: The Daily will run a media literacy column by Sarah Cavanah, interim executive director of Oklahoma Scholastic Media and former Daily staff writer, every Tuesday to give readers a behind-the-scenes look at The Daily and media coverage in general.

This is The Oklahoma Daily, the “University of Oklahoma independent student voice.” The closest thing to an owner The Daily has is the OU student body.

Thousands of students have worked for The Daily, including me. But I was surprised to find out how much I didn’t know about how The Daily really works.

Even though I spent more than two years in The Daily newsroom —when dinosaurs and grunge rock ruled the Earth — I believed things about The Daily that just weren’t true. In the past week of asking questions, I’ve learned as much about The Daily’s operations as I learned while working there.

I’m hardly the only former Daily staffer, or journalist of any kind, to be so uninformed. Like most newspapers, the first rule of The Daily is: “Don’t write stories about The Daily.”

That rule sounds like the start of a conspiracy, but it’s in place for a good reason.

Thousands of students may leave The Daily as confident journalists, but almost all of them come in as inexperienced and scared kids. It’s a natural tendency to want to stick to what you know, especially when you’re unsure about what you’re doing.

Without the pressure on Daily staffers to go out and find sources and stories beyond their comfort zones, The Daily would look like a gossip-filled Twitter feed and there would still be approximately four free parking spots available at Lloyd Noble Center.

But there’s an unintended consequence.

Occasionally, The Daily is the news. Sometimes, it’s controversial, like last year’s practically weekly debate about the content in The Daily’s editorial cartoons.

But those untold stories can be positive, too. For instance, few people have heard about the day the paper first went online — April 19, 1995.

While working in that famous “real world” of media relations, I came to realize how the lack of knowledge about how media work can sometimes mean the difference between success and failure, especially for people who never even thought about taking a journalism course.

So I proposed this column, one that would serve both as a way of shedding a little light and covering the media. If there’s something you want to know about The Daily or the media, please send those questions to dailyopinion@ou.edu.

I might not know right now, but I’ll try to find out. After all, it is your newspaper.

— Sarah Cavanah,

professional writing and journalism graduate student