John Kucko: Second Act

After a long career with WROC-TV, former anchor and sportscaster is now dedicating his time to digital photography — 713,000 people follow his work online

By Mike Costanza

 

To View John Kucko’s Work, go to: www.facebook.com/JohnKuckoDigital

 

While the rest of us are in our beds dreading the alarm, John Kucko courses through Western New York and the Finger Lakes taking the photos and videos his fans crave.

“If you’re passionate and excited about getting up every day, then it’s not work. It’s like fun,” the 61-year-old said.

Kucko’s passion for capturing and presenting those images to the public led him to leave a long career in television sports broadcasting and become a full-time digital content creator with his own Facebook page.

John Kucko Digital offers beautiful photos and videos of dramatic waterfalls, colorful barns and other subjects that make this region special, along with depictions of the interesting events its communities host. He even travels overseas to cover interesting subjects, tells stories on the page and livestreams from the field. He has 713,000 followers online and his work reaches as many as 80 million people all over the world each month.

As a child growing up in Binghampton, Kucko developed strong interests in sports and sports reporting, particularly of NFL games. He was such a great fan of the Miami Dolphins that when he was 12 or 13 years old, he wrote to the late Don Shula, the football team’s legendary head coach, to ask the hall of famer for an autographed picture.

“He did get back to me after three or four times of me writing to him on Snoopy stationary,” Kucko said.

Shula’s office sent Kucko a picture signed “Best wishes, Don Shula” and other goodies and helped his family get a discount when staying at the hotel where the Dolphins lodged when playing the Buffalo Bills at the team’s home stadium. Once a year, the Kuckos headed to Orchard Park to watch the Bills take on the Dolphins.

“I would sit there in the upper deck, the cheap seats, if you will, looking into the press box, thinking ‘One day, wouldn’t it be cool if I could be in that press box covering a game like this?’” the Penfield resident said.

Upon graduating from SUNY Oswego, where he majored in broadcasting, Kucko embarked on a television sportscasting career that took him to Elmira and Binghampton and then to Rochester.

After covering sports for 13-WHAM he came to WROC-TV, where he debuted on Sept. 25, 1991 with a story on the Bills. He spent the next 32 years with that station, most of them as its full-time sports director and weekday sports anchor. WROC is part of the Nexstar Media Group, which owns or partners with more than 200 stations in the US, so Kucko covered stories around the country.

“I was based out of Rochester, but I was also, like, doing a lot of coverage for dozens of other stations across America for big events: Super Bowl, Daytona 500, PGA Championship,” he said.

Kucko’s decades in sportscasting have left him with a wealth of memories.

In 1988 he scored an interview with the mercurial baseball manager Billy Martin. The late George Steinbrenner, the New York Yankees’ principal owner, had just fired Martin for the fifth and last time and the interview was the first he gave after leaving the team. Martin was killed the next year in an automobile accident.

“That interview is now in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown [the National Baseball Hall of Fame] and their archives, recognized really as the last extensive interview with Billy before his crash on Christmas of 1989,” Kucko said. “It was a big deal as a young kid who’s a broadcaster.”

The story of Jason McElwain’s extraordinary performance on the basketball court in 2006 also drew wide attention. McElwain, called “J-Mac” by his classmates, was a high-functioning autistic Greece Athena High student. He couldn’t make the school’s basketball team, so varsity coach Jim Johnson allowed him to be the Trojans’ student coach. Johnson knew how much the young man wanted to play for the team, so with just four minutes left in the final home game, he handed J-Mac the ball. J-Mac sank seven baskets, putting 20 more points on the scoreboard for the Trojans, who won that night. Kucko was the first to get the story on the air.

“It was selected as ESPN’s Best Moment in Sports,” he said.

Kucko covered every home and away Bills game and 19 Super Bowls, including three in which the team played in the early 1990s. While covering one game he found himself heading to the press box with the late Andy Rooney, who was a commentator for the television news show “60 Minutes.” Kucko carried the legendary journalist and essayist’s leather attaché case, which was laden with player statistics, press releases and other papers, up to the press box for him.

“Andy Rooney was that curmudgeon, cantankerous guy, but for whatever reason, I always liked people like him that were old school with that, you know, the old leather case just filled with notes,” Kucko said.

After a time, Kucko began photographing the players and places he encountered on the job with disposable cameras.

“I’d be on the field for the last 10 minutes of the game,” Kucko said. “I’d get the players shaking their hands and I’d take some good snaps.”

When the stresses of Kucko’s job began to take a toll, Kucko’s wife, Charla, suggested that he try to cope with them by acquiring a hobby. He took her advice and began bringing a much more capable Canon single lens reflex camera to football games.

“I would look for things to shoot unrelated to the X’s and O’s of football,” Kucko said. “I used to love to get to the stadiums early and get nice empty stadium shots, because I just like stadiums.” Football coaches map out plays using X’s and O’s to depict their and their opponents’ players.

One fall day, Kucko found a use for his camera that took him in a different career direction.

He and his wife were south of Rochester in Letchworth State Park when they discovered the picturesque iron train trestle that bridged the Genesee River’s gorge at that time. He loved the look of the structure, which was built in 1875 and returned the next day in the hope of photographing a train as it rounded a curve enroute to the bridge. He got the shot.

“It was a Canadian Pacific red engine, which was really nice with the background of the fall color,” Kucko said.

Kucko began photographing the trains that were passing through Letchworth, then branched out to capture images of the region’s natural beauty at first on film, then with a digital camera.

In 2016, he quit working full time as WROC’s sports anchor, became a part-time news anchor for the station and started John Kucko Digital. The new gig allowed him to focus upon taking uplifting photos and videos for the page and drawing in revenue.

“I knew I could monetize my page if I just really focused on it, built it up fast and I did that,” Kucko said.

Photos and videos of roaring waterfalls, burbling streams, waves smashing into lighthouses, colorful barns, trains cruising down tracks and other beautiful and exciting subjects began to fill the page. WROC allowed him to present some of his work on the air either by itself or as part of a daily feature, “Kucko’s Camera.”

On Sept. 25, 2023 — 32 years to the day after he joined WROC — Kucko announced that he was leaving his anchor slot to focus completely upon servicing his Facebook page.

Nowadays, he arises at 4:30 most mornings, grabs some coffee and heads out to capture images of the area’s charms.

Water flows through his page in many forms, from images of lakeshore sunrises to videos of snow falling on moving trains. He uses different types of equipment for his work, including cell phones, regular digital cameras and those mounted on drones.

Though Kucko goes out with his equipment throughout the year, he particularly enjoys photographing winter scenes. On a day when the wind was blowing 80 miles an hour and the temperature was down to minus 30F, he bundled up and headed out to catch Lake Ontario’s waves assaulting the Oswego West Pierhead Lighthouse. Though his camera was on a tripod, it was still hard to keep it steady enough to get the video.

“That’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever shot,” he said.

Kucko also offers his audience images of picturesque barns, antique vehicles and other objects, along with photos and videos of the outdoor events he’s covered. When Nashville, Tennessee, resident Noah Coughlan passed through this region on a 5,500-mile solo run across the US, Kucko covered it. Coughlan’s journey, titled “Run for America: A Tribute to the American People,” is intended to honor America’s 250th anniversary, but Kucko focused more upon its positive effects on the communities through which Coughlan passed.

“It’s kind of bringing people together in their respective communities, so something like that I’m going to jump on all the time,” he said.

Kucko has also traveled overseas with his wife to cover the holiday markets that Vienna, Prague and other European cities host at Christmastime and has taken large groups on trips to Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and several other parts of the world. Asked what he’d really like to capture for his Facebook page, he came up with another hard-to-get shot.

“I’d love to see a volcano erupting,” he said.

Lovers of Kucko’s photos can take hard copies of them home in the form of the calendars and collections of postcards he sells. Down through the years, he’s donated more than $200,000 from the proceeds from those sales to worthy causes.

 

Five Things About John Kucko

1. John Kucko got his first job in television sportscasting in 1987 at WENY, a small station in Elmira.

2. His first Rochester gig was as a weekend sportscaster for 13-WHAM.

3. Kucko’s daily feature “60 Seconds of Serenity” offers brief, relaxing videos of beautiful natural scenes. He’s been doing the feature since COVID-19 first hit the Rochester area in 2020 and has never repeated a scene. You may view the segment on Facebook at www.facebook.com/JohnKuckoDigital.

4. A woman in Kyiv, Ukraine, wrote Kucko that it meant a lot to her to be able to watch videos of streams and waterfalls on his Facebook page while her neighborhood was being shelled.

5. He met his wife, Charla, at 13-WHAM, where she was a news anchor and reporter. They have been married for 35 years and have two grown daughters.

 

Seeing the Story Through

WROC-TV News Director Rory Pelliccia met Kucko in 2007 when he was a master control room operator for the station and Kucko was its sports director. He admired the veteran sportscaster’s willingness to work long hours to get the story ahead of the competition.

“When he had the big story, he was going to see it all the way through. It was important for him always to win,” Pelliccia said.

That drive served Kucko well, especially when covering important stories for WROC. The station is part of the Nexstar Media Group, which owns or partners with more than 200 US stations that can share stories among them. These days the company sends dozens of people to report on major sports events like the Super Bowl, but that wasn’t the case when Kucko covered the games for the network.

“He was the one doing those live shots for all of the stations with one of our photographers. They didn’t have a team of people,” Pelliccia said.

Kucko eventually became a mentor and friend to the younger man, who still sometimes turns to him for counsel.

“There were a few times in my career where I, you know, took some risks and I would always consult with John before, because his opinion very much matters and still matters to this day,” Pelliccia said.

 

Digital Presence: Photos for Good

John Kucko’s Facebook doesn’t just showcase his skills as a digital content creator.

“I’m a big believer in using social media for good,” he said.

Click on John Kucko Digital and you get the chance to buy some of the page’s colorful photos in the form of calendars and postcards. Down through the years, Kucko has given more than $200,000 of the proceeds from those sales to worthy causes and organizations. More than $40,000 of that total went to help finance the creation of the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disability that can manifest itself in difficulties with social communication and interaction and restrictive or repetitive behaviors or interests. Research has shown that exposure to nature can provide social, emotional and other benefits for children who have the disorder. The ANT was created for that purpose and Kucko supported the $3.7 million project right from the beginning.

“He was off and running with the idea before we even came close to putting a shovel in the ground,” said Loren Penman, the retired educator who helped lead the effort to build the trail.

Penman and her cohorts began working on The ANT project in 2014 and it opened in late 2021. Though it was created with those with ASD in mind, the looping, picturesque one-mile trail is ADA compliant and anyone is welcome to use it. At least 15,000 people visit the trail each year.

Kucko has also donated funds to other nonprofits, including the NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Finger Lakes and RocMaidan, which provides vital humanitarian and medical supplies to Ukraine.

For more information on The ANT, go to: https://autismnaturetrail.com