In anticipation of a total solar eclipse on April 8, the School of Communication, Media, and the Arts at SUNY Oswego has introduced a course dedicated to the media coverage of the large-scale event. CMA 490, also titled “Covering the Eclipse,” will focus on not just the direct observation of the eclipse in Oswego, but also how students can prepare themselves for similar occurrences in their future careers. 

 Spearheaded by Catherine Loper and Michael Riecke, professors of mass media at the university, students with diverse academic backgrounds will apply their learned skills in the event’s coverage. Both professors are confident that the enrolled students are beyond capable in their abilities. 

“We were pleasantly surprised; we have 24 students in the course,” Riecke said. “We were looking for an interesting cross-section of students with different strengths, experiences, interests, to make sure we could fill every role that we would need to make this happen. We’re really excited about the group that we put together.”

Though still following a semi-traditional classroom model, Riecke stressed the course’s hands-on aspect of media coverage and how it will prepare its students in the long run.  

“The thought with creating this course for this particular opportunity was to really give students this really specialized look at producing content for a one-time event,” Riecke said. “It’s something, professionally, students who go into TV news or TV sports are going to be doing on a fairly regular basis, and it gives us the chance to use this opportunity, something that is happening right in our backyard here on campus, to capitalize on that and use it as a learning opportunity.” 

“We’ve had this idea for a long time,” Riecke said. “It is one of the things that we think is the hallmark of our program, which is giving students these sorts of real-world opportunities to experience news gathering and production in a way that mimics what students would experience professionally.”

Though the eclipse sets a precedent for mass media faculty and students, SUNY Oswego has seen past coverage of significant domestic events. The university brought a group of students to cover the 2020 New Hampshire primary in light of that year’s presidential election. 

“We sort of saw [the primary] as a one-time opportunity to cover an event that all eyes were on in the U.S.,” Riecke said. “Then the pandemic happened, so we didn’t do anything in between, and as we were approaching this primary season. We thought to ourselves, ‘Let’s try to do that trip again,’ and recharge this idea of creating these coverage opportunities, these special programs, these special courses for students.”

“The problem was [with] the whole debate over the New Hampshire primary and selecting the date,” Riecke said. “But the New Hampshire primary was just this past week; it would’ve been the first week of classes. The date was different from when it was four years ago. It just wasn’t going to be feasible.”

In place of this year’s missed opportunity to cover the primary, Loper and Riecke implemented the “Covering the Eclipse” course to give senior students one last chance to practice their coverage abilities. 

“We still wanted to do something,” Riecke said. “We knew the eclipse was happening, we knew it was just at the right part of the semester. It wasn’t too early, it wasn’t too late; it was perfect timing to wrap a course around [the eclipse] and still give students the opportunity to produce this special program.”

With an adaption to ongoing events, Riecke said that he and other university faculty are excited to cover more than just political events. While the 2024 presidential election is being considered for the focus of a future CMA 490 course, any other notable event is subject to coverage by students. 

“Our thought is that we now have this course called ‘Covering the Eclipse,’ and we hope to continue it with future courses that start with ‘Covering the’ fill in the blank,” Riecke said. 

With an ever-growing tree of media, fields of study such as environmentalism, natural sciences and the arts have an exponential chance of becoming intertwined with journalism and other media outlets. Given the opportunity, Riecke would be more than happy to collaborate with professors within the STEM field to gain a more profound insight into respective events.

“We will mix it up, and there may be times where there is something where there could be a crossover into a different department entirely,” Riecke said. “We could be doing something on pollutants in Lake Ontario one time, and maybe that would involve a class in the sciences that would join us or a professor who may be researching that or studying that who could offer some sort of expertise or sidebar to the course.”

As CMA 490 advances into early April, Riecke emphasized the importance of mixed student demographics in the media. Though future editions of this course will be predominately sought by journalism majors, the expansion to other fields of study encourages a combination of academic backgrounds. 

“I’m always happy to welcome students from other majors into [these types of] courses; It could go into biochem,” Riecke said. “We’re also aware that there are students in other programs who may have an interest in media, or just want to learn how it works.”

According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the first instance of the eclipse’s totality will occur at Mexico’s Pacific coast at around 11:07 a.m. PDT on April 8. Buffalo, NY, will experience eclipse totality at 3:20 p.m., and totality will occur approximately two or three minutes later in Oswego. Classes are canceled on April 8 due to the eclipse.