Crystal Beavers arrived at her internship at Syracuse’s WTVH-TV News Channel 5 Friday morning to see a sign that read ‘Mandatory Staff Meeting’ to be held Monday morning.

‘In broadcast, mandatory staff meetings usually aren’t a good thing,’ said Beavers, a senior broadcast journalism major at Syracuse University.

News Channel 5, Syracuse’s first television station, fired approximately 40 employees Monday morning. It will merge with Channel 3, which was once its competition station.

Beavers said that the meeting immediately generated a lot of talk amongst staff members, but no one was officially told of the mass layoffs until Monday. She is taking RTN 567, a class in the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications called ‘Advanced Newscast Producing and News Management.’ As part of the class, students intern at professional news stations for course credit.

Beavers said she immediately received an e-mail from her professor that he wasn’t sure what would happen with the student interns.

‘He had already received some calls from the executive producers from Channel 3,’ Beavers said.

Beavers’ professor, Christopher Tuohey, met with producers from both Channel 3 and Channel 5 Tuesday morning to discuss what will happen with Channel 5 interns. Tuohey said he does not think the merger will pose a problem for his class.

‘The people at Channel 3 and Channel 5, who I work with on this, are very concerned that the students not be negatively impacted,’ Tuohey said. ‘We’re all sure we can work it out so that things are back to normal, with some adjustments, after Spring Break.’

Though five students were interning at Channel 5, Beavers said she is more concerned for the staff members who lost their jobs.

‘It was just really sad for me to think that all those people lost their jobs when they worked so hard,’ Beavers said. ‘But you know, that’s the business right now, that’s the economy right now. So you kind of just have to pick yourself up and figure it out.’

Currently, the station’s Web site does not report any news of the layoffs. Instead, it posts an article with the advantages of the merge effective Monday. Channel 5, owned by Granite Broadcasting Corp. in New York City, will move from WTVH-TV to WSTM-TV, owned by the Illinois-based Barrington Broadcasting Group.

Though Channel 5 was Syracuse’s oldest television station, established in 1948, it has ranked in last place out of the city’s three news stations for about a decade.

As of now, Beavers does not have an internship and will not be reporting to work Friday morning.

‘It’s kind of funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve kind of already been laid off and I don’t even have my first job yet.’

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Published on March 3, 2009 at 12:00 pm