By JORDAN GREEN, Editor in Chief
“Winning the awards isn’t what you write a paper for, but it documents your achievements and tells you that you’re doing the right thing. It tells me that I accomplished what I set out to do – to produce an award-winning paper for my community.”
— Korina Dove
For two months in 2011, Korina Dove had been praying, crying and losing sleep.
She believed that God was calling her to go on a mission trip – a trip far away from her home in Cherokee.
One night in August of that year, she went to a church in nearby Kiowa, Kansas, to hear a sermon. Following the sermon, with tears streaming down her face, she spoke to the pastor.
“He prayed over me,” she said. “I’ve never had anybody pray over me like that before. And when he got finished with it, even he said to me, ‘You’re going to Thailand.’”
In that moment, Dove – a Northwestern Oklahoma State University graduate and local newspaper reporter – decided to leave behind a career telling the stories of people in northwest Oklahoma to tell the story of Jesus to people in a nation she couldn’t even find on a map.
“I can look back now, and I didn’t know really what Jesus meant back then,” she said. “But I know He was there.”
‘ALWAYS IN SEARCH OF THE TRUTH’
Dove’s friends and family describe her as a free-spirit. They adore her sense of humor, they say, and they know she has a flair for writing.
They also know her as a career journalist who searches for facts and separates them from fiction.
Just ask Steve Valencia, her former professor.
“I think Korina was a very driven student,” Valencia said. “You can see pretty quickly in students that are driven and those that really want to perfect their craft. She was one of those.”
In 1995, Dove was majoring in English education at Northwestern, and she had to take an elective course.
She signed up for a class about news reporting, which was part of the university’s mass communication program. Valencia, then a professor in the program, taught the class.
Dove said he had a significant impact on her life.
“I went to Steve Valencia’s news reporting class the first day, and I fell freaking in love,” she said. “I loved it, and I went and changed my major to mass communication within a day or two.”
From that moment on, Dove’s life would be devoted to media in one way or another.
Later in the semester, Valencia asked Dove to join the Northwestern News, the university’s independent student newspaper, as a reporter.
Dove became an editor during her junior year, and she had to put her newly acquired journalistic skills to the test when reporting on the Student Government Association.
Student reporters investigated claims that SGA members weren’t being transparent during their meetings, she said. Reporting on the issue wasn’t easy for the News team, but Dove and her reporters pushed for greater access to the organization’s records. Eventually, they got them.
The struggle helped define Dove’s legacy as a journalist, Valencia said.
“She had no fear, and the real good journalists don’t,” Valencia said. “She was one of those that was always in search of the truth.”
Valencia took another job before the start of the 1997 – 1998 school year. Dr. Becky Tallent, a longtime Oklahoma journalist, became the newspaper’s new adviser.
Whether formally or informally, she was also Dove’s adviser.
STRUGGLE WITH FAITH
College was a time of uncertainty for Dove. She stopped attending church regularly when she got to college. She said she never lost her Christian faith, though religion began to confuse her. She hadn’t always been a mass communication major, and she questioned whether she could be a reporter.
And if she chose to be a journalist, she faced yet another dilemma: Could she still be a Christian?
“There was that thing back in the late 1990s and early 2000s about, ‘Well, journalists are such horrible people that you can’t be a Christian and be a journalist at the same time,’” Tallent said. “She had that little bit of doubt because of that attitude that was going around.”
Tallent and Dove had several conversations about faith – interesting conversations, said Tallent, a member of a Methodist church.
“Finally, one day, she was just like, ‘I don’t know, Doc,’” Tallent said. “I was like, ‘Korina, where are you going to find me Sunday morning? Leland Clegg United Methodist Church. … Do you think I’m a heathen because I’m a journalist?’”
Tallent wasn’t the only person who spoke to Dove about her faith – in part because journalism wasn’t the only aspect of Dove’s life that made her question religion.
She took a mythology course at Northwestern that confused her, she said. In the class, students heard stories about other beliefs and gods that seemed similar to the ones she had grown up learning at church. She took the view that she would try to believe in not one, but all religions, she said.
For a year, she wondered: Which religion is right?
Then, on a sunny day, she sat down under a tree between the Jesse Dunn building and Vinson Hall.
“I was sitting under that one day, and really struggling,” she said. “I just heard God say to me, ‘Pick one. Just pick one.’ I just kind of looked up to the sky, and I was like, ‘Well, I’ve known you all of my life, and you’re what I know, so I pick you.’ And that was the end of my confusion.”
A JOURNEY IN JOURNALISM
In the summer of 1998, Dove began an internship with her hometown newspaper, The Cherokee Messenger and Republican. She worked for Steve Booher, an award-winning journalist who would become one of her lifelong mentors, she said.
“Everything Dr. Tallent taught me in college, Steve Booher was doing, and that’s why I loved it there,” she said.
Dove left the Cherokee paper in 1999 after she graduated from college. She worked at a few other newspapers in Oklahoma and Kansas before she became the managing editor of The Blackwell Journal-Tribune in Kay County in 2004.
There, she hired a new sports editor for the paper, Mark Evans.
Evans said Dove was a hard-working editor who had a good sense of humor. They used song titles as headlines whenever they could, he said. One time, Dove took several photos of an event hosted by the local school’s robotics team. She used the headline “Mr. Roboto.”
“It was a very fun time for me working with Korina,” Evans said. “She was easy to talk to and would always ask if you could do something instead of just telling you to do it. I feel like we put out a good product and enjoyed doing it.”
Though Dove enjoyed working with Evans and others at The Journal-Tribune, the fun would soon come to an end.
In 2006, a new publishing company bought the paper and laid off several beloved staff members, Dove said. She wasn’t laid off, but she said she needed to make a change.
That year, she started her own newspaper in nearby Grant County: The North Central Reporter.
Dove started the paper with a $5,000 loan she used to purchase equipment. She worked out of her home – and, for the most part, by herself.
Her goal was to become a legal newspaper in Grant County, allowing her to publish public notices from local government agencies.
The North Central Reporter became a legal newspaper after publishing for a year and a half, allowing her to publish notices – and to enter her work in awards contests promoted by the Society of Professional Journalists and the Oklahoma Press Association.
In her three years of contest entries, she won more than 30 awards.
“I’m very proud of that,” she said. “That was my paper that I started. Winning the awards isn’t what you write a paper for, but it documents your achievements and tells you that you’re doing the right thing. It tells me that I accomplished what I set out to do – to produce an award-winning paper for my community.”
She operated the newspaper until 2010. Eventually, the workload of being a one-woman muckraker became too much. She did some freelance work for Grant County, and in 2011, she returned home to work at the Cherokee newspaper, still edited by Booher. She wouldn’t stay.
‘JESUS AND MEDIA’
When Dove came home to Cherokee, she knew she wanted to go on a mission trip, she said. She had been on a mission trip in Arizona two years prior, and she wanted to go on another one.
This time, however, she wanted the trip to involve journalism.
She searched the internet for media-related mission trips. During one of her searches, she clicked on a website with links to hundreds of other sites about mission work.
She followed one of the links.
“I was reading it, and I didn’t see the name at first,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh my gosh! This is exactly what I’m looking for.’ And then I looked, and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s in Thailand.’ And I just closed it.”
For the next three weeks, she said, the website was all she could think about. She began to believe that God was calling her to go on a mission trip in Thailand to spread the gospel.
But she wasn’t sure.
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She went to see her pastor, assuming he would tell her that her idea wasn’t practical.
Instead, he said his brother had gone on a mission trip to China. The pastor supported Dove’s idea.
Dove prayed about the situation for several more weeks before she went to a church in Kiowa, Kansas, to watch a sermon being simulcast from another church.
At one point in the sermon, the speaker – evangelist Beth Moore – pointed out toward the audience and said the words, “Straighten up.”
Those words, Dove said, were a sign from God.
“Beth Moore pointed her finger right at me in that auditorium, and I lost it,” Dove said. “I just left that day, and I knew that was where I was going.”
TAKING THE LEAP
Going on a trip to Thailand would be expensive for Dove and her two young daughters: Justine, then 8 years old, and Jaynee, then 9. The total cost of the trip would be $14,000.
She raised the sum in a month and a half.
Dove and her daughters left on New Year’s Day in 2012. When they arrived in Thailand, Dove started mission training with the “Youth With a Mission” program, a Christian outreach group that operates schools in places around the globe, among other works.
During her six-month training, Dove learned how to use her skills in journalism to teach students about the Bible.
“It’s a full-time job,” she said. “It was hard. Very hard. But it was everything I wanted. It was just all day, every day, Jesus and media.”
Dove and her children moved to Cambodia for two and a half months after the first three months of her training session were over. She joined six other missionaries to teach English at a school with students ages 5 to 18.
Her team created a coloring book for the students, telling stories of the Bible. Luckily, Dove said, her time designing newspapers came in handy.
“I was the only one who knew how to use InDesign, so I got to do all of the layout and design stuff,” she said. “It was my honor to do that. We told the story – it was a simple Bible story – and we had to translate it into Khmer [pronounced ka-MAI] when we got to Cambodia. We would teach English words out of it.”
Dove’s newspaper experience and command of the English language were useful teaching tools.
Still, she had trouble transitioning from the newsroom to the classroom, her daughter, Jaynee Inman, said.
“With mission work, a lot of it is very spontaneous, just like moving to Thailand was,” Inman said. “A lot of it is just waiting on God, and I think that was hard for her. She didn’t have a clear path of what was happening. When she was a reporter, she did. She knew what she wanted, and she did it. When she came into the mission field, it was really difficult because she didn’t get to see that straight path.”
Dove still doesn’t always see a clear “end goal” in mission work. She’s learned to accept it.
“That’s the downside of missions is you don’t know how you affect people,” she said. “I think that’s the beauty of it, too. Sometimes, you don’t need to know.”
STILL WRITING – AND STILL BELIEVING
Since moving to Thailand in 2012, Dove has served both as a missionary and an educator. She also married Russ Pattinson, an English teacher from England.
After her mission trip ended, she got a job with the Royal Thai Navy as an English teacher. Now, she writes travel guides for Agoda.com, Southeast Asia’s largest online travel agency.
It’s not newspaper reporting, and it’s not mission work, she said. But she still gets to do what she loves – write.
“There’s never been a day that I haven’t wanted to go to work,” she said. “It’s that fun of a job. I have awesome teammates, and I love what I do.”
At one point in her life, Dove questioned whether she could be a journalist and a Christian. Now, she said, she lives a life devoted to telling the gospel of Jesus through media.
In her eyes, she knows the truth.
“Through all of those things, the hard times, I just always had kind of this sense that I was doing the right thing,” she said. “Everything happens for a reason, and God always makes something good out of that. I never lost that truth.”