New advisor to lead student media

By Spencer O’Daniel @SpencerODaniel2

Howdy, Texas A&M students and Aggie community!

Spencer O’Daniel here from the basement in the Memorial Student Center. It is my honor and privilege to introduce myself as the new student media adviser for The Battalion, Aggieland Yearbook and Maroon Life magazine through our student media program.

My journalism experience began in high school in a small classroom in Belle Plaine, Kansas, where I helped with a pregame, ingame commentary and post-game analysis for our high school basketball team. I got the opportunity to announce and commentate, combining my love for media with basketball, sports analysis, interviewing and working with athletes and coaches throughout the season. I caught the “bug” for journalism because I had an amazing high school adviser, Sherra Taylor, who pushed me in the classroom, behind the microphone and even in Honors English my senior year. I knew that I wanted to work with people, be around sports and learn more about journalism at the collegiate level.

My junior year in college, I decided to become a secondary education journalism teacher. At first, Wichita State University, my alma mater, was even unsure of how to put a course schedule together for someone wanting to teach journalism at the high school level. For many high schools, student media classes are often taught by English-focused teachers, art and design teachers, or even added to the plate of teachers needing a filler class. For me, I knew I wanted to advise student media of all types and show students how to tell meaningful stories for their community, work with sources in a caring manner, create eye-popping visuals and designs. In addition, showing them how high school journalism can build their resume, soft skills, experiences and people skills in ways that could benefit them beyond a high school journalism classroom. For the past 11 years, I have gotten the opportunity to advise at three different institutions at both the high school and college level. From building award-winning programs from scratch in highly impoverished areas to con- tinuing excellence in our publications at Kansas State University, all my experiences as an educator, journalist, creator and First Amendment advocate have prepared me to lead this student media program at the largest Division I school in the country. Our campus in College Station is incredibly fortunate to have a nationally award-winning student media program with rich tradition, core journalistic values that have stayed intact through several decades and hundreds of former student journalists and alumni who are highly engaged, connected, and supportive of the meaningful stories our journalists tell on a daily basis.

While coverage of Texas A&M — and notably our journalism program — has dominated the headlines at the state and national level recently, I have been incredibly impressed at what our student journalists have achieved without a journalism major, official journalism building and a leader for our academic program to build a 21st century, multimedia journalism program for our campus community. If you stepped into our newsroom on a deadline night or were a fly in our Slack channel during a breaking news conversation, you would have no idea at the lack of resources, professional services and academic opportunities unavailable at this time to the students who care about creating strong publications, meaningful stories and keeping our readers in touch with what’s happening throughout the A&M campus. They are tenacious, dedicated and simply make no excuses. They genuinely care about their key role of curating impactful content that our students and community need to know about.

Students — if you are looking for a meaningful way to contribute to the Texas A&M community and an experience to build your resume, learn professional skills that transfer to any major or field and want to feel a part of a community that really embraces how important their role is, stop by our newsroom in L400 in Memorial Student Union and drop by my office. I would love the chance to meet new students from different majors and interests around campus and have a conversation (and even coffee if you are up for it!) on how you could contribute to our student media department with your unique set of skills, personality and experiences you bring to the table.

Journalism is never dying; just evolving in a multimedia fashion that at times is hard to put your finger on. I embrace my new role of building future leaders of newsrooms, helping students discover new skills that can translate to their professional lives and building new relationships around our College Station campus with student media supporters, alumni, staff, faculty, administration and those who believe in the power of the First Amendment and the critical role of a thriving student media program on a college campus.