Latest news with #OklahomaJournalismHallofFame
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
The late James Beaty takes home 2024 ONG Editorial Sweepstakes award
The late James Beaty, who served as the Managing Editor for The McAlester News-Capital, received posthumous honors as the 2024 ONG Editorial Sweepstakes Award winner. The award was presented Saturday, June 7 during the The Oklahoma Press Association's annual convention, hosted June 6-7 at the Grand Casino Hotel and Resort in Shawnee, Oklahoma. ONG sponsors the contest and award. The contest takes place on a monthly basis and members of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame judge the monthly contests. At the end of the year, winners throughout the year are considered and an overall winner is selected as the sweepstakes award winner. The final selection for the ONG Sweepstakes Awards came from members of the Mississippi Press Association. Beaty won the award for his editorial titled 'McAlester Council shouldn't repeal the will of voters.' Ed Choate, publisher of The Muskogee Phoenix, presented the award. 'The winning writer said the McAlester council shouldn't repeal the will of voters after four city councilors repealed a quarter cent sales tax for a cancer treatment center that was already approved by a vote of the people,' Choate said when presenting the award. 'He wrote the quality of future cancer treatment for McAlester, and the surrounding area is at stake.' Judges said the 'editorial stood out among a dozen excellent entries.' 'It gave a complete picture of the problem, discussed it so everyone could understand it and gave a solution,' judges said. 'The fact it was so clearly presented made it a good choice as the best entry. Good job with letting the reader know the problem that needs correcting.' Choate said Beaty was 'one of our state's great reporters.' Beaty passed away in the summer of 2024. Beaty reported for the MN-C for more than 38 years and celebrated his 72nd birthday on May 3, 2024. He passed away May 12, 2024. The late award-winning journalist started his career in 1985 after graduating from East Central University in Ada. Beaty was also a graduate of Eastern Oklahoma State College in Wilburton and Hartshorne High School. Beaty's writing over his career helped expose several issues related to corruption and nepotism in local governments that led to dismissals, resignations and even criminal charges against several individuals — earning him several state and national awards for his reporting. His weekly Ramblin' Round music column was a favorite, with his writings making their way onto music forums across the globe. His reporting lauded him into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2017. In August 2024, a portion of Kiowa Avenue in McAlester was renamed as James Beaty Avenue. McAlester News-Capital publisher Reina Owens accepted the award on behalf of Beaty's family, who were unable to attend the luncheon where the award was presented. 'James was a remarkable journalist and it was an honor to accept the award for him and his family,' Owens said. 'His absence in our newsroom is still felt today but his memory will live on.'
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame announces 55th class, induction ceremony
Twenty distinguished journalists and a family dedicated to the field of broadcast will be honored at this year's induction ceremony for the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the organization's 55th. The hall of fame also will mark the anniversary with the dedication of a new museum at the University of Central Oklahoma. A departure from the usual luncheon induction ceremonies, this year's ceremony is scheduled for 6 p.m. May 9 in the grand ballroom of the Nigh University Center at UCO. The event will include the 2025 class, a special 55th anniversary posthumous class and a lifetime achievement induction. 'We decided to move the induction ceremony to an evening event this year because of the 55th anniversary and the large number of honorees this year,' said Director Joe Hight, who is also UCO's Edith Kinney Gaylord Endowed Chair of Journalism Ethics and an OJHF member since 2013. 'As with the 50th anniversary, we wanted to make this one a special while focusing on the journalists who have excelled both in this state and the country. This year's honorees are exceptional in many ways." The evening will begin at 4 p.m. with the dedication of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame Museum in the Liberal Arts building on the UCO campus, featuring a special film on the museum's content produced by hall of fame members Tony Stizza and Galen Culver with assistance from hall of fame intern and scholarship winner Jake Ramsey. A reception toasting the honorees will follow at 5 p.m. in the University Center's Heritage Room. Invitations to the induction ceremony will be sent by March 1, and reservations at $75 each must be made by April. More information can be found by going to the hall of fame website at Sponsorship tables can be purchased starting at $1,000 per table. The full class of honorees includes 24 journalists, chosen from among more than 100 nominations. They will join the more than 525 members inducted to the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame since its beginning. Dean Blevins: Blevins has been a highly decorated athlete and sportscaster in Oklahoma for over 40 years. He began in TV co-hosting Sportscene for Tulsa cable before working at KWTV and KOCO-TV. Blevins covered college football with ABC, CBS and ESPN and worked 40 years in radio at KRMG Tulsa, KATT-FM OKC and the Sports Animal. He is a two-time Emmy Award winner, an eight-time Oklahoma Sportscaster of the Year, former OU starting quarterback, and also received the Gaylord College Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014. Owen Canfield: Canfield's career includes coverage from hard news to sports for newspapers from the The Duncan Banner to The Oklahoman. He was named AP-Oklahoma sports editor in 1985 and spent nearly 20 years with The Associated Press. Canfield was AP's first reporter at the Edmond post office massacre in 1986, helped with the Oklahoma City bombing coverage in 1995, witnessed two executions and assisted with coverage of major weather stories and trials. 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: Christy is a third-generation Oklahoma journalist who began his career at age 12 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 worked as sports editor at the daily Sherman (Texas) Democrat, and returned 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 an ongoing 63-year career. David Fallis: Fallis is deputy editor for investigations at The Washington Post. He began his career in 1991 at the Tulsa Tribune as a police reporter, before going to the Tulsa World, where he eventually became an editor, leading a criminal justice team and running investigative projects that won regional awards. He joined The Washington Post as an investigative reporter in 1999 and became an editor in 2014. He helped lead an investigation of fatal shootings by police that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2015 and has been an editor or reporter on five other Post investigations that were recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists. Thomas C. Maupin: Maupin worked as a reporter/photographer in Missouri and as a copy editor in Kansas before joining OPUBCO in 1982. He became copy chief in 1989 and helped write The Oklahoman's Style Manual. He was a finalist for the American Society of Copy Editors' Copy Editor of the Year Award in 2009 and won first in Newspaper Headline Portfolio - Great Plains Journalism Competition and first in Headlines in the AP/ONE Competition in 2010. He retired in 2016, continuing to freelance for The Oklahoman until early 2018. Maupin has also done freelance work for the Moore Monthly and Moore Parks Department. Vicki Monks: An enrolled Chickasaw Nation member, Monks is one of Oklahoma's pioneering women journalists. After beginning her career in Tahlequah as a "teen reporter" for the local paper, she went on to OU, and was a journalism fellow at Stanford and the University of Colorado. She worked as a reporter/photographer for KWTV, then KDFW in Dallas, where she won a Peabody Award. Monks served as the Center for Investigative Reporting's managing editor before traveling worldwide freelancing for NPR, BBC, CBS, National Geographic TV, Rolling Stone, Vogue and American Journalism Review. Oscar Pea: Pea has been a photojournalist for nearly 40 years. After work at stations in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Amarillo, Texas, he joined News on 6 in Tulsa in 1988. He has covered local, national and international stories including the Oklahoma City bombing, the Summer Olympics bombing in Atlanta, Bosnia and other countries where Oklahoma soldiers were sent, as well as all types of crime in Green Country. Pea has served as chief photojournalist and director of operations at News 6. Dawn Shelton: Shelton founded the Luther Register News, an online newspaper and community resource, in 2015 to address a critical need for local coverage in a rural news desert. She began her career as a reporter and producer for KTOK and the Oklahoma News Network. Shelton also launched the popular Luther Pecan Festival in 2017. A member of LION Publishers, she is nationally recognized for championing community journalism and the ongoing challenge to make it sustainable. Marshall L. Stewart: Stewart's first taste of radio air time came on a Northern Oklahoma College campus station in 1970. He would return to college radio following four years in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, at both campus stations at OSU in Stillwater, KVRO and KOSU. His 40-plus year career was spent in Oklahoma and would take him to stations in Ponca City and throughout Tulsa, including the NPR affiliate at Tulsa University, winning him numerous awards including UPI, AP, OAB, RTNDA, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Keep Oklahoma Beautiful Award for a series on poultry farm pollution. Mike Strain: Strain worked at Oklahoma's two largest newspapers for a combined 31 years. After starting his career at the Shawnee News-Star, he joined The Oklahoman in 1990 and left 15 years later as deputy sports editor. He then joined the Tulsa World as sports editor, became news editor in 2011 and managing editor in 2014. Strain was the Oklahoma Press Association president in 2020, before he retired from journalism to run his family's farm in Bray. Frederick Barde: Considered "the dean of Oklahoma journalism" at the turn of the 20th century and working in the field before statehood, Barde helped establish the profession in Oklahoma from 1894 until 1916. First writing as a "stringer" in Guthrie from 1894 until 1910 for publications such as the Oklahoma City Times, Sturm's Magazine, The Daily Oklahoman, New York Sun and Philadelphia Ledger. Best known as the author of Field, Forest, and Stream in Oklahoma (1912) and Outdoor Oklahoma (1914), the state Legislature authorized $5,000 to purchase his papers and photographs, which are now at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City. Nolen Bulloch: Bulloch was a political and criminal reporter for the Tulsa Tribune. Lauded by the Tulsa City Commission and KTUL-TV for his work, Bulloch was also an advocate for fair treatment. His work on an article on 'Kansas City Fats,' a McAlester prison inmate sentenced to life for armed robbery for a 15-cent Tulsa robbery, and helped lead to Fats' (whose real name was George O. Jones) freedom and return to society to live a productive life. Louisa McCune: McCune was a journalist, advocate and visionary who began her writing career with her hometown newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle in 1994, before she became editor of Oklahoma Today Magazine in 1997, where she made editorial content 'sparkle.' In 2011, McCune joined the Kirkpatrick Foundation as executive director and in 2013 founded ArtDesk, a quarterly publication. Dayle McGaha: After starting as the newspaper's mailroom attendant and working in the classified advertising department, McGaha eventually served as publisher of the Blackwell Journal-Tribune for 20 years. He said he was proudest of having mentored young journalists and helped women obtain leadership roles, while supporting the Blackwell community with quality news and information. Johnny McMahan: McMahan joined the Woodward Daily Press in 1979 and worked as a photographer, news editor and sports editor until his death, helping to guide the hometown paper through changes in technology, political upheaval and cultural changes. He was awarded for his work in news, sports and photography, while simultaneously leading his team to numerous awards over the years, including the Sequoyah Award. He was inducted into the Woodward Hall of Fame in 2021. Ora Eddleman Reed: Having grown up in the newsroom, writing was natural for Reed, whose family bought the Muskogee Morning Times and the Twin Territories: The Indian Magazine in 1898. Reed also let her voice to fiction under the name Mignon Schreiber — 'little writer' — with themes, characters and tensions in the coming together of cultures. The Muskogee Daily Phoenix remembered Reed for recording Native American history at the turn of the 20th century, a time of great transition in Indian Territory. Louise Earthman Rucks: Nicknamed "Kue," Rucks was known for her weekly column 'Hound Hill' that was published in The Daily Oklahoman for 36 years. Rucks' was named National Dog Writer of the Year by the Dog Writers Association of America in the 1950s at the Waldorf Astoria the night before the Westminster Dog Show. She also wrote for ZOO Sounds, a publication of the Oklahoma City Zoo. Before her journalism career, she was a registered nurse, having received her degree from St. Thomas/Vanderbilt University Hospitals in Nashville. Ellie Sutter: Sutter dedicated her career to enthusiastic journalism through her time at the Billings Gazette and The Norman Transcript. In 1983, she joined The Oklahoman, where she stayed until retiring in 2004. She reported on many historically significant events, including the Oklahoma City bombing and tornado outbreaks. Sutter had the only reporting byline on the front page of The Oklahoman's extra edition on the Edmond post office massacre in 1986. Jack Stamper: Stamper assumed control of the Hugo Daily News with fellow OU Journalism School alumni, eventually buying them out and growing his stake in local journalism alongside his wife, Marie, with the acquisition of The Antlers American and the McCurtain Gazette. He also served in state government roles at both the Oklahoma Wildlife Commission and the Department of Charities and Corrections as it morphed into the Department of Corrections. Bill Teegins: Teegins was an award winning broadcast journalist who worked as the sports director for both KOTV 6 in Tulsa and KWTV 9 in OKC. He also lent his voice to radio for OSU football and basketball play-by-play from 1990-2001 until his untimely death in a plane crash returning from an OSU basketball game. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 2001. The Ogle Family: Jack Ogle and his sons, Kevin, Kent and Kelly Ogle are honored together as a family dedicated to broadcast journalism in the state of Oklahoma. Jack Ogle's career began in Norman radio in the 1950s and in 1963 he joined WKY-TV 4 as a reporter and anchor, while also providing color commentating for both The University of Oklahoma and Oklahoma State University. After retiring from day-to-day reporting in 1978, Ogle produced commentaries for WKY-TV 4, KOCO-TV 5 and KWTV-TV 9 until 1990. Kevin Ogle, the oldest son of Jack Ogle, began his career in news stations in Lawton and Fort Smith, Arkansas, before returning home to OKC where he has been the principal anchor at KFOR-TV 4 for 27 years. Kent Ogle began his career in radio and with time at OETA, before joining his older brother in 1994 at KFOR-TV 4, where he has anchored the morning news program for 30 years. Kelly Ogle, the youngest son of Jack Ogle, spent early career stints in radio and at OETA and KFOR-TV before heading to KWTV 9, where he was principal anchor from 1990 to 2022. He currently teaches broadcast journalism at OSU. This article originally appeared on Oklahoman: Who will enter the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame in 2025?
