Syracuse University Journalism Students Cover the 2026 Empire State Winter Games

Students from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School for Public Communications are covering the 2026 Empire State Winter Games through a hands-on program focused on professional sports journalism and visual storytelling.

More than a dozen journalism and photography students are producing photos, video, and audio throughout the Games and publishing their work to this website, which is built specifically to support live, deadline-driven coverage. The 46th Empire State Winter Games, based in Lake Placid and venues across the Adirondack region, bring together thousands of competitors in more than 30 winter sports, making it the largest multi-sport amateur winter athletic event in North America. The program is supported through the Newhouse Sports Media Center.

During the Games, graduate and undergraduate students photograph multiple competitions each day at venues including Whiteface Mountain, the Olympic Center, and the Mount Van Hoevenberg Olympic Complex.

According to project director Seth Gitner, associate professor of magazine, news, digital journalism, and visual communications at the Newhouse School, the intensity of covering a multi-day sporting event pushes students far beyond the pace of a typical weekly class assignment. Students are constantly adapting, learning new sports, working in changing conditions, and producing work under real deadlines.

Working alongside photo assignment editor and Professor of Practice Jon Glass, students edit, caption, and upload images daily, following the same workflow used in professional newsrooms.

Glass explains that the goal of the program is to replicate a working newsroom environment, where students operate as professional photojournalists and are responsible for delivering publishable work on deadline.

Throughout the 2026 Games, the team publishes hundreds of images to this site, making them available to media outlets across the Northeast for local and regional coverage. The collection also serves as a visual archive of the Games for athletes, families, and fans.