SUNY Oswego’s award-winning student media organizations The Oswegonian, WNYO 88.9 FM and WTOP-10 TV are adapting in response to the pandemic while still offering students hands-on experience.

Oswego’s student newspaper, The Oswegonian, will see circulation changes, as the number of published papers will downsize from its traditional 1,300 papers every week to 1,000 copies that will be spread throughout campus and the city. 

While The Oswegonian has always been a weekly newspaper, this semester they will print biweekly. 

“We will still be publishing a physical paper, but it will be every other Friday starting Sept. 11,” Editor-in-Chief Ben Grieco said.

Compared to its traditional 10 pages with the additional eight pages for Laker Review, they will have four pages of news, two for sports and the remaining for Laker Review.

Oswego’s student-run radio station WNYO will have to limit their number of shows due to space-use limitations and Marano Campus Center’s change in hours.

“We are doing a lot of pre-recorded shows, so on the weekend we’re filling our schedule with people who have done pre-recorded shows as well as more NPR-syndicated content, which is something we can normally hear in the mornings,” WNYO General Manager Jenn Robilotto said.

The current circumstances have also led the radio station to expect an uptick in podcasts as the safety guidelines set by New York state mandate that only two people can be in the studio at once.

Similar to WNYO, student-run television station WTOP-10 will not be able to hold in-studio productions; however, they have found that they can put on a live production from outside the studio by way of special software called OVS.

“Anchors can Zoom in and somebody who’s on the other side of the Zoom will record it through OVS and queue up videos as well,” WTOP-10 General Manager Matt Green said. “We’re finding that we should still be able to stream live on [campus access channel] 10.2 and our public access channel as well as WTOP-10’s website and social media,” Green said.

Green has also indicated that, should campus activities come to a halt, WTOP-10 is prepared in a way that would allow 90 percent of the tasks to be completed in a remote fashion.

Opportunities for experience

When it comes to having students get involved, whether on or off-campus, all of them arrive at similar conclusions.

“We love getting first-year students involved -- that way they have something to build on as they graduate,” The Oswegonian’s Grieco said. “Even if you’re not a journalism major, you can be a zoology major. I like to think every job or field eventually comes down to writing.”

“Whether you are on-campus and you’re afraid of getting COVID, which is a reasonable fear, or you’re off-campus and you obviously can’t be here, you can still do pre-recorded shows,” WNYO’s Robilotto said.

“Go for it, join WTOP, we’re looking at a very historic year,” WTOP-10’s Green said. “One thing I tried to tell my e-board throughout the summer is that nobody at WTOP has ever had to do what we’re about to do, and that should empower us to do it well because it really looks good on all of us, not just the organization and the people that come in and help us, but it looks good on all of us when we graduate and look for jobs to say ‘hey, we were able to keep our remote production going despite the fact that we couldn’t access our very own studio.’”

For more information, visit the organizations' websites:

-- Written by Tomas Rodriguez, Class of 2021