Tom

Buffalo News Photo/Bill Wippert




This blog started, in part, with the passing of one of my former co-workers at the Buffalo News, Jay Bonfatti. Now another great guy -- and great journalist -- is gone.

Tom Borrelli died this morning. The News' story is at http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/499559.html. He had been in the news since his fall while covering a high school football game.

Most people outside of the paper might know him as the paper's lacrosse and fantasy sports reporter, but within the paper he was mostly an editor. In the sports department, that meant everything from doing rewrite (handling stories off the phone) to copy editing to assembling and laying out the entire section.

And there was nobody you'd rather be working with than the Ox (as he was tagged) when it came down to getting the job done. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports (amid a department filled with people fitting that description ... and whose league I was never in), he could whip together a college football roundup off the wire, assemble a scoreboard page, handle some spillover from the high school phone calls -- and keep track of his fantasy baseball team, "the Oxen Train" -- all at the same time.

On top of that, he was the top practical joker and password hacker on the floor. If you received a message from somebody you didn't know too well at the News inviting you for a "piping hot cup of java" or attempting to sell you chocolate toads for their child's junior possum scout troop, you knew where it was really coming from.

As with Jay, Tom's friends were his family. And once you were a friend, you stayed one. ... I guess I'm stunned today, in part, because Ox was such a big character (both physically and figuratively), that I expected him to bounce back, to be sending those kinds of messages from a hospital bed while he wrote fantasy sports columns on a laptop, making his way back to the newsroom.

In my 23 years at The News (including about 10 working a desk away from Tom), I learned that the public's vision of the paper is of the bylined reporters, but the heart of the organization was the inside people who were fixing the reporters' errors, deciding what gets covered and just pounding away to make sure the paper gets out every day.

That heart is crying today.

Fredonia election coverage/convergence style

It was a momentous election, and some monumental coverage by Fredonia students, IMHO.

Posted here are a few photos I took at WCVF while it was all going on. I meant to take photos at the Leader and WNYF, but forgot. The productions came off very well, I thought.

Election night was the TV station's first newscast of the year, so the atmosphere was a bit frenetic, but they pulled it off. ... At the radio station, it was cool to see the TV station's live-linked camera in the interview studio, while calls were coming in from Erie County, Jamestown, Manhattan and places beyond. Both stations had teams of people watching news feeds, analyzing when they could add states to each candidate's tally. The Leader -- in the midst of a redesign, BTW -- was supplying the photos as needed.

It was a great night, and a great first step for campus media.

Convergence in Action

I'm psyched for tomorrow night, and not just because the election results will finally be coming in (it's rather like the Super Bowl for newsies).
The campus radio station, TV station and newspaper at Fredonia will be working together on their campaign coverage and doing it in a pretty big way. So if you're in the Dunkirk-Fredonia area, check it out on cable or on WCVF-FM (88-9). And look for the Leader next week.
It's going to be a fun night, a little like walking the wire without a net. Stay tuned!
BTW, you can check out the site the three share at http://fredportal.com/.
It's just in its infancy stage, but I think it's going to be great down the line. And, yes, for transparency's sake, I'm involved with it, but the students are the real driving force behind it -- which is as it should be.