After a career spent in television journalism, Michael Riecke, department chair and associate professor of broadcasting and digital media, started his journey at SUNY Oswego in 2011.

Riecke grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania called Great Bend, which is just south of Binghamton, New York. Growing up, both of his parents worked across the state line in Binghamton, as it was only a 15-minute drive from his town.

As Riecke grew up, he realized that sports might not have been his passion in life and he pivoted to the arts.

“I found as I moved through middle and high school, sports sort of fell away from me,” Riecke said. “I became really interested in music…I was in a lot of chorus groups and I was in band and marching band, I just found that the creative world was more of my space and where I found my people and my motivation.”

He came to the conclusion in high school that although he loved music, he did not want to be a teacher and believed the only two paths for a musician were either a teacher or a professional. Riecke did not believe that he was good enough to go professional despite competing at the high state level.

“I did all of that and was fairly successful and had options to sing for different programs at different colleges, which was great, but I decided to go a different route because the other thing I was really heavily involved with in high school was my student newspaper,” Riecke said.

In his junior and senior years of high school, Riecke was editor-in-chief of his school paper. It was there that he found his love of telling stories and writing. With his background in theater and newfound love of writing, broadcast journalism seemed like a natural fit.

“In high school, I realized early on that the broadcast journalism path was going to be my path,” Riecke said. “I was super interested and I had a great opportunity [at] the ABC affiliate in Scranton at the time, WNEP, did a Saturday morning show, [a] news show for kids. I auditioned and I hosted that for… two seasons of it at least.”

All of this experience gave Riecke the advantage he needed to get accepted into Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. With his previous high school experience in TV, Riecke started working in newsrooms part-time while attending SU.

“When I got to SU, I already had an idea of, at least operationally, what it meant to work in a newsroom and some of the basics of production,” Riecke said. “So it wasn’t long [until] I started working part-time as a working reporter for the ABC affiliate in Binghamton.”

By his senior year, Riecke was simultaneously a student and working 40-hour-plus workweeks as a reporter at NewsChannel Nine in Syracuse. He worked there for nine years and had some incredible opportunities while he was there.

“In 2004, [a] massive tsunami hit Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and Thailand; it just was devastating,” Riecke said. “Tens of thousands of people were killed, it was all people were talking about and it happened right before the holidays, but I got to spend a weekend, some days in Sri Lanka covering that story.”

Eventually, Riecke decided to get his master’s degree at Le Moyne College, which was close to him and gave him the ability to be a student, but still work full-time. It was there that he found his love of teaching. While completing his master’s, he started teaching at Onondaga Community College, sharing his expertise in broadcast journalism.

His biggest piece of advice for students is to make connections with faculty while they are here.

“Don’t go through this process of college without building connections with faculty,” Riecke said. “There are so many students who I see sometimes and they just kinda showed up at class and got their degree. I think most faculty want to help students. We wanna see you succeed. We wanna help you achieve your goals. Those of us who came from industry, we want you to access our networks and we wanna share that world with you.”

Riecke came to SUNY Oswego in 2011 and has been here ever since. He teaches various broadcasting courses such as BRC 229, BRC 329 and BRC 429, which are all multimedia news and sports classes.