Mark Thalman (’89) covered his 10th consecutive inauguration in Washington D.C. this month. As an accomplished freelance director of photography, Thalman has done amazing work with politics in Washington D.C., and he said a majority of his success comes from his time in BG News.
“I consider my time at BGSU to have been a vital part of my personal and professional development and I’m very thankful to have had access to such wonderful fellow students, professors and administrators,” he said. “My four years there were fundamental in everything I’ve done since.”
As Thalman looked back on his time working for BG News, he shared fond memories and described his experience at BGSU as “instrumental” to everything he’s done since.
While Thalman has always been passionate about covering news and politics, everything started to come together his senior year with the BG News. The 1988 Bush vs. Dukakis presidential election took place that year. With this, Thalman and several other BG News reporters and photographers traveled around Northwest Ohio to various campaign stops.
“The biggest event of that year for me was when President Ronald Regan came to campaign for George H. W. Bush, and he spoke on the steps of the Wood County courthouse,” Thalman said.
He added getting the opportunity to be in the press pool to hear Ronald Reagan’s campaign for George H. W. Bush “really kind of stoked my interest in politics, seeing that experience up close of being in the press pool. It was thrilling.”
He and a few other students also had the opportunity to travel to Washington D.C. to cover the George H. W. Bush inauguration.
“We literally loaded into one of their cars and drove from Ohio. We stayed in a motel in a very sketchy part of D.C. because it was the only thing we could afford,” he said. “And we had no credentials. We had no access at all, but security back then was nothing like it is today, and I was able to get within probably 100 yards of Bush giving the inaugural speech without even a credential.”
At this inauguration, Thalman and his fellow BG News members covered protestors and the parade.
After college, Thalman moved to Washington D.C. and hasn’t left since. There, he has covered an impressive list of political and social events including 10 presidential inaugurations, AIDS protests, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage and gun rights and many more.
During this recent inauguration of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, Thalman worked the cameras for Telemundo, a Spanish television network. He and his team spent five days ahead of the inauguration constructing and hauling equipment including cameras, anchor desks and lighting up to the top of a building.
Although this year’s ceremony was moved indoors due to the freezing weather, that didn’t stop Thalman and his team from producing Telemundo in its usual spot outside on top of that building. With the temperature reaching as low as 12 degrees, Thalman and his team had to be well-prepared and bundled up for their 20-hour shift, which ran until around 1 a.m. the morning after. But luckily for Thalman, facing the cold weather isn’t anything new. Inaugurations are notoriously cold as they run in January – the coldest month of the year in Washington D.C. He said he and his team had to essentially dress “for the Arctic and be prepared to grind it out for 20 hours.”
Although Thalman has quite a list of accomplishments through both his time at BGSU and in his professional career, he said he hopes to delve deeper into education. With two daughters currently in college, he has had a greater focus on the value of higher education. Thalman had the opportunity to work side-by-side with his daughter, Cailey, a Broadcast Journalism major at Penn State along with some other interns with a minor league baseball team.
“I really love now that I’ve got all this experience, having a chance to kind of share it with my own kid and the other interns working for that baseball team,” he said.
As a news editorial student at BG, Thalman said he could have never imagined himself doing photography and working in television as a career until his senior year when he decided to take a TV production class and that changed everything. He describes this singular course as changing the “entire trajectory of his life.” He encourages BG students, specifically aspiring photographers, and journalists, to “just try as many things as you can and get out into the real world as much as you can because you never know what you’re going to try that might change your path.”
