It's no surprise that Ethan Charlip ended up at Syracuse University. His New Jersey high school classmates Jacob Belotti and Shruti Marathe were already there when he arrived on campus. In fact, Shruti told Ethan he'd be at the WJPZ spring recruitment meeting and tasked Jacob with making sure of it.
Like so many of us, Ethan immediately found his tribe at the station, quickly earning a reputation for hanging out there more than even the exec staff. And how badly did he want to join exec? He applied for every position. You'll hear that hilarious story.
Ethan did become production director, getting the station involved in podcasting and continuing the teaching mission of WJPZ - agreeing to do a free 2 hour Adobe Audition training for anyone who would join his staff. During a semester abroad, he ran for General Manager - interviewing over Zoom (before it was cool) from an airbnb in Prague. He stayed up until 6:00am there awaiting the results. He won.
Like every GM before him, Ethan wasn't sure he was ready for the position, especially as he learned to navigate office politics with friends and more. But his contributions earned him the 2020 Rick Wright Lock Award - right before the world shut down.
Ethan handed the GM reigns over to Melody Emm, and COVID-19 hit. The Class of 2020 never returned to campus after spring break. Ethan's class did not have a senior week, a graduation (save for a "make up" ceremony in 2021), or last Z89 show. It was only thanks to Melody sneaking him in to the station when he returned to pack up his apartment that he got a brief final show.
Naturally, it wasn't easy for the Class of 2020 to find jobs - Ethan found himself doing a desk job at Westwood One, before eventually moving to the world of PR - helping startups get noticed. And you won't be surprised to hear how many WJPZ lessons he employs to this day.
And he still has a Watson theater chair that a classmate eviscerated.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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0:00:26 - JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay, excited for today's guest. He's a former general manager of the station, and in March of 2020, we all shared a marker to sign his novelty Lock Award check right before the whole world shut down. Mr. Ethan Charlip. Welcome to the podcast.
0:00:43 - Ethan: Thank you for having me.
0:00:44 - JAG: So I ask all of our guests, I'm going to start in the same place with you. How did you find out about Syracuse and then the radio station and where you're from originally?
0:00:51 - Ethan: So I'm originally from Jersey, so I found out about Syracuse because I was looking to go into broadcasting of some sort. Wasn't 100% sure what originally. I wanted to go to the University of Miami, and I told my mother this plan, and she said, absolutely not. So I had to go look elsewhere. At the time, I was really thinking I wanted to be a sports broadcaster doing sports talk radio.
0:01:14 - JAG: One more for the tote board. Hang on. Okay, go ahead.
0:01:17 - Ethan: Isn't that how we all got there? So I started looking into Syracuse, and I had a few friends that were there, some other Z Alums that I'm sure we'll get to that a little bit later. I applied early decision to Syracuse. It was the one place I wanted to be. I still remember the moment I got my acceptance letter. It was like the happiest moment of my life. And the rest was kind of history. And then as for getting to WJPZ, I made a mistake, to be honest.
0:01:46 - Ethan: I say this always, I say this forever. My biggest mistake is that I did not join WJPZ the moment I got to Syracuse. I waited until my second semester because I was kind of a shy kid. Wasn't really sure what to do with joining organizations and anything. But as I said, I had some friends from high school, Shruti Marathe, who was also a former GM a couple of years before me, and Jacob Belotti, who was VP of operations at one point. Both of them were already involved at the station. And the way I actually got involved at Z is Shruti cornered me in Newhouse one day, and she said, the general information meeting for Z 89 is tonight. You're going to be there, right?
0:02:29 - Ethan: And I was like, oh, maybe. I don't really know. And she went, "NO, the general information meeting for Z 89 is tonight. You will be there." And Jacob was actually put in charge of making sure that I attended the meeting.
0:02:44 - JAG: That's Jersey on Jersey crime right there.
0:02:46 - Ethan: Exactly. We had all gone to high school together. We had known each other for years, so they had no issue just straight up bullying me into joining the organization, and I appreciate them for doing it to this day.
0:02:57 - JAG: I will let you off the hook and give you special dispensation here because you said you feel bad waiting until second semester. We've had guests on the show that joined sophomore, junior, even senior year, and they say, "Why didn't I join faster?" I joined, like, November of my freshman year, and I wish I joined faster. I was that same shy kid who hadn't found my tribe until I got to the station. Sounds like you had that same experience.
0:03:15 - Ethan: Oh, yeah.
0:03:16 - JAG: Okay, so when you get to the station, tell me... I'm sorry. Once you were dragged into the station kicking and screaming, tell me what you got involved with and what you did there.
0:03:27 - Ethan: Early on, I kind of just took on a DJ shift like everybody else, but I always hung around the station. It was joked by some people that I was there more than the executive staff my freshman year, because it was a place to hang out. I loved being there. There were always people around, so I would just go and chill out, and I kind of just got my hands involved in everything and anything. If anybody needed an extra set of hands, I was there.
0:03:49 - Ethan: And after my first semester at the station, it was the end of the school year. So they were doing the mid year elections for the executive staff for people that would fill in the second half of the term. And I decided that the only logical decision was to apply for every position. So I applied for all of them, and that kind of got me known. From then on, everybody was like, oh, that's the guy that wants to do everything. Okay, thanks.
0:04:15 - Ethan: And the next semester, I ended up becoming production director, and it kind of just grew from there.
0:04:19 - JAG: What were some of the stuff you handled as production director? I'm trying to think of production directors from the 70s, 80s, 90s, and 2000s. What does a production director job look like in the late 2010s?
0:04:29 - Ethan: So I was the production director when we first started doing podcasts when podcasting was getting too big for us to not do it anymore. That's when I was the production director, so I was very involved in getting those off the ground. I was the editor for all of the original podcasts, but also when I took over, the production team was really small, and we were just looking to get more people interested in production. So a big part of my job is I just offered to anyone and everyone that I would teach them how to use Adobe if they would join the team. That was the trade off. I was like, I will sit down with you for 2 hours and teach you what you need to know as long as you join the team.
0:05:03 - Ethan: And so that's really what I spent a lot of my time doing as the director.
0:05:06 - JAG: It's really easy to see why you would eventually become a Lock Award winner as well as General Manager. Paying that education of WJPZ forward of, hey, come on in. Welcome. And I'm going to teach you something just like you learn from those around you. You mentioned your high school classmates, the folks that brought you in, who are some of the other connections that you made while you're at the station?
0:05:24 - Ethan: I mean, everybody. You get into the station and you're friends with everyone forever. Shruti and Jacob were still two of my very good friends. Melody Emm, who followed me as GM, and her fiance Baymes, who I believe helps work on this podcast, right?
0:05:39 - JAG: Yep. He's edited some of our episodes. Yep.
0:05:41 - Ethan: Two of them are they're still two of my best friends to this day and just a bunch of other random people that you still you keep in touch with because you were too close not to. So, you know, Hannah Butler, people like that, that I'm running out of names at this point, but people that just, you know, you want to keep around after you leave.
0:05:57 - JAG: Melody decided she was going to start calling me Uncle Jag, so I appreciate you not calling me that. I was actually on the phone with her yesterday.
0:06:04 - Ethan: Amazing. Love that.
0:06:06 - JAG: So you start off as production director. How do you come to rise to the ranks to general manager?
0:06:10 - Ethan: So I was never really supposed to be general manager, to be honest.
0:06:13 - JAG: You are not the first person by a long shot to say that on the show, by the way, Ethan.
0:06:17 - Ethan: Yeah. So I only spent a semester as production director, and then I went abroad for a semester. And while I was abroad, I applied to be general manager. My sole intention was to make the board know who I was.
0:06:30 - JAG: Okay.
0:06:31 - Ethan: I was like, I'm going to apply because then I'll get an interview, they'll all know my name. And then when I end up not becoming GM and I run for VP of programming to be the program director, I'll have some important backing. And that was the plan. And then there was a lot going on at the station behind the scenes between different factions, for lack of a better term. Not to get all inside baseball about it, but because of some of that stuff, there were a couple of main contenders in the GM race that kind of got knocked out because of all the drama. And I became more or less the compromise candidate.
0:07:06 - Ethan: So that's kind of how I ended up in the position. I was shocked when I got elected. They thought my camera froze because, like I said, I was abroad, so I was doing it over Zoom, back before that's what we were all doing.
0:07:17 - JAG: Were you in a hostel? Were you in a Starbucks? Where were you?
0:07:20 - Ethan: So I was studying abroad in London, but for the weekend I was in Prague. I was at an Airbnb in Prague, and with the time difference, they were doing it at like 09:00 p.m.. The interviews at like 09:00 p.m.. Eastern time, which was about 02:00 am., where I was. So I stayed up all night. And originally during my interview, I told them I was like, hey, it's two, three am where I am. I'm exhausted, I'm going to have to go to sleep.
0:07:44 - Ethan: Somebody email me what happens because I didn't think I was going to win. It didn't matter. I was like, Just email me who wins? And I'll see it when I wake up in the morning.
0:07:51 - JAG: Yeah.
0:07:51 - Ethan: And then at the very end of my interview, the last thing I said before I logged off was, never mind, I'm not going to be able to sleep. Let me know when it's time to hop back on the call. And so I stayed up until about 06:00 AM my time, when they finally called me back and they announced that I was going to be the general manager. And like I said, they thought my screen froze because I was in pure shock. My face was like a mixture of shock and horror because I was not ready for this. I did not expect this to happen by any means.
0:08:20 - Ethan: It was a crazy experience. And then the call ended with Hannah Butler. Again, she was the broadcast consultant at the time, so she was running the election, and the last thing she said was, okay, now, Ethan, please, for the love of G-d, go to sleep.
0:08:33 - JAG: A line that will now live in Z89 lore.
0:08:36 - Ethan: Yes.
0:08:36 - JAG: So you were GM, the 2018-19 year?
0:08:40 - Ethan: I was GM 2019, the full calendar year of 2019. So I was in right before the pandemic.
0:08:45 - JAG: Right before you handed it off to Melody and Kyle.
0:08:48 - Ethan: To Melody. Yep.
0:08:49 - JAG: Okay.
0:08:49 - Ethan: Yep, exactly.
0:08:50 - JAG: Let me ask you this before we get to your stuff post graduation and even before COVID. What are some of the things you learned at JPZ, Ethan, that you think have served you well in the couple of years that you've been out?
0:09:00 - Ethan: I mean, you learn everything at JPZ. It's a crash course in being a professional and doing everything. And I've worked in radio, I've worked out of radio, and so there were technical skills that helped me at one point, and now it's just the personal skills, having to deal with people. There's a lot of different people. Z89 attracts an eclectic group, and so you have a lot of personalities and it was a lot of fun. But also, you got to learn to deal with that. You got to learn to deal with the downsides that come with that as well. And especially being GM, I had to learn very suddenly how to deal with a staff and how to deal with a staff that was made up of my friends.
0:09:40 - Ethan: All of a sudden, I went from like, we were all buddy buddy to now I'm your boss. I need to tell you you're not doing your job. And it was just a completely different world that I really had to learn how to deal with quickly, and it's been extremely helpful in the professional world, just having that experience of dealing with those personalities.
0:09:58 - JAG: It really is amazing when you think about the lessons that all of us over 50 plus years have learned at the radio station, that a lot of people don't get to learn until they're 25, 30 or whatever it is, and we're learning it as 19 and 20 year olds. And most of us, I won't say us, because I wasn't. But everyone that became GM that I've talked to, oh, my G-d, I wasn't ready for that. But the stuff that I learned and the crash course is the perfect way to put it, as one of our other guests put it, as you're managing the Island of Misfit Toys.
0:10:25 - Ethan: Yes, I think that's a great way to put it. Like you said, nobody's ever ready to take over as GM. When I took over, I talked to a couple of people and I was like, I'm not prepared for this. I don't know what to do. And every single one of them said, I didn't know either. Just fake until you make it. You're going to figure it out.
0:10:41 - JAG: Yeah. So I want to go chronological here, and I do want to come to your career in a second, but I would be remiss if I didn't ask you. 2020 was your senior year. You win the Lock Award. We're all in Syracuse. We're all sharing 100 wings among 50 people, which, in hindsight, was not the best idea.
0:10:55 - Ethan: So much of what happened that weekend shouldn't have, knowing what happened one week later.
0:11:00 - JAG: I do want to give a shout out, if I haven't already in the podcast, to Christy Ogonis Vincent, who is a dear friend of both Josh Wolff and myself. She was in the thick of it in New York, like, right before the Banquet when it was really hitting hard in just north of New York City. And she texts both of us, like, are you sure you want to go? Like, make sure you bring Purell. And I totally was a dick to her. I blew her off. I was like, okay, Mom, whatever.
0:11:21 - JAG: About a month later, I texted her back and I was like, I am so sorry. You were so right. None of us had any idea what was about to happen.
0:11:30 - Ethan: Yeah, we were taking bets on how many jokes about COVID were going to be in the speeches that night. Like, none of us were taking it all that seriously. And then it became super serious.
0:11:38 - JAG: I want to say it was Chris Bungo had just come back from Italy, and Donovan was making jokes about, do we let him in the room, and hindsight being, no pun intended, 2020, we look back now and we're like, whoa.
0:11:49 - Ethan: Yeah.
0:11:50 - JAG: So you had the end of your college career taken away from you in a sense, right?
0:11:54 - Ethan: Yeah, I'd say my college career ended unceremoniously with an email from the Chancellor while we were home for spring break. We were told originally we're going to extend spring break to two weeks, and then during the second week, they emailed us and said, you're not coming back to campus. And it was really like we technically finished the year on Zoom, but at that point, nobody had taught classes on Zoom yet. Nobody knew how to transition it. So classes really just kind of stopped. You were just attending them because you were supposed to, and everything was really scaled back. It was really an anti climactic ending to a college career, especially if you go somewhere like Syracuse. There's a lot going on all the time.
0:12:35 - Ethan: Senior week is a big deal when you're graduating. There's a lot of different things that people take part in, and we kind of just missed out on all that. We ended up getting a commencement in September of 2021, and that was like the closest we had to a real graduation.
0:12:50 - JAG: How did that work? Did they invite you all back to campus to walk?
0:12:53 - Ethan: Yeah, we were all invited back to campus. It was basically just a reunion. They held one giant commencement, and then we broke off into, like, little school activities. But yeah, everybody got invited back. A lot of people didn't make it, which was the downside of that. Well, I mean, there's a lot of downsides of what happened, but postponing like that, it was a good time. We all really appreciated having it, but it just wasn't what it could be because we weren't all there. We weren't actually finishing our career. I mean, all of us had been in our jobs for a year at that point and stuff like that, so it was nice, but it was a weird situation.
0:13:26 - JAG: So did you ever get a last show on Z 89?
0:13:29 - Ethan: Yes, actually, I am one of very few from my class at Z89 that got a last show. And I only got it because I was very good friends with Melody, and she was the GM at the time. All of us had just left campus, so we all had to go back at some point to move out of our apartments.
0:13:46 - JAG: Right.
0:13:47 - Ethan: And Melody was still living in Syracuse full time. I had gone back home, and I came back for a weekend to clear out my apartment. And Melody was like, I'll sneak you into the station and I'll let you do a half hour or an hour, or whatever she gave me for a last show. And that was really emotional because I ended up crying at the end of it.
0:14:12 - JAG: Join the club. Me too.
0:14:13 - Ethan: Yeah. So I was like, I'm not going to cry on air. I'm not going to cry on air. And I held off until the last second, and you couldn't really tell unless you were paying attention, but the people that know my voice were like, you cracked at the end. And I was like, yeah, I broke down the moment I turned my mic off.
0:14:28 - JAG: I remember in 2002, I stacked my last show with a bunch of emotional songs because I'm a crier, and I knew I'd cry, and that's without a worldwide pandemic and being cheated out of my last everything at Syracuse, so I can't even imagine.
0:14:40 - Ethan: Yeah, it was tough. I was very appreciative that I got that opportunity to have a last show, though, because so many people just didn't, and I really feel for them.
0:14:49 - JAG: Okay, let's turn to your life after Syracuse, Ethan. Tell me after graduation, and again, you graduate at the beginning of a pandemic, the job search. I can't imagine what that was like.
0:14:58 - Ethan: It was crazy. And, I mean, I was trying to go into radio, and even before the pandemic, what was at the time Entercom, and iHeart had just had a bunch of layoffs, so I really chose the worst time to try to get into the industry.
0:15:10 - JAG: You picked the wrong year to be born, Ethan.
0:15:12 - Ethan: You know, yeah, I really did. So the job hunt was very slow at first. I was working for a little while just for a family friend that had a small company selling trading cards because it was a paycheck. And then from there, I ended up getting a job at Westwood One, the radio network, doing a corporate job behind the scenes, a lot of emailing, very boring. I was still trying to make the jump back to radio for a little while, like back to an actual station, but there were just very few jobs. And because of the state of everything, there were a lot of people that were a lot more qualified than me going for jobs that were well below what they should have been just because that was the situation.
0:15:50 - Ethan: Yeah. And so it kind of became evident that that was not the moment for that career to come to fruition. So I then made, after I think, eight months at Westwood One, I made the jump to the dark side and joined a PR company where actually my WJPZ skills have come in handy because, like I said, you got to learn to work with your friends. The CEO of my company. I work for a very small startup. The CEO of my company is somebody I know from high school.
0:16:15 - JAG: Oh, wow.
0:16:15 - Ethan: So that was a skill that was very helpful to have, walking into this job because it was an interesting situation.
0:16:21 - JAG: Are you still there?
0:16:21 - Ethan: I'm still there. I've been there a little over a year now.
0:16:23 - JAG: What's your day to day? What are you doing?
0:16:25 - Ethan: Media relations mostly. My entire company is former media professionals in one manner or another that just went straight to the source on that one. So it's a lot of media relations. I work with a lot of startups, so just contacting reporters and such to try to get them to write about my client or whatever.
0:16:42 - JAG: That must be a really competitive space trying to get media coverage for startups where there's so many startups out there. And I'll ask you this, what gives a startup staying power?
0:16:50 - Ethan: There's a lot of things that come into play there and really a lot of it is just happenstance. You got to have the right funding at the right moment and if that doesn't line up, you're going to crumble no matter how good you are. But the one consistent we see is mission based companies are going to do the best companies where the founder has a reason for why they're doing this and the people that are working for them understand that reason and are behind it and are all in on that. Those are the startups that have staying power and they'll figure out how to deal with everything else that comes.
0:17:21 - Ethan: But those have been our most consistently successful clients.
0:17:24 - JAG: I think if there's a parallel to be drawn there with podcasting, it's "know your why." It's why are you doing a podcast? For this podcast, it was to chronicle the history of the radio station and in part drive attendance to the Banquet. There are people who do a podcast who say, I do a podcast because my friend said I'm funny and I should have a podcast. And that's never a good reason to do a podcast. You've got to know your why. I think that's true of anything and that's a really great answer to that question.
0:17:45 - JAG: Are there any stories that come to mind for you that you look back on and still crack up from your time at the station? You've got so many great relationships. You're already laughing. For those who can't see him right now, he's already cracking up. When I ask the question, what stories come to mind that you still laugh about a couple of years later?
0:18:00 - Ethan: I mean, there's a lot and I feel like a consistent trend of WJPZ alums is there's a lot of stories that probably aren't appropriate for a podcast?
0:18:08 - JAG: And also you're young, you're still in the statute of limitations.
0:18:12 - Ethan: I got to be a little more careful. Well, going back to what I talked about before, when I applied, decided to apply for every exec staff position. It was my first time really applying for jobs other than just like part time stuff in high school, you walk in, fill out the application and leave. So I didn't really know what a cover letter was. I didn't know that I needed one and Shruti was the GM at the time, I believe, and during the election, or like right at the beginning of it, she texted me and she said, hey, do you have cover letters to send in with these. And I was like, Do I need those? I didn't know I needed that.
0:18:47 - Ethan: I was like, but if you need them, I can pump some out real quick and send them back to you. And she's like, yeah, if you could, it'll help. But again, I don't really know what a cover letter is supposed to say, so I Google real quick, what is a cover letter? And it's like, it's stating your interest in the job. So literally, for all the positions, I sent the exact same cover letter, and it said, I hereby announce my candidacy for X position.
0:19:13 - Ethan: Signed, move on to the next one. It was just that one line over and over again. So that was also part of why it became infamous, because apparently every time a position came up that I was running for, they would say my name and they would just recite my cover letter.
0:19:29 - JAG: Your one line cover letter.
0:19:30 - Ethan: My one line cover letter. So that was one that became a little bit of lore for the classes around me and I still find very amusing.
0:19:38 - JAG: You and Sam Kandell have had the best cover letter stories so far. If you don't know Sam's story, go back and listen to her episode. It's not published at the time of this recording, it'll be out by the time Ethan's episode is out.
0:19:48 - Ethan: Yeah, I'm going to have to listen to that. There's a lot of just random stuff that happens in the moment. There was one time where I don't know how this happened, but I was on the mic, and the mic popped off its stand. So there's a video somewhere of me just, like, holding the mic up trying, because I'm also afraid to move it because of all the sound that it'll create. And we didn't have the best mic guards at the time to block out wind like that, so I was just, like, holding it in the exact position it fell out in for the rest of the segment. It was just stupid little stuff like that. There was one time this might still be in the statute of limitations, but, oh, well, they can come after me. There was one time we were having an executive staff meeting in Watson Theater, and Baymes. Again, Baymes is six foot eight, he's a big guy. And there was a chair that apparently was a little bit broken already, and none of us realized it.
0:20:42 - Ethan: And Baymes sat down in this theater seat, and it just crumbled, like they just dropped out from under him. And I decided that we needed the seat for the station. So I took the seat and I hid it. I was still the GM at the time. I hid it in my office and I actually still have it sitting in the corner of my room.
0:20:57 - JAG: Oh, my G-d. The broken seat from Watson Theater that Baymes eviscerated is now in your house?
0:21:03 - Ethan: It's now in my house. It is a collectible. I moved and I had a bunch of stuff in my mother's storage and she pulled it out and she was like, you are taking this. I can't believe I'm storing a broken theater seat from your college. Why do you have this? And I was like, we can't get rid of it. I'll take it.
0:21:18 - JAG: Sentimental value.
0:21:19 - Ethan: Exactly.
0:21:20 - JAG: Oh, my G-d. Is there anything, Ethan, that I have not asked you about that you'd like to talk about regarding JPZ career or anything else?
0:21:28 - Ethan: I think it's important to note how great the connections are. We've already talked about this, but the connections you make being at WJPZ are unlike anything else I've really experienced on that great of a scale. Everybody has those friends where you say, like, oh, we could not talk for five years, and we'll pick up conversation like it's yesterday. Yeah, that's literally everybody at WJPZ. I haven't been to Banquet in the last couple of years because I'm a bad alum, but I guarantee that I'll be there next year. I've told enough people that I'm committed.
0:21:58 - JAG: It's going to peer pressure you into it just like Shruti did going to the station in the first place. It'll come full circle.
0:22:03 - Ethan: Exactly. Yes. The three of us have agreed to peer pressure each other into going, so if any of us aren't there, please, everybody else, make fun of us. But I'm sure I'll walk in and it'll be like I never left. It'll be like the last time I was there was two weeks ago when we were all having a great time. And the connections just get you so far. Personally, professionally, I got some great opportunities. I interned at Elvis Duran in the morning show and KYW Newsradio thanks to connections that I made through the station.
0:22:30 - JAG: Who were those connections? Let's shout them out real quick.
0:22:32 - Ethan: Getting me on Elvis Duran was a team effort of Megan Flynn, Kat Brady, and Allie Gold. So thank you all for that. When I was working at KYW, Alex Silverman was the program director, although he swears up and down that he had nothing to do with me being brought on as the intern.
0:22:48 - JAG: Sure, Alex!
0:22:49 - Ethan: Sure. Even if he did step away, having WJPZ on my resume helped there. So you get so many incredible opportunities, both personally and professionally, when you make these connections and you hold on to these friendships.
0:23:02 - JAG: All right, Ethan Charlotte, class of 2020, thank you for your contributions as both a student and an alum and look forward to seeing you in March.
0:23:08 - Ethan: Yeah, thanks so much. Looking forward to seeing you.