Ted Streuli, executive director of Oklahoma Watch, has more than 30 years of journalism experience and has served as president of the Oklahoma Press Association and Freedom of Information Oklahoma. In the 1980s, he and a group of students at Santa Rosa Junior College in California formed an independent student newspaper — a decision he said led to his being effectively pushed out of the college’s journalism program.
Streuli said he and other student journalists felt the school’s official paper, The Oak Leaf, was not adequately covering the Student Activities Department.
“That department handled everything — all club activities went through there,” he continued. “They oversaw student government, offered services like health checks and voter registration drives and provided referrals for on- and off-campus services.”
They tried to talk things out with the paper’s adviser, but those talks proved “unfruitful.”
“We were two students who had already completed the school’s journalism program and worked on that paper, so we decided the remedy was to launch our own,” said Streuli.
Streuli and the other students decided to call their newspaper The Other.
“We thought it was all kinds of clever in about 1980,” he joked.
The Other received funding from SJRC’s Student Activities Association and backing from the department’s dean.
“We could kind of do whatever we wanted. If we wanted to distribute newspapers around campus, we could,” Streuli recalled.
He said while other journalism students were aware of the behind-the-scenes circumstances, most of the student body was not.
“It was just another publication on campus available for them to read,” he said. “My memory is that it was well received and well read.”
Streuli said his involvement with The Other ultimately led him to leave the journalism program at SRJC altogether after he requested to test out of a professor’s class by taking its final exam.
“I told her my name, and there was a long silence,” then she said: “You could take the test, but I would require an A on that exam to receive credit for the class. In your case, it would be very difficult for you to get an A, and the fee is nonrefundable.”
Streuli became an English major instead, which he said delayed the start of his journalism career.
“In the bigger picture, I think it helped because I was able to focus almost exclusively on writing,” said Streuli. “When I got into the business full time about eight years later, I worked at small papers with editors who saw potential and were willing to teach me what I didn’t know.”
Streuli said starting something new as a young journalist was a formative experience.
“In my career, I’ve worked at small and midsize papers, owned a weekly paper and worked as an editor and publisher, so I’ve done many things that required an entrepreneurial skill set, and that isn’t something that’s really taught in journalism programs,” Streuli said.
