Joe Paciorkowski
By Heather Monahan
Assistant Features Editor
It’s hard to miss the sports truck sitting outside the Reilly Center. Along with the Bob Koop Broadcast Journalism lab, the truck gives students in the Russell J. Jandoli School of Journalism and Mass Communication a unique real-world experience. Joe Paciorkowski is the one who keeps both amenities running smoothly.
Paciorkowski, known by students as Joe Patch, operates and takes care of the production truck, as well as the Koop Lab. The truck allows members of SBU-TV Sports to produce telecasts of Bonaventure sporting events and even got SBU-TV nominated for a College Video Summit Award in 2011, the truck’s second year at Bonaventure. The Koop Lab is home to SBU-TV and makes weekly newscasts possible.
“I take care of the truck and keep it running,” Paciorkowski said. “A part of that is being able to train a whole bunch of students on how to operate it. That’s one half of the things I do here. The other half is to keep the Koop Lab alive and well and to help out over there with keeping that equipment up and running.”
Paciorkowski, an Olean native, graduated from Olean High School in 1972. He then attended Alfred State for a few months, but didn’t earn a degree from the school.
“You can’t get a degree for what I do,” he said. “This is my passion, this is what I do. There, still to this day, isn’t a school for what I do, and I have 35 years of doing this now.”
After spending eight or nine years working for the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES) in television, he left to go after his dream of working in what Paciorkowski described as big time television.
Paciorkowski moved to South Dakota for a short time before relocating to New Hampshire as Vice President of an ABC affiliated television station in the competitive Boston television market.
Within the market, Paciorkowski’s New Hampshire station didn’t have the amount of people or the funds the Boston stations had. However, the station came up with a solution, Paciorkowski said.
“What you have to do is get a lot of kids out of college and turn them into professionals,” Paciorkowski said. “So that’s what we tried to do, and we wound up doing that to the point where we were getting better ratings in New Hampshire than the NBC station in Boston.”
Eventually, Paciorkowski’s station became so successful the Boston ABC affiliate purchased it from him, prompting him and his wife to return to Olean.
About three and a half years ago, Paciorkowski immediately took interest when he heard Bonaventure received a new production truck.
At the time, his brother was a business student at Bonaventure, and he contacted deans at Bonaventure. Paciorkowski was eventually contacted about a job.
Paciorkowski said his favorite part of what he does here is similar to his favorite part of his job in New Hampshire.
“What I like doing and what’s good about it is bringing a bunch of people up to be able to compete with other people who do jobs as professionals,” he said. “That’s the best part of doing it. It’s what I’ve done for a long time.”
However, Paciorkowski said he gets to reach out to students on a different level at Bonaventure.
“Instead of hiring kids who are straight out of school, I have the kids in school and I’m capable of bringing them up to that level,” he said. “And if I get them to that level before they leave, it’s good for everybody.”
