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Syracuse University Journalism Students Cover 2022 Empire State Winter Games

Students from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School for Public Communications covered the 2022 Empire State Winter Games in a new program designed to help them gain real-world experience in sports journalism.

More than a dozen journalism and photography students captured photos, video and audio at the Feb. 3-6 Games and posted their work on this website specially designed by their advisor. The 42^nd Empire State Winter Games, sponsored by Community Bank N.A. and based in Lake Placid and throughout the Adirondack region, hosted about 2,000 competitors in more than 30 sports. It is the largest multi-sport amateur athletic winter sporting event in North America. The program is being funded through the Newhouse Sports Media Center.

At the Games, graduate and undergraduate students photographed multiple events each day at various venues including Whiteface Mountain, Olympic Center and Mount Van Hoevenberg Olympic Bobsled Run.

“Doing an assignment for a class once a week is different than doing it all day for four days,” said advisor Seth Gitner, a Newhouse School associate professor in magazine, news, digital journalism and visual communications.. “There were lots of opportunities for students to get outside their comfort zone to photograph lots and lots of different types of assignments.”

Working with fellow faculty advisor Jon Glass, students captioned and uploaded photos that were posted to this website on a daily basis.

“We wanted to create a newsroom environment where students were working as photojournalists to deliver their work on deadline,” said Glass, a professor of practice for magazine, news and digital journalism.

The team has posted more than 900 photos to this website that enabled media outlets from throughout the Northeast to download the images to use in their local coverage. Participants and their families also have access.

So far photos have been featured on Syracuse.com, Sentinel and Enterprise and Batavia News, plus aired on WAER (Syracuse’s NPR affiliate) and WSYR.

“This class is an opportunity for students to be published and also get assignments from real-world publications,” Gitner said. “We really want the student to be published in some form — like a website or newspaper.”

Gitner and Glass hope the program will continue at the Lake Placid 2023 FISU World University Games next January, where 1,600 college athletes representing 600 universities and 50 nations gather to compete in the Adirondacks.