Whether she’s exploring the life and legacy of a feminist sex educator (The Disappearance of Shere Hite) or the right-to-die legal battles surrounding Terri Schiavo (Between Life & Death), a common thread binds together many of the films she’s produced.

“They each unmask underlying power structures in society through deeply personal narratives, and question how we can do better to create a more equal and more just world,” said Ferdinando, a 2004 Fordham graduate and the executive producer of NBC News Studios.

She began working on her latest film—The Sing Sing Chronicles—in 2016. That’s when she visited Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez at the maximum-security Sing Sing Correctional Facility, about 30 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, where he’d been serving 25 years to life for a murder he didn’t commit.

“He was a father desperate to get home to his children, and even though there were many glaring issues in his case, he’d exhausted all of his appeals,” Ferdinando said. “I connected with JJ immediately, and it was clear there was an important story to tell.”

Eight years and more than 1,000 hours of archival footage later, The Sing Sing Chronicles— a four-part docuseries—is bringing that story to light. The series premiered at the DOC NYC film festival on November 16, and it aired on MSNBC the following weekend. (It’s available for streaming on the DOC NYC website until December 1).

The Sing Sing Chronicles highlights the bond NBC News crime reporter Dan Slepian formed with Velazquez over two decades—an unlikely connection that led to the exoneration of six men who were wrongfully convicted, including Velazquez, who was granted clemency in 2021 and finally exonerated on September 30 of this year. The docuseries is built on more than 20 years of investigative reporting by Slepian, who also recently authored a book recounting the experience.

As showrunner and executive producer of the series, Ferdinando said she’s extremely proud to be a part of a project detailing the complications of the criminal legal system and how a wrongful conviction can impact generations.

Launching a Media Career at WFUV

The award-winning journalist and filmmaker credits her success to the principles of journalism she learned as an undergraduate at Fordham, where she double majored in communication and media studies and Spanish language and literature. While completing her studies, she worked as an anchor, producer, reporter, and eventually news manager at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station.

“That radio station changed my life,” said the Staten Island native who chose Fordham after becoming familiar with the Lincoln Center campus while attending Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.

She did her first news broadcasts on WFUV shows Mixed Bag with 1967 Fordham grad Pete Fornatale and Vin Scelsa’s Idiot’s Delight, where she continued working five years after graduating.

With 20 years under her belt at NBC, Ferdinando recently returned to the University for “Fordham to the Frontlines: Alumni Journeys in News & Media.” The event, sponsored by the Career Center, featured several other successful grads and brought them together with students—an experience she described as “really heartening.”

“Career paths are unpredictable,” Ferdinando said. “If you don’t put yourself out there and say what you want to be doing, it’s hard to bring that to fruition. We really encouraged them to hone in on what they want to be doing and go after it.”

—Erica Scalise, FCRH ’20

That was the call made by Ryan Ruocco as a thrilling, historic WNBA season ended on Sunday night, when the Liberty toppled the Minnesota Lynx in Game 5 of the Finals at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center—the first title for one of the league’s original franchises.

Ruocco, a 2008 Fordham graduate, is a lead play-by-play announcer for WNBA, NBA, and women’s college basketball games on ESPN, and he and color commentator Rebecca Lobo have called all the WNBA Finals games for the network since 2013.

“This was our 12th Finals together,” Ruocco said, “and to get a chance to be the soundtrack of this moment in women’s basketball, it feels like a dream come true.”

The moment he references is one of great growth for the league, with the past season seeing increases in TV ratings and game attendance thanks to veteran stars like Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson and rookie phenoms like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. To cap it off, fans were treated to a dramatic Finals series that included an overtime final game and a stunning game-winner from Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu in Game 3—a contest that had Ruocco “practically losing his voice thanks to all the huge shots” but earning praise from fans and critics.

“I was so elated and stunned that this game has given us even more excitement, even more drama,” Ruocco said about calling Ionescu’s game-winner. “Because it felt like the Finals just kept outdoing itself.”

A Legacy of Sports Broadcasting Excellence

Ruocco got his start in broadcasting at WFUV—part of a long list of Fordham alumni who learned the ropes at the University’s public media station and have gone on to great success in the business, from Vin Scully to Mike Breen.

In 2019, Ruocco told Fordham Magazine that working under the mentorship of former WFUV executive sports producer Bob Ahrens made his career possible.

“It’s this simple,” Ruocco said. “If I did not go to Fordham and work at WFUV, I would not be here doing what I’m doing today. Period.”

Looking ahead, he sees only continued growth for the WNBA. And he put in a huge endorsement for checking out a New York Liberty game in person.

“I think the atmosphere at Barclays Center for Liberty games is as good as or better than any atmosphere for basketball in the country,” he said. “There’s a sense of community and jubilation and fun, in addition to the passion. It feels like a party where everybody’s invited and everybody’s welcome.”

As the Mets take on the Los Angeles Dodgers and look to move ahead to the World Series, Majkowski, who launched his sports broadcasting career at Fordham’s public media station, WFUV, looks back at five of his most memorable moments working in the booth.

5. The 2015 NLCS Sweep of the Chicago Cubs | October 2015

When did Citi Field become home? Maybe the loudest I’ve heard it before these last couple games [against the Philadelphia Phillies in this year’s National League Division Series] was when they played the Cubs in that 2015 NLCS. And then we went to Chicago and they clinched there.

4. Regular-Season Series vs. the Washington Nationals | July 31 – August 2, 2015

It was right after the [Yoenis] Céspedes trade. The Nationals came in and the Mets beat them at Citi Field—the Sunday night game, they hit three home runs in five pitches.

And then we went back down to Washington [in September]. Maybe the Nationals had a chance to make a last stand. They had a lead, I think, every game. And the Mets came back on, putting the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for Washington.

3. Game 5 of the 2000 World Series vs. the New York Yankees | October 26, 2000

Even though the Mets lost, Game 5 of the 2000 World Series against the Yankees [is very memorable]. I had Mike Francesa sitting next to me in the booth, and when the ball first came off of Piazza’s bat against Mariano [Rivera in the ninth inning], you thought, “Oh, maybe it’s going to go,” and even Mike—he probably wouldn’t admit it, but he even had a little start.

From a producing standpoint, we had to do a postgame show. And because it was on FAN, they wanted us to incorporate both sides of the story, with Suzyn Waldman down on the Yankee side and Eddie Coleman in the Mets’ clubhouse, which was obviously, after losing the World Series, not an easy task.

That’s something I’ve always been proud of, because we balanced both sides of that story very well, I believe.

2. First Game at Shea Stadium After 9/11 | September 21, 2001

After 9/11, we were in Pittsburgh, and we ended up busing back to New York, and we came over the George Washington Bridge and you could just see [the World Trade Center site] in the distance. Coming back to Shea for that first game back … that was something.

1. Robin Ventura’s “Grand Slam Single,” Game 5 of the NLCS | October 17, 1999

I’ve always had my greatest affinity for that team, that 1999 and 2000 bunch—Robin and Johnny Franco and Al Leiter and all the guys there. I got to know them a bit more than some of the other teams along the way. Just so many players on those teams have always been my favorites.

RELATED STORY: Meet the New York Mets Radio Engineer Who Hasn’t Missed a Game in 30+ Years

Chris Majkowski engineers and produces the Mets’ radio broadcasts on WFAN. It’s a job he landed in 1993, four years after graduating from Fordham, where he was sports director at WFUV. And he hasn’t missed a day of work for the Mets since his sister’s wedding the year he started.

What does your average Mets game day look like?
If it’s a night game, I’ll get to the ballpark around 3 p.m., about four hours before first pitch, and just set up the booth—do all the cabling, check all the connections, check the studio.

And then it’s, “Okay, what are we doing on the pregame show today?” Then we have other segments during the game: “This Date in Mets’ History” and the “Electrifying Play of the Game.” The sound needs to be edited for that and I will do research for “This Date.”

Then the broadcasters and I go through the news and the notes from the day, not just for our game but for the rest of the league. We make sure we go through the commercial log. And then I’ll get something to eat and it’s “play ball.”

And then what are you doing during the game?
If something comes up during the game, like [play-by-play announcer] Howie Rose, says, “Hey, I remember back in … ” or whatever, I’ll look into that. And the whole time, I’m also mixing the show. If something’s happening and the announcers are yelling and the crowd is loud, you have to balance that.

I also do the posts for the Mets Radio Booth X account to keep the masses informed and say, “Hey, something’s happening. Maybe you want to tune in.” Don’t ever say that there’s a no-hitter going, though, because then the fans tell you that you jinxed it all if it doesn’t happen.

Next year, you’ll potentially work your 5,000th consecutive game. Do you get sick of hearing or thinking about that streak?
So, the funny thing is, I recently worked an event for Bloomberg Radio, and Cal Ripken Jr., who of course has the streak of 2,632 straight games that he played, was there as a guest. I’m not one to ever ask for a picture or anything, [but] I wish I had because I think that that would’ve been pretty neat.

Back in August, I worked my 5,000th game overall. The 5,000th straight game will happen sometime next year. Well, 5,000 is a nice round number, so maybe I’ll take the next day off.

Do you have any favorite road cities or ballparks?
San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego for the city. Boston as well. That’s not an every-year stop, but Fenway is great, and Boston as a city is great. We had a couple games against the Phillies in London back in June, and we went to Tokyo in 2000.

Maybe I’ll start cutting back so I can go back for a trip to London or maybe a trip to Tokyo where I don’t have any responsibilities and can just be a tourist.

Was there a moment you realized this year’s team might have something special?
Maybe you look back and you say, “That was the moment,” but that’s only looking back. Earlier in the season, we were thinking, “Oh, this is one of those years,” and it’s all down and out. And then suddenly, we’re flying to California for a League Championship Series and hopefully beyond. So yeah, it has been remarkable.

We’ve had a couple of years—2015, now this year—where you have the moments when the stadium becomes more of a home. This is our place now. It’s not just another ballpark, not just another booth, but this is home.

RELATED STORY: New York Mets Radio Engineer Shares 5 Most Memorable Moments

How did you decide to go to Fordham and get involved with WFUV?
At Herricks High School [on Long Island], there was an English teacher who was a Fordham alum, and he always tried to steer one or two of us a year to Fordham. Around that same time I had started listening to One on One, FUV’s sports call-in show on the weekend. So, through Mr. Desmond at Herricks High School, and then listening to FUV, I was introduced to Fordham, and I applied and got in.

When I got to Fordham, I thought I would go more toward writing and just never made it to the newspaper. A bunch of friends and I were all commuter students and instead of hanging out in the commuter lounge, we hung out in the hallway at FUV.

I started doing some stuff on air. By the time senior year rolled around, I was the sports director. We were doing the play-by-play for football and basketball and even some baseball. There’s a group of us from the radio station who still are close, and we get the whole gang together when we can.

And you still do public address work at Fordham too?
Yep. I was still in school, and I started doing the public address for some of the women’s basketball games. I’ve continued to do that to this day. Joe DiBari and the folks over in the athletic department are very accommodating. They’ll say, “Hey man, whenever your schedule allows, we’d love to have you up to still do the game.”

So I still do a couple of football games a year and about 20 basketball games between the men and the women. In a way, it’s like I never left because I’m still up there all the time. Once Fordham gets in your blood, it’s tough to get it out.

Interview conducted, condensed, and edited by Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08.

This story was updated on October 25.

Fast forward to April of this year, when the band announced a massive tour to go along with a new record deal with XL and a brand-new song called “Starburster.” The band’s rise in such a short time has been incredible to witness, and the latest single—from the forthcoming album Romance—takes the group to an entirely new plane. Singer Grian Chatten took inspiration from a real-life panic attack and included gasps in the song’s chorus, creating a most unexpected hook for the track. Chatten displays a confident swagger, and his phrasing is nothing short of hypnotic as he weaves his way through the song like a frontman 20 years his senior.

It’s an exhilarating direction for a band poised to make good on the promise to become the “next big thing.”

WFUV Discovery is a new music recommendation from Russ Borris, music director at WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org), Fordham’s public media station.

I first met Charlie in 1973, when I was a sophomore at Fordham University. I had heard him many times on CBS Radio and admired his work. So I wrote him a letter and asked if he had any advice for an aspiring broadcast journalist.

To my delight, Charlie wrote back. “I’m afraid I’m not much on advice,” he said. “But as you may know, I’m an old Ram myself. If you’d like to visit the Broadcast Center sometime, give a call and I’ll lay on the fifty cents tour for free.”

I called right away, before he could forget who I was, and one winter morning, I hopped on the D train in the Bronx and headed down to CBS News headquarters on West 57th Street in Manhattan.

Charlie had one of the most distinctive voices in radio. And over the years, I had formed a mental picture of him to match it. I thought. When Charlie greeted me, the voice was familiar but the image was not. I could not believe that amazing voice was coming out of this stranger. As he showed me around, it took a while before the voice and the speaker synced up in my mind.

Charlie bought me breakfast at the CBS cafeteria. He told me he had spent a lot of time in his Fordham days at the student-run radio station, WFUV. I took that as a suggestion, and when I returned to campus, I headed to the station and went to work in the news department.

A decade later, after working as an AP broadcast writer and editor, I was offered a job at CBS News, at the radio network, where Charlie was the star. By then, he had long since forgotten me, but we soon reconnected when I was assigned to write radio newscasts for him.

Charlie always ended with a kicker. One he wrote that I’ll never forget was about a truck flipping over and spilling its cargo of cookies all over the roadway. Charlie ended by saying:

“That’s the way the (pause) ball bounces. Fooled you!”

Brilliant.

My job when I wrote for Charlie was to find a kicker worthy of him and write it well. It was a challenge I enjoyed.

One Sunday night, I wrote a kicker for his 8 p.m. radio newscast about a study that found watching too much TV could make you fat. The punchline: “Someone once called television a vast wasteland. Looks like too much of it could lead to a vast waistline.”

Charlie looked at the copy and said, “This is good enough to steal.” And steal it he did. He used the line again on his 11 p.m. television broadcast.

That broadcast was called the CBS Sunday Night News. It was 15 minutes long and, in 1986, I became Charlie’s writing partner on it. We split up the stories and challenged each other each week to come up with the best line. I never had so much fun in my life.

I will always be grateful to Charlie for the kindness he showed me as a young college student and for the privilege of working with him as a colleague. May he rest in peace.

—Jerry Cipriano, FCRH ’75, retired in 2018 as senior news editor of the CBS Evening News. He began his journalism career at the Associated Press while still attending Fordham. He joined CBS News in 1984 as a writer for network radio and moved over to television news in 1986.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Connecting, a newsletter for retirees and former employees of the Associated Press. It is republished here with the kind permission of the newsletter’s editor, Paul Stevens.

Watch this on-air tribute to Jerry Cipriano during the last of his many CBS Evening News broadcasts. Anchor Jeff Glor describes him as “a mentor, a friend, and master craftsman who has written the first draft of history for more than three decades.”

Related Story: Charles Osgood, Beloved CBS Broadcaster, Fordham Graduate, and ‘Patron Saint’ of WFUV News, Dies at 91

A Long Island native, Weinstock transferred to Fordham as a junior and quickly set out to make the most of her time at the University. She worked at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, and interned at the national TV show Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee. After graduating in 1995, she built a career in marketing and publicity at major film studios, including Paramount. She took a hiatus to raise her three sons—now 9, 12, and 13 years old—and a schnoodle named Charlie. But that “break” is over now, thanks to what the Los Angeles resident calls “the Lego incident.”

Fordham Magazine caught up with Weinstock to find out how she went from being a media exec to an entrepreneur pitching her invention on national TV.

How did your Fordham education help prepare you for entrepreneurship?
I wasn’t exactly on an entrepreneurial path from the start, but Fordham gave me a solid foundation on which I built a successful first career—and the overwhelming desire to be a lifelong learner who leans into curiosity and loves the challenge of figuring things out is persistent. Ideas are easy; I’m probably not the first person to think of something like this, but the difference is having the will and courage to jump in and figure out how to execute it.

How did you get the idea for Pick-Up Bricks?
I have three active boys with tons of Lego bricks, which is a family favorite, but it was also everywhere, all the time, and seemingly always underfoot. Any parent can tell you the pain is real! I’m not just talking about the pain of stepping on Lego bricks or other little toys, but the pain of trying to get kids to pick up their stuff. That’s why we made Pick-Up Bricks a toy. We wanted to empower kids to want to do it themselves by making cleanup fun.

Walk me through the creation process.
I had had enough and ended up vacuuming [my kids’ Lego] pieces up with my Dyson—maybe not my best parenting moment, but it was oddly satisfying and kind of fun to suck them up. The incident sent me and my brother-in-law Steve, who has entrepreneurial experience and an advanced business degree, on a four-year quest to save feet everywhere. We started sketching on a scrap piece of paper, and that was the launching pad. Fast forward, we launched domestically in late 2022 and had a successful year last year, which we capped off with the Shark Tank appearance.

How did you end up on Shark Tank?
One of the show’s casting team came across Pick-Up Bricks on social media. On one hand, we were just blown away to have drawn Shark Tank’s attention. At the same time, we were very apprehensive about doing the show and putting ourselves out there. But I’m always encouraging my children to do hard things and to stretch themselves by going outside their comfort zones—this was my opportunity to walk the walk.

You ended up accepting a joint offer from Lori Greiner and Mark Cuban. Tell me more about your experience on the show.
I am so grateful for the opportunity! We had two excellent producers who were our biggest cheerleaders and skillfully guided us through the monthslong process.

The best part for me was the Sharks’ reactions. They totally got it—and they loved it! It was a lot of fun to see them sucking up the Lego bricks, racing to finish first. Even the notoriously spicy personalities responded so positively to us and our invention—it was truly gratifying.

What’s next?
We are in talks to go beyond the direct-to-consumer space into national chain retail placement. Looking forward, we are focused on getting Pick-Up Bricks out to more of the world and capitalizing off that swell [in attention from appearing on Shark Tank].

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Sierra McCleary-Harris.

‘The Voice of Reason in an Often Unreasonable World’

In a nearly five-decade career at CBS, the 1954 Fordham graduate was known for his distinctive voice and style, his intellect and sense of humor, and a warm, measured tone. He had a predilection for bow ties and a penchant for rhyme that earned him a reputation as CBS News’ “poet in residence.”

A master communicator, he was also a bestselling author of several books, a lyricist who scored an improbable hit in 1967, and a talented musician who played banjo with the Boston Pops and piano with the New York Pops. He could cover hard news “as straight as a string,” as he once put it, and deliver poignant human-interest stories with a wit and authenticity that endeared him to generations of listeners and viewers—both on Sunday Morning and on his syndicated radio show, The Osgood File.

“Charles Osgood has been a presence in all of our lives for decades,” said Tania Tetlow, president of Fordham. “His gentle and poetic delivery of the news, the wisdom of his observations—everything about him spoke of steadiness and integrity. He was the voice of reason in an often unreasonable world. We will all miss him terribly.”

‘The Theater of the Mind’

Born in the Bronx in 1933, Charles Osgood Wood III moved to Baltimore with his family in 1939 and grew up in the city’s Liberty Heights neighborhood, an experience he recalled in his 2004 memoir, Defending Baltimore Against Enemy Attack: A Boyhood Year During World War II. The year was 1942, and it was “the best of times and the worst of times,” he wrote, as he was surrounded by siblings, friends, and baseball—but against the backdrop of the Great Depression and World War II.

“Although memory has a built-in sugarcoater, and childhood is seen through the cotton candy of time, I have always been certain that there was a genuine sweetness to the days when I was nine years old and the country was united in winning the last good war, if there could have been such a thing,” he wrote.

It was also a time when he developed his love for radio, which he called the “Theater of the Mind” and “the greatest show on earth.”

An Education in the ‘Process of Orderly Thinking’

Osgood moved back north in 1946 to attend St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, New Jersey, before returning to the borough of his birth as a student at Fordham College at Rose Hill. He majored in economics—“not communication arts or journalism, as some might think,” he told Fordham Magazine in 1980.

“In those days at Fordham we also studied such arcane subjects as epistemology, cosmology, and ontology. It didn’t seem possible that I’d even make a living from them, but I swear I am! That’s because they developed in me the process of orderly thinking—the methodology of going from one step to another,” he said.

Osgood honed his broadcasting craft working at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station, during his years at Rose Hill. The station, founded in 1947, was just a few years old when he started. He eventually hosted his own show, No Soap Opera, and worked alongside other future luminaries including Alan Alda, FCRH ’56. “When I wasn’t on duty there I would just stay around because I enjoyed it so much,” he said.

After graduating in 1954 with that radio experience, Osgood was hired as an announcer by WGMS, a classical music station based in Washington, D.C. Soon after, though, he joined the military as an announcer for the United States Army Band, a role that he held until 1957. While serving near the Arlington National Cemetery, Osgood took on jobs at several Washington, D.C.-area radio stations under pseudonyms, and in the book Kilroy Was Here: The Best American Humor from World War II, he tells the story of being tasked with DJing a closed circuit radio broadcast for President Dwight D. Eisenhower while the commander in chief recovered from a heart attack in Colorado in 1955.

“I was put into a studio with a stack of records that had all been chosen as his favorites,” Osgood recalled. “And I spent most of the day playing records for Eisenhower.”

During his stint with the Army Band, he also “got to write some lyrics for the band and chorus,” he said in the 1980 Fordham story. “That’s when I really began versifying.”

From the Army, Osgood returned to WGMS until 1962, when he got his first job in television as the general manager of WHCT in Hartford, Connecticut. When the station ran into budget issues and Osgood was fired in 1963, he got his next break thanks in part to a fellow Fordham graduate, Frank Maguire, FCRH ’56, who was in charge of program development at ABC in New York at the time. Osgood joined ABC Radio as a writer and co-host of Flair Reports, which featured human interest stories.

“It had been years since he had seen me work, but he had enough faith to recommend me for the job,” Osgood said of Maguire. It was at ABC that he decided to change his professional name. “My own name was Charles Wood, but since there was another fellow in broadcasting [at ABC] named Charles Woods, I decided to use my middle name, Osgood.”

Beginning a Long Tenure at CBS

In 1967, he began working for CBS, where he would spend the rest of his career. Starting as a radio reporter for WCBS, he moved to the television news division in 1971, the same year he began hosting what would eventually become The Osgood File, short radio segments broadcast on stations across the country multiple times a day, four days a week.

On television, he started as a reporter and became an anchor of CBS Sunday Night News in 1981, followed by stints as a co-anchor of CBS Morning News, a news reader on CBS This Morning, and an anchor of CBS Afternoon News and CBS Evening News with Dan Rather.

It was his next role at CBS for which Osgood became best known: In 1994, he succeeded Charles Kuralt as host of Sunday Morning, where his trademark style as a calm, upbeat presence gave viewers a relaxing alternative to other Sunday morning programming.

“We accentuate the positive and don’t try to shock,” Osgood once told a reporter. ”I think there’s a growing appetite for that. We’re surrounded by shock.”

He hosted his last episode of the program on September 25, 2016, signing off with his signature “I’ll see you on the radio,” before thanking his viewers and the staff of the show. He continued to host episodes of The Osgood File until December 2017.

Osgood received numerous honors throughout his career. He was inducted into the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 1990, earned a lifetime Emmy Award in 2018, and received many other accolades, including the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism, the Radio Television Digital News Association’s Paul White Award, four other Emmy Awards, and three Peabody Awards.

The Patron Saint of WFUV News

In 2008, WFUV honored Osgood alongside Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, FCRH ’49, one of the first student voices on the station, with lifetime achievement awards in news and sports broadcasting, respectively. The awards, subsequently renamed in their honor, are presented annually to journalists who reflect Osgood’s and Scully’s standard of excellence.

“All of us at the station are saddened by Charles Osgood’s passing,” said Chuck Singleton, general manager of WFUV. “He was the patron saint of WFUV News, a mentor to our young journalists, and a distinguished link to the station’s founding generation of news professionals. Charles liked to say, ‘I went to the University of WFUV.’”

Osgood stayed extremely engaged with his alma mater and WFUV throughout his life. He was a Fordham trustee fellow and an emcee at numerous Fordham events, including the annual Fordham Founder’s Dinner, where he was among the honorees in 2005. Fordham also honored him in 2010, when he was inducted into the University’s Hall of Honor. He received an honorary degree from Fordham and delivered the commencement address to the Class of 1988, encouraging them to “stand for the values that shaped you here at Fordham.”

He occasionally returned to WFUV and was a frequent attendee of the station’s annual On the Record gala, at which other broadcasting legends—including Ted Koppel, a friend who started at ABC on the same day as Osgood in 1963, and Jane Pauley, who succeed him as host of Sunday Morning—received the Charles Osgood Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Everything I learned in my career, I learned at FUV,” Osgood said at the station’s 60th anniversary celebration in 2007. And while he thought the station’s new-at-the-time broadcast center on the lower level of Keating Hall was “better than CBS,” he reminded the audience that “it’s not equipment that teaches you. The most important equipment is not in a box, but what goes on in your own brain and your own heart.”

A Mentor to Fordham Students and Alumni

That lesson is one he conveyed to generations of Fordham graduates, including Emmy Award-winning producer Sara Kugel, FCRH ’11, who started working at Sunday Morning as a broadcast associate in 2012.

“I grew up watching Sunday Morning, and that was just a routine we had in our household. It was the only show my family really watched together,” she recalled, noting that she was “very much drawn” to Osgood’s warmth, gravitas, and intelligence.

“I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into journalism then, but … once I started looking at Fordham, the fact that WFUV existed on campus, and that it had produced Charles Osgood? You can’t get it better. There’s nothing more inspiring than that.”

Over the years, the two bonded over their shared Fordham connection. Kugel recalls listening to a WFUV livestream of a Fordham football game with him one Saturday afternoon. “Of all the people I’ve met, I would say I found him to be very authentic,” she said. “Who he was on camera, really, it matched who he was in person.”

CBS New York’s Alice Gainer, FCRH ’04, echoed that sentiment. Following her Tuesday evening segment on Osgood’s life and legacy, the award-winning anchor and reporter shared some personal thoughts about Osgood with viewers, noting that in 2013, she “had the privilege of sitting on a journalism panel with him, since we’re both Fordham and WFUV alums.”

“What stood out to me was just how sharp he was—everything about him was so distinctive: his voice, his style. You know, you turn on the TV now, you see a lot of the same. He truly stood out. He leaves quite a legacy. And I have to point out, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘What am I doing on a panel with Charles Osgood?’ But he didn’t treat me that way. He treated me like a peer, and that meant so much. And he, you know, he’s still inspiring so many journalists to this day.”

A Fordham Family

The Fordham connection extended to his family. His wife, Jean Crofton, graduated from Fordham College at Lincoln Center in 2002, and two of their sons, Kenneth Winston Wood, FCLC ’98, and Jamie Wood, FCLC ’05, are Fordham alumni.

Fordham was “the first place where he was given a voice and the ability to tell stories on a platform when there were not as many platforms to be able to captivate an audience,” Jamie Wood said. “I think he always felt a great deal of gratitude and indebtedness to the Fordham community for creating the conditions that allowed that to happen.”

Wood added that his father’s disposition and personality on TV and radio reflected his personality at home.

“There was not really much of a performance element to it just because it’s just who he was,” he said. “He was the single most optimistic person that I’ve ever known. I think that he had an ability to see the inherent goodness of anyone and led with any storytelling or any interaction with that baseline assumption, that there’s fundamental good in every person that he is talking to, that he’s engaging in some way, and I think that that’s one of the things that made him beloved and endeared by so many.”

A Life Filled with Music and Community

While Osgood was known most widely for his talking and writing, many will also remember him as an enthusiastic singer, musician, and composer—who not only loved to perform for friends and family but who wrote the lyrics to two songs that achieved some level of wider success, “Gallant Men” and “Black is Beautiful.”

“I will always treasure being on set when Charlie would play the piano and sing,” Kugel said. “Witnessing Charles Osgood play ‘I’ll be Home for Christmas’ on the Sunday Morning set was pure magic. Only a few people would be in the studio during those tapings, but it seemed there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. We all knew we had witnessed something very special. It felt like heaven.”

In his final radio segment, broadcast on December 29, 2017, Osgood gave a brief history of Robert Burns’ familiar poem “Auld Lang Syne” and recited a version of his own, over the sound of pensive bagpipes, as a farewell to his listeners:

“The memories of days gone by—old times, old friends, and all—
faces, voices of the past our minds can still recall.
They live still in your memory, as they still live in mine,
as we lift a cup this Sunday eve for Auld Lang Syne.”

Osgood is survived by his wife, Jean Crofton; their five children, Kathleen Wood Griffis, Kenneth Winston Wood, Anne-E. Wood, Emily J. Wood, and Jamie Wood; two siblings; and six grandchildren.

“My dad above all loved other people’s company,” Jamie Wood said. “It wasn’t being a public figure, it wasn’t being a journalist. He just loved being around community, and so thank you for welcoming him into your homes and into your radios to be able to … share stories, to share the better parts of humanity. And he will see you on the radio.”

—Ryan Stellabotte contributed to this story.

Every year, students broadcast dozens of Fordham sporting events on WFUV (90.7 FM, wfuv.org). And each live broadcast—from football to basketball, water polo, softball, and beyond—requires the work of a team of on-air talent, behind-the-scenes producers, studio hosts, and more.

It’s an experience that has helped launch countless careers since 1947, when the station was founded. That fall, a Fordham junior and future Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully, FCRH ’49, called the Fordham-Georgetown football game “by Western Union wire, some three hundred miles from the actual scene,” he wrote in The Fordham Ram, providing a sense of the way “a quiet radio studio in Keating Hall” was “transformed into a beehive of activity, where at least ten men scurry busily but without sound to the staccato beat of the telegrapher’s key.”

Since then, the technology has changed but the character of the experience is pretty much the same. And the WFUV sports legacy has grown to include Michael Kay, FCRH ’82, voice of the Yankees; Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, voice of the Knicks; Chris Carrino, GABELLI ’92, voice of the Nets; Dan D’Uva, FCRH ’09, voice of the Vegas Golden Knights; and Tony Reali, FCRH ’00, host of Around the Horn on ESPN, among others.

“It’s incredible,” said Julia Moss, who earned her bachelor’s degree from Fordham College at Rose Hill in 2023 and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in public media at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. “Words could never do it justice, what WFUV does just to get you prepared for the real world. Specifically in New York, people look for WFUV on resumes—for good reason.”

For students like John Warner, a junior in the Gabelli School of Business, being part of a broadcast crew is a dream come true.

“I was that kid when I was very little, playing fake announcer in my head while running around with a football or running around with a Wiffle ball,” he said with a smile. “Being able to do that at the level WFUV allows us to, it’s pretty amazing.”

In October, Fordham Magazine joined Warner and his fellow WFUV crew members for the annual Homecoming game at Rose Hill, when Fordham football rallied for a last-second victory against Lehigh. Here’s a glimpse of what the experience was like behind the airwaves.

10:31 a.m. The station, located in the basement of Keating Hall, begins to fill with students who are a part of the gameday crew, which is supervised by Bobby Ciafardini, sports director for WFUV.

Will Tallant, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill and the on-site producer for the game, packs the broadcast kit—headsets, microphones, and other pieces of equipment—before he and play-by-play announcer Lou Orlando, a junior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, and color analyst Brian Rabacs, a senior in the Gabelli School of Business, head across Constitution Row to the broadcast booth at Moglia Stadium. It’s a wet walk, with a steady rain coming down.

10:52 a.m. Julia Moss, the game’s studio producer, gets settled behind the board in Studio 2. “When I’m producing, I make sure [the broadcast] is going, the highlights are going, the engineering is going,” says Moss, who is also the sports manager for the station.

There’s an additional challenge this morning: Some members of the WFUV sports staff are in the main sports studio to pretape interviews for One on One, New York’s longest-running sports call-in show. That means that while the microphones are live, Moss and her gameday crew need to find creative ways to communicate with each other without making a sound.

“We do a lot of nonverbal cues—like your highlights,” she explains, gesturing to Warner, who will be hosting the halftime and postgame shows that day. “I always count him down, ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1,’” she says, “but [only] with hand signals.”

“We also go on Snapchat—black screen—and then type something and make it bigger,” she says, showing how she holds her phone up over the board to communicate with Warner and Chris Carrino, the update anchor, a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill—and the son of Brooklyn Nets broadcaster Chris Carrino, who got his professional start at WFUV in the late 1980s.

Working as a Team

11:32 a.m. Orlando and Rabacs, who had already called at least five games together in 2023, go over their notes for the broadcast. “I think it helps a lot—having the same crew together, you can kind of feel each other out, know what each other’s tendencies are,” Rabacs says. “Also, Lou and I are very close friends.”

Earlier in the week, Orlando had finished his “boards,” where he keeps details about each team to reference during the broadcast. But as he starts to lay them out, he realizes that the spot where he usually keeps them is wet, as the window in the booth was slightly open to allow for the broadcast team’s “crowd mic” to capture the sounds of the fans.

He decides that taping the boards to the booth’s wall is the best solution to keep them dry.

12:07 p.m. Back in the studio, Moss and Crinieri go through all the pieces they’ll need for the broadcast. There’s a pregame interview with Fordham coach Joe Conlin, for example, spot promos for the station that feature alumni like NBA Hall of Fame broadcaster Mike Breen, FCRH ’83, and graphics for the station’s YouTube stream.

“I’m kind of like the glue that holds the production together,” Crinieri, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, says laughing. “If there’s a problem with the highlights, I go and help. If there’s something wrong with the Tieline, I’m in communication with the on-site producer to try and help any way I can.”

12:24 p.m. With the rain pouring down, the Tieline—the device used to connect the booth at Moglia Stadium to the main studio—goes down, and Crinieri’s help is needed.

After a few minutes of adjusting the connection, and a retest, Tallant says they’re ready to go again. “Now I’m making sure all the right buttons are pressed, the right levels are adjusted where they need to be,” he says as he turns the broadcasters’ microphones back off following the test. “So, they sound good. And they sound good in the studio as well.”

After troubleshooting the situation, Crinieri discusses a backup plan with Moss. If the line goes down again, the broadcasters would call into the studio on their phones.

And We’re Live!

12:51 p.m. Crinieri checks in on the student trainees who are in the studio to cut audio highlights of big plays during the game. Some of those clips will be played on the air during the halftime and postgame shows.

Moments later, Moss officially “takes over the station” from WFUV DJ Delphine Blue by playing the prerecorded intro to the Fordham football pregame show, hosted by Rabacs and Orlando.

1:31 p.m. As the first quarter wraps up with Lehigh holding a 7-0 lead, Orlando and Rabacs send the broadcast back to the studio for a “scoreboard update.” For Carrino, that means highlighting scores from around college football—and other sports—in a minute or so.

It’s a tight window to fit in all the scores he wants to share, so after the update, he works with Warner to remove a few games from the list for the next update.

1:43 p.m. The game had started slow for Fordham, with rain-soaked conditions making it hard for the offense to get going, but with 12 minutes left in the half, quarterback CJ Montes runs the ball in from the 4-yard line for the Rams’ first touchdown of the day, tying the game at 7.

For the studio crew, that means cutting the first Fordham highlight of the day. The live broadcast is fed into two computers in the newsroom, and trainees, under Crinieri’s supervision, are responsible for capturing that piece of the recording and saving it as a new audio file.

2:13 p.m. With halftime approaching, Moss checks in with Warner to confirm the highlights she has ready. “It’s super collaborative because I have to make sure [the team knows] what I’m putting in here,” she says, gesturing to the audio board. “He has to narrate it and then I play it, so we’re constantly making sure the script is exactly the order that I have.”

Warner, meanwhile, has spent the game tracking plays and writing notes about some of the big moments in order to host the halftime show. “As those come in, I’m simultaneously writing one- to two-sentence scripts,” he says. “It’s fun too because it’s an opportunity to insert a little bit of your personality.”

A Walk-Off Win

4:03 p.m. With just about 11 minutes to go in the game, Fordham trails by 11 points in front of a resilient Homecoming crowd that has been cheering on the Rams through hours of pouring rain. But now, as the rain eases up, the Fordham offense really turns it on.

First, CJ Montes throws a 14-yard touchdown pass to MJ Wright. Next, Brandon Peskin kicks a field goal to tie the game at 35. With less than a minute to go, the Rams get the ball back and drive 62 yards on seven plays, including an 11-yard reception by Garrett Cody, who goes out of bounds with one second on the clock.

“Fordham and Lehigh tied at 35, Fordham looking for their first conference win of the season,” Orlando tells listeners as Peskin returns to the field to attempt the game-winning kick. “Forty-four yards out, the kick from Peskin—it’s up, it’s through the uprights! Fordham wins 38-35, Brandon Peskin the hero in the final second!”

As Orlando’s voice crescendos in the booth, fans cheer in the stands, and the Rams rush Peskin on the field before heading to the Victory Bell in front of the Rose Hill Gym to celebrate their Homecoming win.

“When I get in, I’m immediately reading every story we have in our rundown for the day and then going through and seeing what the best pieces of sound are, the best pieces of video that we’ve obtained, and then putting it all together in a script,” Leverty says. “It’s not just one story you’re working on—you’re looking at all the big stories of the day, so the content varies, which is exciting.”

A ‘Pinch Me’ Moment at the Super Bowl

For Leverty, a 2020 Fordham College at Rose Hill graduate, working under tight deadlines is nothing new. She majored in journalism and film and television, and had multiple internships, including one as a production intern on MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin. She also wore a lot of hats working at WFUV, Fordham’s public media station.

“I was in the sports department and I became a beat reporter—I did a season for the New York Giants, two seasons for the New York Rangers, one for the Red Bulls, and then I was also website coordinator in my senior year,” she says.

One of her biggest opportunities came when she and five other students traveled to Miami Gardens, Florida, to handle the station’s coverage of the 2020 Super Bowl, featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers—“definitely a ‘pinch me’ moment,” she says. “I never thought that I’d be able to work a Super Bowl, let alone work one while I was still in college.”

Leverty helped with the production of the shows the students did from Radio Row, the media center for Super Bowl week, and covered the game itself. She says two interviews really stuck out to her—one with Ian Rapoport, a national breaking news reporter for the NFL Network, and one with Quinnen Williams, a defensive lineman for the New York Jets.

Combining News and Sports

While her current job is primarily in news, Leverty says that her background as a sports reporter and producer has been helpful.

“Working in the sports world, you go into every assignment not really knowing how it’s going to turn out,” she says,” so just being able to roll with all of the unexpected storylines that may come out of it, I think, was a really valuable learning experience for working in the news—especially breaking news on a morning show.”

Leverty also says that going to school in New York opened her eyes to opportunities in the media industry.

“I came in undecided when I started at Fordham, but because I was in the city, I was looking for different things to do that I hadn’t been able to do before, and one of those things was attending a live taping of a TV show,” she says. “When I did go to one, it was a late night show, and I just thought that being able to sit in the audience and watch the behind-the-scenes was so cool.”

The excitement of that experience helped her solidify her path at Fordham and beyond.

“I had always been sort of a news junkie and into current events, so it became the perfect combination to pursue journalism in that medium,” Leverty says.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

“It was a lot of training, but once I got the hang of it, I really loved it,” says Shore, who also wrote for The Fordham Ram while majoring in journalism and political science.

In 2022, the California native was selected to join Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local news organizations and pays part of their salaries. He’s been covering public safety and criminal justice issues for The Current, a nonprofit investigative news outlet in Savannah, Georgia.

Last year, he dug into the history of a white police officer who had shot and killed a Black man and was placed on administrative leave with pay.

“We found that he had had a bunch of use-of-force reports against him” when he worked as a prison guard, Shore says, and they went unnoticed when he was hired. The Savannah Police Department now requires a more thorough background check of prospective officers.

“I can see the changes I’m writing about,” Shore says, highlighting the importance of local news. “We all have to live here together and we all want to make it a better place, and that’s something I really value.”

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.