The journey that led Jerry Condra to Lanigan Hall took forty years and traversed every region of the United States. Along the way he reported the assassination of a president from the site, met fascinating and well-known people, described some of the century’s significant social changes to an exploding television news audience, and built two new ABC-TV affiliate stations from the ground up. "When I was 10 years old I knew that I would be involved in electronic media all my life,” says the tall, gray-haired Condra.

“And when I was 23, exposure to some very prolific and engaging professors revealed the excitement of teaching to me. I knew then that I also wanted to teach. The only questions were “when?” and “how?” It took decades for the answers to those questions to unfold. But this fall he saw his dream come true when he began teaching fulltime in the Communications Studies Department.

The assistant professor’s radio career began in the sixth grade when he sold a radio station on the idea of a middle school disk jockey show. At age 19 he was simultaneously managing radio stations and attending college. An offer to return to the #1 station in Dallas-Fort Worth allowed Condra to continue his education by attending the University of Texas at Arlington.  “It was an extremely exciting station”, he says “Comedian George Carlin was our morning deejay and Bob Schieffer of CBS-TV, was one of our news reporters”.

“That was the station where I discovered how much I loved news reporting”, says Condra. “My first day there was the day of the University of Texas bell tower shootings by a Fort Worth student. It was a major story and I was thrown right into the middle of it”. But the biggest story Condra would cover during his news career was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jr. “People thought our station manager was crazy when he suggested we cover Kennedy’s activities live in both Dallas and Fort Worth from the time he touched down”, he says “Unfortunately he was right”.

Condra moved from radio news to anchoring television news in Abilene, Texas and Syracuse, where he anchored for channel 9. He then moved up to news director positions at ABC-TV affiliates in St. Joseph, Missouri, and Sacramento, California. His success led to two simultaneous offers: One was to be news director at the ABC-TV outlet in Washington, DC. The second was to build a new ABC-TV outlet from the ground up in Rapid City, SD, and then serve as general manager. Condra chose Mount Rushmore and became one of the first news directors in the nation to be named general manager of a television station. After success in South Dakota, he moved on to manage ABC-TV stations in Austin, Texas; Florence-Myrtle Beach, SC; and St. Joseph, Missouri. Along the way he owned and managed two radio stations in Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas. All the stations he managed became the #1 local news stations in their markets.

But the old desire to teach broadcasting was still very much alive in Condra. He earned a Master of Science in Management degree, taught classes at two nearby universities, and also served on the professional advisory boards of those schools. “My experience in adjunct teaching was so enormously positive and rewarding”, he says, “that my wife and I decided to finally make the transition to full time teaching”. In August 1999 he moved to Oswego State to teach electronic media management, programming, sales, and mass media copywriting.

How has the career change worked out? “Wonderfully!” he exclaims.  “My students are loaded with talent and my colleagues are innovative, stimulating teachers. There’s a wonderful closeness and communication between students and professors here”.

Condra also works with students on internships, which has led him to meet many Oswego alumni now working in the media. “The success and influence of our alumni is amazing”, he says. “Pick any market from Syracuse to New York City and you find alumni in high profile positions. We hope to invite many more of them back to campus to talk to our students. They have an enormous impact on students”.

Condra’s research interests focus on how present mass media can strategically and profitably manage their transition to the new era of digital television in the new media marketplace. He has set up a broad-based advisory group of electronic media executives as to provide data and guidance for this research.

Condra and his wife, Reba, have four grown children and three grandchildren. He is a member of the Broadcast Education Association, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and International Radio and Television Society.
 

I'm very proud of my family. This is us at a holiday celebration. my three sons and daughter have given us two grandsons and one granddaughter
		Planning coverage of a Syracuse news story with ABC-TV's Peter Jennings in 1968. I was 11PM News Anchor and reporter at Channel 9 in Syracuse.