TAPinto franchise merchandise
Photo courtesy of The Bona Venture Archive
BY: SAWYER BURKE, NEWS EDITOR
TAPinto Greater Olean, run by St. Bonaventure professors Rich and Anne Lee, is celebrating its 10th anniversary through a continued partnership with the university’s Jandoli School of Communication.
Rich Lee met the founder of TAPinto, Mike Shapiro, in 2010 while working in New Jersey. Most of the branches of TAPinto are located in New Jersey. TAPinto is a network of around 90 local news platforms that are independently owned and operated. St. Bonaventure is the only TAPinto franchise as a university.
The university brought TAPinto to campus as an experiential learning course. It runs as a six-credit class spanning two semesters; however, for the Lees, TAPinto is more than just another class offered at St. Bonaventure. While students do learn the basics of the TAPinto publishing platform and interface, the course is designed to operate much more like a professional newsroom than a traditional lecture-based class.
“I would say a lot of the class is run like a newsroom,” said Rich Lee. “We encourage students to come up with their own ideas.”
Instead of simply completing assignments from a syllabus, students pitch story ideas, conduct interviews and report on events throughout the local community. The structure allows students to gain hands-on journalism experience while covering real issues and events in the surrounding area.
“We do a lot of discussion,” said Anne Lee. “We both worked in big newsrooms when newspapers were a big thing, and we tried to emphasize the real beauty of collaboration.”
Anne Lee said the range of stories that students pursue often surprises people.
“Students have attended protests, participated in media calls with political officials and even covered concerts,” said Anne Lee.
This level of independence requires students to take initiative, often leaving campus to gather information, interview sources and observe events firsthand — a process that closely mirrors the work of professional reporters.
While it might be expected that a longer story, one that has a little more substance and detail, would get the most traffic on the TAPinto website, the Lees have found it surprising that crime is the topic that gets the most people to click.
“People love crime,” said Rich Lee. “It is kind of funny. You’ll see the three-paragraph police story gets more traffic than a more in-depth story.”
Some story ideas are handed to students, with a few being able to pitch their own ideas. Ryan Lombardi, a junior journalism major, said the Lees will send him stories to cover for TAPinto.
“My stories are mostly handed to me,” said Lombardi. “With basketball, the stories present themselves. I write previews and game stories, but then if other news comes out about the team I will report on it.”
Lombardi began writing for TAPinto Greater Olean his freshman year by covering both basketball teams at the school. Now, as a junior, he is the full-time men’s basketball beat writer.
Christian Figueroa, a senior sports media major, said he prefers to cover events going on in the Olean area, because the perspective outside of St. Bonaventure’s campus is refreshing.
“I love going to vendor events or parades in Olean,” said Figueroa. “I get to talk with the townspeople and take loads of pictures. It’s nice to see what Olean is like other than St. Bonaventure.”
Aaron Hardy, junior sports media major, said he found that students tend to cover stories on local sports or the local government, but they have some freedom to choose.
“We have a lot of freedom; there are certain AP style guidelines we have to follow and certain ways Anne and Rich may want the story formatted, but we have a lot of freedom,” said Hardy.
Donovan Moffat, former St. Bonaventure student and now assistant athletic director for academics and student development, wrote for TAPinto during 2019.
Moffat said his time with TAPinto was a way of getting his feet wet and gaining real journalism experience.
“I felt like the situations and stories that were given to us were more of an opportunity to go out into the community and get comfortable being uncomfortable,” said Moffat. “I’m not only going to write about sports, so I need to learn how to write about a fire that happened downtown or what the Olean [Public] Library is doing.”
Aaron Chimbel, Dean of the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure, explained that TAPinto Greater Olean is a great way to prepare students for careers in the journalism world.
“The founder of our program, Dr. Russell Jandoli, used to say, ‘You learn to write by writing,”’ said Chimbel. “Our students learn an enormous amount by being out in the field and doing work, just like they would on the job.”
TAPinto Greater Olean primarily covers the communities of Olean, Allegany, Portville and Hinsdale, providing local news and community updates for residents in those towns and villages.
The site has grown steadily over the past decade, but its readership saw a significant surge during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many residents relied on local news outlets for timely information about closures, safety measures and public health updates.
In 2020 alone, TAPinto recorded a total of 559,348 page views, reflecting a sharp increase in community engagement during the early months of the pandemic, according to the Lees. In the previous year, 2019, TAPinto amassed a total of only 193,572 page views, said Rich Lee.
The Lees said the site became an important source of daily updates during a time of uncertainty.
“People would get up in the morning to check and see what precautions you’d have to take or if school would be closed,” said Rich Lee.
Ten years after its launch, TAPinto Greater Olean continues to function as both a newsroom and a classroom, giving students the opportunity to report on the communities surrounding St. Bonaventure.
For the Lees, the program’s success is measured not only in page views, but in the experience students gain by stepping outside the classroom and into the role of a working journalist.
