Member Spotlight: Gina Capellazzi, Digital Content Producer for the Catholic Courier
The Catholic Journalist's Member Spotlight highlights the diverse voices and organizations that make up the Catholic Media Association. This month features Gina Capellazzi, an award-winning multimedia journalist who serves as the digital content producer for the Catholic Courier for the Diocese of Rochester, N.Y. She joined the publication in 2015 and plays a central role in managing its digital and multimedia storytelling initiatives.
As a youngster, when Gina Capellazzi imagined her future, she said, "My dream job was to work for the Today Show." She especially admired Katie Couric.
While she was at college working on class projects, she decided she didn't like the way her recorded voice sounded. She thought about changing majors but stuck with broadcast journalism and focused more on behind-the-scenes roles.
After graduation, she started her career at WHEC-TV in Rochester where she worked for eight years as a producer, both for television and the web.
But, as has happened in much of secular media, her station downsized and she started looking for her next opportunity.
"It wasn't in the plan, but I guess God led me to exactly where he wanted me to be," Capellazzi said.
That was the Catholic Courier, which each month reaches more than 170,000 people in the 12-county Diocese of Rochester in its print edition. Capellazzi became the Courier's digital content producer.
She has a wide range of duties, but "Mostly I'm responsible for utilizing various media platforms to tell stories of interest and importance to people of the diocese... as well as to increase the Catholic Courier's online presence."
As summer waned, those duties took her to the diocese's 100-year-old Camp Stella Maris, a children's summer camp, to record some of its anniversary activities.
"We did two videos," for the camp project, she explained. "One of our senior priests... attended camp there, sharing his memories and his stories... I didn't have to do much. He was great sharing stories off the top of his head. And the kids were all around doing their usual thing at camp."
The other video included an interview with a former camper whose parents met at the camp. "Her dad was director of the camp from 1977 to 1997. She's a youth minister at one of the churches now, and she was joined by one of her young people who is learning to be a counselor this summer at the camp. So, we did an interview there in their outdoor chapel area."
The two video stories will be woven into a presentation that will look like a webpage with photos of the camp from the past and present, and a long written interview with both the executive director of the camp who has been there since 2008, and the caretaker whose affiliation with Camp Stella Maris is more than 50 years long.
The multimedia project was scheduled to go live a week before Camp Stella Maris' big anniversary celebration.
A few years ago, Capellazzi started and continues a podcast about her favorite sport - figure skating - called "This Week in Skating." That avocation meant she was one of the accredited journalists at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina.
Two years ago, Capellazzi developed the Courier's first podcast to help mark the newspaper's 135th year and an exhibition of photos from the paper.
As she imagined it, the short podcast series included interviews with past and present Courier photographers. And she pulled it off with Courier team members, despite her coming down with COVID in the midst of taping.
After the successful anniversary series, Capellazzi launched and oversaw the production of a yearlong video podcast, "Pilgrims of Hope," for the Jubilee of Hope. Then she started a third, audio-only podcast, "Extraordinary Time," to highlight the church's liturgical seasons.
With Courier chief photographer Jeff Witherow, she livestreams diocesan Masses and ordinations.
Capellazzi also produces and edits news videos; writes stories for print and the web; posts OSV and CNS news stories to the website; and works on their three weekly e-newsletters.
In her years at the Courier, Capellazzi said one of her most memorably assignments was covering a high school student who took a trip to Ghana in August 2025 with the National Youth Advisory Council and Catholic Relief Services.
"He was so moved by the experience that he raised money and then returned to Ghana in February of this year with his dad to build beds for refugee families for his senior project," she said.
She also enjoyed covering the New York State Eucharistic Conference in 2023 and the National Catholic Youth Conference in 2017.
Along the way, Capellazzi persuaded her brother, Mark, to join church service, first at a nearby Catholic school of theology and ministry. Now he's project coordinator of Youth and Young Adult Ministry for the Diocese of Rochester.
"It's funny, sometimes we get asked if we're husband and wife, but nope, brother and sister. I'm the oldest."
She was scheduled to cover an event her brother planned in mid-August. At the same time, she was busy preparing to follow Rochester's Bishop John S. Bonnici to the beatification ceremonies for one of his predecessors, Venerable Fulton J. Sheen.
The ceremony will be Sept. 24 in St. Louis, followed the next day by a Mass offered by Bishop Bonnici in the Diocese of Peoria, where Bishop Sheen grew up and was ordained a priest. Bishop Sheen became the sixth bishop of Rochester in 1966.
Bishop Bonnici has a special fondness for Bishop Sheen, Capellazzi said. He carries Bishop Sheen's crozier.
The past 11 years have been full of challenges, but Capellazzi is happy she made the change when she did.
"Now I wouldn't go back to secular media. I love this and love the stories I would never have gotten to tell (in) secular media."
Boehlefeld, retired features and multimedia editor for The Observer in Rockford, Ill., freelances and writes fiction. This article originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of The Catholic Journalist.