5 OU Daily alumni among Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame 2025 inductees

Five journalists who started their media careers by working on the OU Daily staff have been named as 2025 inductees into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

They’ll be among a 10-member 2025 class, a special 55th anniversary posthumous class and a lifetime achievement induction at the University of Central Oklahoma, which will also dedicate a new museum. All events will be held at UCO’s Nigh University Center on May 9.

This year’s class includes the following former Daily staffers, listed alphabetically, with citations from the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame’s press release on the inductees:

Owen Canfield

OWEN CANFIELD (1959- ) covered hard news to sports for a small newspaper, The Duncan Banner, to the state’s largest, The Oklahoman. He spent nearly 20 years with The Associated Press and was APs first reporter at the Edmond post office massacre in 1986. He helped with the Oklahoma City bombing coverage in 1995, witnessed two executions and assisted with coverage of major weather stories and trials. He was named AP-Oklahoma sports editor in 1985. Responsibilities included OU and OSU, but he also covered major golf tournaments, NCAA Final Fours and five Olympic Games. He became The Oklahoman’s editorial writer in 2003 and was named chief editorial writer in 2011. Four years later, he was named opinion editor until he left the newspaper in 2021.

David Christy

DAVID CHRISTY (1949- ) is a third-generation Oklahoma journalist who began his career at age 12 as an after-school and summer printer’s devil at the family’s weekly in Waukomis, The Oklahoma Hornet. He has worked in every facet of the newspaper industry — back shop to newsroom. He was a Linotype operator at 16 and attended the University of Oklahoma School of Journalism, where he worked on the Oklahoma Daily sports staff and OU Sports Information. He worked as sports editor at the daily Sherman (Texas) Democrat, returning to Waukomis to serve as editor, reporter, columnist and photographer. He currently is news desk editor and columnist at the Enid News & Eagle. He has been part of eight Sequoyah Awards over a still ongoing 63-year career.

David Fallis

DAVID FALLIS (1964- ) is investigations editor at The Washington Post. He grew up in Tulsa and graduated from the University of Oklahoma, starting his career in 1991 at the Tulsa Tribune as a police reporter. When the Tribune folded in 1992, he began reporting for the Tulsa World and eventually became an editor, leading a criminal justice team and running investigative projects that won regional awards. In 1999, he joined The Washington Post as an investigative reporter and became an editor in 2014. The following year, he helped lead an investigation of fatal shootings by police that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He also has been an editor or reporter on five other Post investigations that were recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists.

Vicki Monks

VICKI MONKS(1952- ) is among Oklahoma’s pioneering women journalists. As a reporter/photographer for KWTV in the 1970s, she won state and national awards, including for her women’s prisons documentary. She then won a Peabody Award at Dallas’ KDFW. After serving as the Center for Investigative Reporting’s managing editor, she traveled worldwide, freelancing for NPR, BBC, CBS, National Geographic TV, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and American Journalism Review. “Carbon Black,” a radio documentary about failures to address industrial pollution of Ponca Indian land in Oklahoma, won a Society of Environmental Journalists award. An OU journalism graduate and journalism fellow at Stanford University and the University of Colorado, she is an enrolled Chickasaw Nation member. She began her career in Tahlequah as a 13-year-old “Teen Reporter” for the local newspaper.

Mike Strain

MIKE STRAIN (1967- ) worked at Oklahoma’s two largest newspapers for 31 years. He joined the Tulsa World in 2005 as sports editor, became news editor in 2011 and managing editor in 2014. At the World, he covered topics ranging from high school sports to a protest-filled presidential campaign stop in Tulsa during the height of COVID-19. His career started in the Shawnee News-Star’s sports department in 1989. He joined The Oklahoman as a sports agate clerk in 1990 and left 15 years later as deputy sports editor. Strain was the Oklahoma Press Association president in 2020. He is a Bray-Doyle Donkey (Class of ‘85) and a University of Oklahoma graduate. He retired from journalism in 2020 to run his family’s farm in Bray.