I don’t particularly enjoy writing about myself.
When my senior cohort at The Daily first began kicking around their ideas for their farewell columns, I didn’t have much to say. The idea of summing up the most formative four years of my life was daunting, and besides that, not really my style. After some gentle prodding by our engagement editor Makenna Buckskin — I believe her exact words were, “You’re going to write one” — here we are.
Blake and his mother, Stephanie Haltom, in front of OU's Gaylord College.
Funnily enough, this distaste for writing about myself was the exact same thought that ran through my mind when I was a senior in high school sitting down to write my personal essay for OU’s application. That story was hardly about me.
Most of the spotlight went to my mother, whom I’ve already talked about so much in dozens of cover letters, and about how her incredible work ethic as a single mother of two led her from struggling to make ends meet week-to-week to recently accepting a six-figure job, earning her master’s degree and who knows what else for her future. Seeing the endless effort she put in to make a better life for herself and her sons informed me from a young age on the type of work it was going to take to reach my own goals. She did it with the odds completely stacked against her, so I never had an excuse to falter in my own pursuits.
When I was a kid, we always dreamed I’d end up playing football at OU, shaking hands with athletic director Joe Castiglione on signing day and maybe earning a segment on College Gameday somewhere along the way.
I hope being editor-in-chief of the student paper that drew a fair bit of heat from the athletic department for its binocular-fueled reporting is fair consolation for her, since we did ultimately get the Gameday shoutout.
“Who says journalism is dead?” pic.twitter.com/BpNJKWUwXG
— OU Daily (@OUDaily) October 16, 2021
She was the first person to teach me something that I consider part of my core values today, and I really could not have done anything I’ve done to this point without all of her sacrifices.
After I finally got to OU’s campus and walked into The Daily, a pattern began to emerge for me. For all the individual strain and sleepless nights I and my friends have poured into stories ranging from serious coverage of state sunshine laws to goofy pieces about how much it sucks to work as a delivery boy in the dead heat of an Oklahoma summer, journalists can’t do our work without relying on others. Good stories are impossible for us to write without someone trusting us with information. You can’t go one day in journalism, if you’re really doing it right, without learning something new.
That’s how I’m always going to remember my experience and friends at The Daily, and why I don’t want to focus on me. Over the course of the last eight semesters, there have been so many people I’m taking so many lessons away from. The value in what I did here was less about what I came in with but rather what I’m taking away with me from working, joking, laughing and experiencing this place with people I consider some of my best pals. The fact that all of these folks did what they did through the course of a global pandemic is just another testament to how much I was able to learn from them in.
Just like in our work, I couldn’t have done half of what I did without relying on these folks. I learned something new every single day.
From our enterprise editor, Chandler Engelbrecht, I’m hoping to emulate his enthusiasm and commitment. I don’t think I can remember a day that’s gone by, regardless of what was happening in his own life, that he didn’t find time to make someone laugh or just ask how they were. The energy he brings to a newsroom is invaluable, and I am so pumped for him to head to Michigan for his first internship, something that was so long overdue it blows my mind.
Jonathan Kyncl, our news editor, taught me most of all that there’s always a skill to keep improving on. I’ve always thought that he was one of the single most improved journalists in our newsroom, from our freshman to senior years. The guy whose writing I edited in one of our early journalism courses and the one who eventually covered things like the Julius Jones case are at two completely different levels, and he even picked up some serious camera skills along the way. The dedication and desire to get better is just unmatched.
I don’t think I’ve ever been worried at all about if our copy chief, Francisco Gutierrez, would be able to finish something if I asked him. Francisco is an absolute model of consistency that I can only hope to match. There’s a reason he’s headed to The New York Times this summer, and there’s a reason I admire his ability to deliver day-in, day-out so much, regardless of the circumstances.
Makenna, our absolute badass of an engagement editor, is the person I think of most when I think about innovation and taking charge, and I’m hoping to take some pages from her playbook once I move into my professional career. She essentially revived an entire desk within our newsroom to spearhead a complete overhaul of our newsletter, social media content and audience outreach, and she was probably responsible for making my job so much easier than it could have been. To do everything that she’s done at The Daily before her junior year is a perfect example of what this place has always been about.
These are just a few of the people still at The Daily who’ve inspired me every day to try and be more like them.
TOP ROW: Seth Prince, adviser; Blake Douglas, editor-in-chief; Francisco Gutierrez, copy chief; Makenna Buckskin, engagement editor; Jonathan Kyncl, assistant news editor; Mason Young, sports editor; Ray Bahner, spring assistant visual editor; Trey Young, photo editor (kneeling); Chandler Engelbrecht, fall assistant sports editor, spring enterprise editor; Justin Jayne, video editor; Alexia Aston, spring news editor; Silas Bales, assistant culture editor; Jazz Wolfe, culture editor; Jillian Taylor, news managing editor.
Not too long ago, a certain Norman celebrity and “program guy” stood in front of our state legislature and reminded folks there that a single person didn’t invent Sooner football — it was generations of players long before him that built that team’s success, and it will be the generations long after him that uphold that pedigree.
In the newsroom, we think similarly. Our adviser Seth Prince is a big fan of looking at The Daily as a continuum. Our newsroom’s success over the past seven or eight years is built on the backs of those who did their part before us, and it’s up to us to continue building that audience trust, doing that hard reporting and upholding The Daily’s own expectations.
Some people in the newsroom have gotten tired of me using a line from Pittsburgh Steelers Coach Mike Tomlin to describe our own jobs: “The standard is the standard.” In Tomlin’s case, this means regardless of what players are on the field, what’s happening in the game, where it’s played, or anything else, the team has one ultimate objective to chase down.
I hijacked this phrase because I am so damn impressed by the young reporters coming up behind me and my senior class, and really do believe they — led by the absolutely outstanding Jillian Taylor, my successor — have all the talent and drive to continue building on what previous generations have done. It’s because of them I feel so pleased with where The Daily is going, and it’s because of them I think we have been able to weather the storm of the pandemic and still serve our community. Their resilience and tenacity can’t be questioned, and just like the people named above, I have so much to learn from these reporters too.
I hope that, most of all, I’ve taught someone in that generation something of my own along the way. If I’ve contributed even a small portion of what my friends have taught me, I’ll feel like my job was done right.
My love for the people of our newsroom and work that The Daily does is never going to fade, even as I get ready to head east and give everything I have to a new community and paper at the Charlotte Observer. I can’t fully anticipate how hard it will be to let this place go, even a week out from graduation, but I’m glad to know everything I learned here will serve as my foundation for the rest of my career and life.
The standard is the standard, and I know The Daily will uphold it. The onus is now on those of us leaving campus to be good ambassadors for this place wherever we end up, rising to greater and greater standards every day.
BD
Blake Douglas served as a news reporter from fall 2018 to spring 2019, summer news editor in 2019, senior news reporter from fall 2019 to spring 2020, news managing editor from fall 2020 to spring 2021, and editor-in-chief from fall 2021 to spring 2022. He is a journalism graduate with minors in international area studies and anthropology.
