Teco Echo

Teco Echo editor and manager
Image Source: https://digital.lib.ecu.edu/15331.185

The first campus newspaper, the East Carolina Teachers College News, a modest administrative publication with little input from the student body, first circulated in late 1923. The ECTC News had readers on campus, but it was mostly a newsletter meant to keep alumni informed about the doings of other alumni, and developments at ECTC. However, things changed in late 1925 as that earlier publication was “merged” into a new one in which students had key journalistic roles in editing, reporting, and management. In its inaugural issue, the new paper, the Teco Echo, proudly declared itself “the first newspaper published by the students of East Carolina Teachers College.” Alluding to Harriot Beecher Stowe’s character “Topsy,” the Teco Echo explained that “The [East Carolina Teachers College N]ews was Topsy-like, it just grew – first a letter sheet, then a ‘clip-sheet,’ and finally, a miniature newspaper that filled its purpose and now passes out. Womanlike, now it is grown up, it is changing its name and starting life anew. All the old ‘News’ is merged in the Teco Echo.” Mixing its imagery, the paper saluted itself declaring, “The King is dead! Long live the King.” The Teco Echo remained in publication until the early 1950s when, in tandem with the school’s transition from a teachers college to a four-year liberal arts college, a new name was chosen, the East Carolinian. Though not without interruption, the student newspaper retains that name to the present.

The Teco Echo emerged as students, virtually all of them female, expressed their desire to have a student newspaper on campus. Word reached President Robert H. Wright who, after due consideration, announced in chapel that such a publication would be possible. “The whole student body became enthusiastic.” At a mass meeting shortly after, the students voted unanimously in support of the project. A staff was elected and work on the paper began. The first editor-in-chief was Deanie Boone Haskett and the business manager, Frances Smith. A contest was held to select a name for the paper and the winner was Teco Echo, submitted by Christine Vick, president of the SGA. “Teco” referred, in abbreviation, to the school’s role as a teachers college, and “Echo” to the paper’s mission in resounding the thoughts, interests, and activities of the campus. Reportedly, over 150 names had been submitted in the contest, the large number reflecting considerable student interest in the project. Over two-dozen student reporters joined the paper’s staff to assist in gathering news and authoring copy. Faculty advisors Mamie Jenkins and Martin Wright guided the students in their work.

In addition to black-and-white line illustrations of the students, faculty, administrators, and campus speakers and performers, the Teco Echo, like contemporary newspapers, came to include, by the 1930s, a significant sports section covering the earliest athletic programs, male and female, on campus. It was also on the pages of the Teco Echo that Pirate nation discourse first appeared. And it was the Teco Echo that first reported, in 1934, the Men’s Athletic Association decision to adopt “the Pirate” as the official identity for men’s teams.

The Teco Echo remained in print for nearly three decades. In 1951, ECTC was given a new name and mission, as a four-year liberal arts college, known as East Carolina College. For many, it seemed that the old name, Teco Echo, was too closely tied to the school’s early, more exclusive role as a teachers college. Nevertheless, the journalistic foundations laid by Teco Echo were everywhere evident in the high professionalism characterizing the new student publication. Also noteworthy is that the demise of the Teco Echo coincided with the increasing presence of men on campus. The Teco Echo had been dominated by female students at a time when the student body was overwhelmingly female. The newly named East Carolinian surfaced shortly after male students achieved gender equality on campus. In short order, the East Carolinian became a paper dominated journalistically by representatives of the male student body.

In the late 1960s, the East Carolinian underwent its own name change, to the Fountainhead, reflecting, for a while at least, East Carolina’s new mission as a university. The Fountainhead also alluded, more quaintly, to the central fountain on campus, in Wright Circle. But most of all, the new moniker echoed the liberated youth culture of the late 1960s as it was broadcast journalistically throughout the 1970s. Yet even the liberally-minded Fountainhead failed to adequately represent the increasingly desegregated student body, leading to the founding of a second student newspaper, Ebony Herald, in 1975, as the voice of African-American students and later, minority students in general. In 1979, as conservative trends swept much of the campus, the Fountainhead yielded to its previous incarnation and publication of the East Carolinian resumed. The new East Carolinian, more aware than ever that its mission was to represent all students, devoted increasing coverage to African-American and minority news, making Ebony Herald, as an alternative student newspaper, less relevant. By the mid-1980s, it had ceased publication, leaving the East Carolinian once again as the student newspaper. 

As the beginning point in the history of student journalism on campus, the Teco Echo remains one of the most significant campus publications of the last century. And as a detailed resource on virtually all campus events from the mid-1920s through the early-1950s, it is without compare.

Sources

Citation Information

Title: Teco Echo

Author: John A. Tucker, PhD

Date of Publication: 7/10/2019

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