WCNY teamed with the Onondaga-Cortland-Madison BOCES and Onondaga Community College to create a Media Marketing Communications course that combines high school and college coursework with hands-on learning from WCNY staff. This innovative program provides a career-boosting head start in media. Students graduate, not only will with a New York State High School Regents Diploma, but also with 18 college credits and industry certifications as well. Two cohorts of students arrive at WCNY for morning or afternoon sessions. They have a teacher supplied by BOCES, who oversees instruction and activities three days a week, with two days per week of college instruction by OCC professors who come to WCNY to teach.
In the first weeks of the program, they gather classroom-style for intensive courses in English, science, electronic media writing, and public speaking as well as the design principles, communications and software use. Students become embedded with WCNY staff to work on projects across TV, radio, social media, web and print platforms, learning first-hand the ins and outs of Central New York’s public broadcaster. Our staff will not only expand students’ technical knowledge, but also show them what it’s really like to work behind a camera, in front of a microphone, or at an editing station. Education has always been central to WCNY’s mission and it’s inherent in many of our programs, both on-air and in the community.
We made the decision to offer this program because we knew we could do this and still conduct business, maybe not “as usual,” maybe even better. As a company, we’ve made tremendous innovations over the past few years so we already had the right cultural mindset, trying new approaches, using strategic partnerships to turn around the status quo. WCNY believes this is a mission-focused program that benefits the community and its future leaders in addition to the students and WCNY.