Bad news, Sagamorons. Ruth Holladay’s blog reports the esteemed and award-winning Sagamore, the campus paper for IUPUI, shut down in August. Students are shuttled into iupuistudentmedia.com, where the lead story yesterday was about the Indianapolis Colts beating the Baltimore Ravens…and the relevance to IUPUI is??
tom mcCain was an editorial cartoonist at the IUPUI Sagamore. You can find more of his work at http://www.crittur.com
As a former editor (B.S. IUPUI, 1978), when it was the student newspaper of the year, this seems a great loss. Without any of the resources of the Bloomington campus’ IDS or Purdue’s Exponent, we took on the big ones and won and kept students, faculty and staff informed about Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis news as well as what was happening in the community at large. And we did it two times a week!
I and many others would have no career in journalism, public relations, publishing or marketing without IUPUI, which catered to non-traditional students, who worked full- or part time and frequently had families. The Sagamore formed life-long friendships in the same way that fraternities, sororities, school clubs and other student activities did. I get as emotional when thinking about walking the asphalt campus as those who trekked Dunn Meadow in Bloomington.
Oh, yeah. The excuse about competing with the Indianapolis Star for advertising? The Sagamore always competed with the Star for advertising.
Sad day, indeed. Happy 40th anniversary, IUPUI.
I am extremely sad to see the Sagamore end. As Jo Ellen put it, The Sagamore was a family for those of us who worked there as students. For many of us, The Sagamore provided us the important opportunity of testing our journalistic mettle, helping us decide if we’d pursue journalism as a career. I am happy to say that I’ve spent 10 of my 25 professional years working for newspapers, online and print. I am proud to say that the Sagamore had everything to do with that. I’ve never regretted a single minute or second-guessed my decision to be involved in this field. Cheers to everyone who ever worked at the Sagamore, and cheers to the Sagamore itself. You will be missed.
I realize this comment is late in view of the 2009 closing of IUPUI Sagamore, for which I held my first job as a reporter under the directorship of Jo Ellen Myers Sharp and the FANTASTIC staff that followed her reign–guess I was just too choked up to comment before now. The year before the paper closed I lost my Mom and was working on two books at that time. I was in limbo for a year and didn’t get much writing done let alone finish the books I was working on. Yeah, I know, life goes on…but somethings never die. The Sagamore is one of those things that lives on in all of us that had the honor to be a part of her each time we pick up that pen and use it for truth and justice, a glimmer of Excalibur is shown.–Gale P. Jontz (alias Blane Schreiber)