Tribute: Miguel Rodriguez ’96

CAREER CALLING: During a long career as a professional journalist, Rodriguez earned recognition as an accomplished sports writer for the Buffalo News, a craft he honed as a sports editor for the Campus Times. (Photo: Harry Scull Jr./The Buffalo News)

What do you do when you arrive on campus in Rochester to start your first year and you want to be a sportswriter (or a SportsCenter anchor, if that is not too much to ask)? You walk down to the Campus Times office in Wilson Commons and talk to the sports editor.

In 1994, that meant meeting Miguel Rodriguez.

Miguel was an intimidating figure. As an upperclassman and a sizable athlete—he had played multiple sports at Canisius High in Buffalo and was the goalie for Rochester hockey—he towered over puny first-year writers when he stood up from his vintage Apple Macintosh.

Miguel assigned me to report on Rochester football, a dream assignment for an aspiring sportswriter. Yet these initial articles were for only his eyes. Miguel patiently sat down with me and compared my game recaps sentence-by-sentence with the versions he had written and published, and he gently offered insights into how to report and tell a story through words.

An expert at his craft, Miguel went on to become an accomplished sports reporter for the Niagara Gazette and the Buffalo News. Who knows how many young writers he guided with his wisdom? Those of us in that number were fortunate.

Miguel died in January at the age of 47.

Our relationship was “professional,” if that’s a term you can use about volunteers at a nonpaying college activity, and I regret that I did not stay in touch with Miguel in our post-Rochester life even after I became a journalist like him. But I try to follow Miguel’s example as much as I followed his work.

For 10 years after graduating from Rochester, I wrote and edited for Washington, DC, publications covering energy and environmental issues on Capitol Hill.

Just as Miguel did for me, I made sure to be patient and direct with our entry-level reporters as they were learning the ropes. Even after I left journalism, I’ve made this a point of emphasis in my career.

He was a great mentor to me at the exact moment when I needed it for my career. May his memory be a blessing.

—David Leavitt ’98

A former reporter and editor in chief of the Campus Times, Leavitt is a media planner at Meta.