By Dan McKeever
I was the first John R. Oller Special Projects Reporter for The Lantern as a senior in the class of 2010. Although I didn’t end up pursuing a career in journalism, I’m still proud of that distinction.
I had written for The Lantern for a year as a junior when our adviser, Tom O’Hara, sent me an email. (For those who worked for Tom, you know that the subject line of the email was probably either “tom” or “tomo”; I never asked why.)
The email said, “Do you understand financial documents?” Like any good professionally ambitious young person, I lied and said yes.
Tom called me in for a meeting and explained that there was an alum who would be funding a paid “special projects” reporter position, with a focus on university administration and finances. OSU was growing and evolving rapidly under the direction of our then-president, E. Gordon Gee. It was an ideal ti
me to dedicate some attention to understanding the reality behind the splashy PR. Was I interested in the job?
I jumped at the chance for two reasons. One, it was a great opportunity to dig deep into the decision-making at the highest levels of the university administration. Two, I was completely broke, and that stipend would mean I could occasionally eat something nicer than Ramen Noodles for dinner.
I covered the university’s Board of Trustees and watched how some of the most powerful men and women in Ohio operated. I wrote stories about the university’s aggressive development agenda, as well as the revitalization and remaining challenges for the University District. For reasons I can’t remember, I also ended up interviewing Jim Cramer of TV’s “Mad Money,” who lit into “The Daily Show”’s Jon Stewart in our interview.
I worked with some great people in the newsroom, but
none better than Tom O’Hara. Tom was an old-school newspaper man — tough, smart, funny, skeptical — who was helping us learn the business at a time when the news media was going through some historic growing pains.
Print newspapers were imploding under the combined weight of the 2008 financial crisis-turned-global recession and the rise of internet media (at the time, we were told that Craigslist had slashed about a third of classified advertising revenue for newspapers). Unfortunately, almost nobody had figured out how to make any real money in the news business giving the product away for free online.
What I learned from working for Tom was that whether we were writing for a print newspaper, a website, or carving our copy into stone tablets, maintaining the instincts and habits of a journalist was always going to matter. People lie, so question everything. Demand the documents and figure out what they mean. Find the right mix of “professional” and “confrontational” to get the job done.
I ended up finding a different career path when my Lantern journalism days came to an end (see “global recession” above), but those skills are still very relevant to my career today as an assistant professor of finance at Binghamton University in upstate New York. (To be clear: I really do understand financial documents now.) I still ask questions and challenge assumptions, but in conference presentations. I still dig into miser
ably complicated documents, but now they’re journal articles. I’m still looking for the right balance between “professional” and “confrontational”, as I imagine we all are.
And I still write, just for an academic audience. So for that, I’m very thankful for my time in the Lantern newsroom, where I learned how to write for an audience for the first time.
Editor’s Note: Dan McKeever (B.A. Economics and Journalism, 2010), is a Lantern legacy. His father, Jim, was a Lantern editor in the late 1970s.
