If you've got a backlog of several episodes of this podcast to listen to, we highly recommend you bump today's to the top of your list. If you were in Syracuse for this year's Banquet, you heard from two of the all-female leadership team of WJPZ: General Manager Grace Denton and VP of Programming (and Lock Award winner!) Maddie Doolittle. Both women are Class of 2024 and were excited to sit down for a wide ranging conversation about where WJPZ sits now, in 2023.
We start with a bit of background. Grace (from New Jersey) and Maddie (western Massachusetts) graduated high school in 2020. That means they started their Syracuse careers at the height of the pandemic, masked up, attending classes over Zoom, and unable to discover Z89 in the sense many alumni did. Both of them, quite candidly, discuss the temptation to transfer out of SU.
Grace joined the station her very first semester, after meeting then-GM Kyle Leff at an information fair at Newhouse. Soon she got involved with the station's social media - as one of the few things she could easily do during COVID.
In the Spring of 2021. Maddie went to an online info session for the station led by Kyle. And she started training hybrid - both online and at the station.
When Grace and Maddie's sophomore year started in the Fall of 2021, the campus was starting to open back up. There was a pent-up energy to get out and participate in campus activities, and interest in Z89 was booming. Soon Grace was managing social media and Maddie was music director. As exec staff members, they quickly identified the need to make connections with everyone at the station and turn recruits into active station staffers. They both discuss the importance of fostering a welcoming environment.
We have a very frank conversation about WJPZ's place in the current media landscape of 2023. Station leadership is well aware that students who don't have cars are not spending the same time with 89.1 FM, or even the station stream, as previous generations. And while the on-air product remains important, Grace and Maddie see the station's brand as equally, if not more crucial. This has turned into the station associating itself with University Union for on-campus concerts and events, concerts and ticket giveaways for venues all over town, and a robust presence across social media. In fact, the students credit recent alumni like Matt Gehrig and Allie Gold, who run social media for MTV and Elvis Duran respectively, for showing them out to create a brand personality on social.
Maddie and Grace were also very willing to talk about their place as an all-female leadership team of WJPZ. If we're being honest, the station and alumni base are dominated by white men. And while we are taking steps to be more inclusive in our Hall of Fame and Alumni Association as a whole, the same is happening at the radio station. Today's guests are quick to credit the leadership team before them for being allies and always making them feel welcome and heard. And they aim to pay that forward with the classes that follow them.
What about the overall relationship between the current staff and the alumni? Today's guests actually use the term "fangirl" when it comes to how they feel about alums - from more recent grads to giants in the field like Dion Summers and Adam Eisenberg, and more. They felt a true sense of validation when alumni complimented their efforts with the station and are very excited to maintain those relationships.
Take a listen to today's episode, and you'll quickly realize that WJPZ is in great hands. Maddie and Grace are well aware of the 50 year legacy of this institution, and are proud to move it forward into the future.
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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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JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am Jon Jag Gay. We had to bump today's guests way up in the order and record them as soon as we could, after this past banquet in Syracuse. If you were at the banquet when the Lock Award was presented to VP of Programming, Maddie Doolittle, she was very excited and a little emotional, and the first person that ran up to greet her and give her a big bear hug was Grace Denton, the general manager.
And what was so cool about that moment for those of us sitting in the audience, was knowing that feeling of JPZ and that connection and those tight bonds that so many of us had with our classmates over 50 years is still as strong as ever today in 2023. So Grace and Maddie, welcome to the podcast.
Maddie: Thank you.
Grace: Thank you.
JAG: I hope I didn't throw you by that, with that opening there, but it was such an indelible moment in my brain that I'm so excited to talk to the both of you and the women who are leading WJPZ in 2023.
Maddie: I was gonna say, I wasn't expecting the intro. I was like oh. Tears teared.
Grace: Got a little exposed.
Maddie: We're gonna start crying already again.
JAG: The, there was not a dry eye in the house at that moment, for anybody that was not at the banquet this year. Let me start. You're both juniors, you're both class of 24, which means you were seniors in high school when Covid hit, which means you started at Syracuse at the height of Covid in 2020. Explain what that was like because I can't even get my head around it. Maddie, let's start with you.
Maddie: For me personally, Syracuse was one of the only schools that let students come on campus in the fall. So a lot of my friends didn't go to their first year of college on campus and everything, so it was really weird being away from home, I guess, for the first time.
JAG: And Maddie, you're from Western Massachusetts?
Maddie: Correct.
JAG: Grace, you're from New Jersey?
Grace: Yeah.
JAG: Okay. I'm sorry I cut you off. Maddie, go ahead.
Maddie: It was really weird. You were trapped in your dorm because they didn't let you enter other dorm buildings and you had to wear a mask every time you left your room, let alone the building.
I would walk down the hallway to the bathroom and be wearing a mask. It was just really strange. I did not even make friends with the people on my floor. It was a lonely first semester, I'll tell you that.
JAG: Were all classes over Zoom, Maddie, at that point?
Maddie: A lot of them were like 50/50. So half the class would go in person one day of the week and the other half would go the other. And the other half of the class would be on Zoom. So it was fully, like the whole class could have been on Zoom, but they just wanted to get people in person or they were completely online. A lot of time in my nice dorm room,
JAG: Geez. And Grace, how was it for you?
Grace: Yeah, it was tough, really. I fully wanted to transfer freshman year. The first semester I was trying to, the only thing that really got me out of wanting to transfer was just thinking, okay, I'll give it a chance.
And obviously I'm glad that I did, but that first semester was tough. You were very much stuck with maybe three people all of the time, and that's if you were lucky. You couldn't hang out with anyone. Classes were very strange. And I was coming in from a really weird experience because when I was in high school, I was a super active participant in class, super talkative kind of student.
And coming into college I was like, that's what I have going for me. My participation grades will always be awesome. And that just went right down the drain. Even in The Herg (Auditorium) in Newhouse, you had to sit two rows apart from the next person. Couldn't talk to anyone. Classes were very tough with the masks trying to understand people. It was just a complete disconnect. I'm very happy that's over.
JAG: I would encourage anybody who hasn't listened to the episode with Kyle Leff, who was the GM of JPZ through Covid, to go back and listen to that. When were you able to get to Z 89 and discover it?
Maddie: I went to an online information session for Z89 in January of 2021, right at the beginning of the second semester, after I decided not to transfer as well. Stuck it out. My mom said I had to get through a full year, so I went to an information session for Z89. Kyle Leff led it, and I ended up signing up to go through like the training process. But it was really weird for me because none of the training schedules fit with my schedule.
So I would come for one hour a week. Like I would come halfway through and people would be like, okay, I have no idea who this girl is. I didn't wanna necessarily be on the radio. I just wanted to play music and do something, and I was in another group. It was like the Survivor Syracuse group or whatever.
We'd like play a season of Survivor on campus. I got voted out, and the next day I started training for Z89. So it was wow, everything happens for a reason. Findings Z89, like, after getting through clearing, I happened to have the DJ shift right before End of the Week Energy, which is a specialty music show.
That was the first semester it was starting. They were like, hey, do you wanna stay and be on air for the show? I said sure, why not? Because there weren't that many people in the show. It was COVID. No one's there on at 9:00 PM on a Friday night. But I am because I had nothing else going on. Obviously, it's Covid. Who had anything going on?
Joined a show and then it became my thing and the reason that I stuck around.
JAG: If I remember right from Kyle's episode, Z89 was one of the few things actually happening on campus. Grace, how was it for you finding the station?
Grace: I joined first semester freshman year, so there was an outdoor involvement fair from Newhouse.
I remember our peer advisors just dragged us around. It very spread out all across Newhouse. And I also remember Kyle advertising for Z89, doing a table, playing the music. And I did not know it was student run, but I wanted to join. Just shout out to Kyle for advertising it really well, cuz I wanted to join right away. And then I did training and one week would be in person and then the next would be online. So also really strange.
JAG: Grace, lemme stop you for a second. How do you train for JPZ online?
Grace: We did not do a lot of it to be honest. Cuz the first week we came in and tried to learn the board and then the second week I was online, all they could really do was tell us, this is what you don't say on air.
And that was about it. So it's funny cuz I hear a lot of people now who remember everyone who was in their training group or like we just trained and a bunch of our trainees are now friends and do a DJ shift together. And I did not have that at all. I could not tell you a single person who was in my training group and it's probably the people I am best friends with now. And I just don't know cuz I don't remember.
But you could feel that the effort was there. We were trying, but it basically did not accomplish anything for the whole semester because so few people could be there at the same time. And it took longer with the online, so I didn't really do much until second semester freshman year and had a DJ shift and I mostly did social media.
That's how I got started. Because there was an online, probably the same one, Maddie's talking about. The online information session, and they mentioned social media and just texting the social media director at the time, and I already knew him. So I thought, I'm gonna try this. So then I basically had like online Z89 for a semester just doing social media.
JAG: So as Covid kind of wears on, so now we're into the spring semester of your freshman year, which is 2021, and then you come back, fall 2021 as sophomores, things are opening back up a little bit and you're able to do more in person at the station.
Maddie: Yeah. Yeah, I would say so too. That was the semester that I started being music director and we had a lot more shows. That might have been the semester people actually started hearing about Z a little bit more. And we trained like a hundred people or something crazy like that. So a lot of people went through training regardless of whether they stuck around or not. People were hearing about it again, which was a good thing.
JAG: What's interesting is roughly every 10 years or so, throughout the history of the radio station, the staff has had to be rebuilt. So I've talked in previous episodes about when we were in a house in Ostrom 2000, 2001, and that really decimated the staff. We had to rebuild that staff in 01-02, and then the station was rebuilt again in 2012 and they were running out of Newhouse for a semester.
Had to be rebuilt and learn how to run a radio station in person and be live on the air and not voice tracked. And here we are 10 years again, it's coming out of Covid. And you alluded to it a second ago, Maddie, you've gotta rebuild the staff. And it sounds a little bit like maybe there was a, some pent up energy of, I've been stuck in a dorm in Covid.
I wanna get out and just do the things. Was that part of it? And how else did you help, both of you, help rebuild the radio station?
Maddie: That's a loaded question. I think, I mean I've been on exec for a full two years now, so saw it go through that like baby boom kind of deal, of a bunch of people got really interested.
But the thing with that is also, I've seen a lot of like issues in the way that we've retained people or lack thereof. We've gone through a lot of altering the way we train people and altering the connections that we're able to make with trainees and things like that. Making them excited to be on a DJ shift, telling them everything that we know, because if you don't know things or you don't know people, then you have no really reason to stay because you don't feel involved or whatever.
I think one of the biggest things that at least the two of us have tried to do is really make people feel like they belong here and that they have a role here. So something that was developed last spring was we created executive producer rule roles and social media manager roles for every single show.
Like we just wanted, besides the exec staff of 14, that's just 14 people. We have a hundred people going through training every year. What are their jobs? We want people to have roles and responsibilities and take ownership of shows and things like that. So that was the big push last year was to get these people in these roles because they came here wanting to do this.
So let's give them a job to do. They wanna do it.
JAG: You sound like a Lock Award winner right now, because you're talking about how important it is.
Maddie: I wonder why.
JAG: No, because in all seriousness, this is something that we've all learned in previous generations over 50 years, is how do you keep students there? How do you retain people? How do you motivate them to wanna stay involved in the radio station?
Grace, let me bounce it back over to you. What are some of the, if you wanna dovetail off what Maddie was saying, the lessons learned about how to retain people, how to recruit people, and how you got involved with executive staff?
Grace: Yeah. I think going back to what you said, where everyone was so energized to come in, that was part of it that we had a wave of people who, a lot were a lot of Newhouse kids and they knew they wanted to do broadcast to some extent and they would get here and after the training wouldn't really have much to do to get that need, get that want, what they wanted to do with broadcasting and accomplish those goals.
A hundred people would join cuz it was a radio station. It sounds exciting. They get to be on air for all of Syracuse. But then there was just no one for them to talk to. Nothing to do. I feel like I almost could have got swept away in that same trend, because after I joined, I think if I didn't join social media, I would've had nothing to do.
I didn't really know anyone, so I would've probably not stuck around. I was lucky, and then I got very close with the old social media director at the time. And he encouraged me to run for a social media director the semester after that, which was Spring 2022. And being on the exec staff brings you in.
But it's like Maddie said, there's 14 people on the executive staff. That's not enough people to stay engaged. So I know it's been a huge focus for us lately, the past couple semesters to just genuinely get to know everyone. I feel like if we in our roles don't know everyone in a station, that is genuinely a problem.
So we tried really hard to just know everyone's names and know what they wanna do, and now we get to think of people when there's a certain task to do. So it just happened with our trainees. It's something that happens every day. If we have something that needs to be done, we could think, oh, this person that we just trained likes film, he can film this.
For us, it's just care. I think that after Covid, People just got disconnected from the station. But when you come back and put a lot of your life into it and start to care about it again, you wanna spread that to other people and it's just actually being invested in other people. It's not about you, it's about the whole station. Which is important.
JAG: Maddie sounds like a Lock award winner, and Grace sounds like a general manager with what you're saying right now. Grace, how did you climb up through the ranks from social media to become GM?
Grace: It actually happened very quickly, which is funny because I was only social media director for one semester. From the beginning, our executive staff at the time was fantastic, very welcoming, and we all became friends very quickly. The way Maddie and I are now, where we're just booming with ideas all the time and have all these spurts of energy is exactly how we were when we first started. So it's been like that since day one, the first general interest meeting.
So that was a good way to just take it and run. So I was social media director, but I was just really interested in the rest of the station, and doing it with my friends and then the VP of Operations, Ryan Baker. Last spring he graduated, so I ran for that, and was lucky enough and got VP of operations and then we had the elections for spring 2023, and I was not ever planning on running for general manager really when I was social media director.
I never thought that would happen, but it was very sudden the whole process and I had a lot of encouragement from other people, which was very helpful.
JAG: You mentioned Josh Wolgf in your speech at the banquet.
Grace: Yes. He was a big part of that because like I said, I moved up those ranks so quickly. Just social media director for one semester. I was like, whoa, I'm not done yet. But I moved up. And I loved social media director. I loved being VP of Ops, so I was happy with that. But then the opportunity for general manager was not something I thought would come up. And Josh Wolff reached out to me and talked me through it and was very encouraging.
And when I was hesitant I don't think I can run an entire radio station. He, told me I can do it, which was very helpful. A very nice confidence boost, so thank you. Josh and I ran and it all happened very quickly, so just was like a breeze and all of a sudden I was like, whoa. I'm now the general manager and it's been my favorite thing ever.
It's been my favorite job that I've had, so I could not complain. But it all happened very quickly, so I'm just very lucky. It's a lot of time in the station, but feels like nothing.
JAG: I think 50 years of general managers before you, Grace, have all said, I don't think I'm ready for this. So I think that's certainly a good company when you're, 18, 19, 20 years old and you're put in charge of a radio station.
It's whoa, how did this happen? You've mentioned the two of you and how close you are and always having ideas and bouncing stuff off of each other. How did the two of you become so close?
Grace: I actually remember.
Maddie: You do?
Grace: I actually remember. Yeah.
Maddie: Okay. I don't, she joined the executive staff I think, and then I don't even know how it happened.
It was just like very fast friends. We're very similar people and we always have the same ideas and I'll text something and then she'll text the same thing one second later cuz we were typing the same thing. I don't know how we like met necessarily.
Grace: I remember that at the first general meeting we were all at in person Spring 2022. We started talking about track. The whole exec staff at that meeting was very excited because we'd only met online and that was our first day.
Maddie: That was a great meeting too, because the executive staff before that one was not friends necessarily. So once we elected everyone, everyone wanted to be friends so bad.
It was like, this is great. So yeah, it was like that was a whole new environment for me.
Grace: I remember in that meeting we started talking about track because we both did track in high school. I don't know how I remember that, but. And a couple of us, it was like all the, we were sophomores at the point, so our grade, a bunch of us went back to the station afterwards and just started talking. And I had met every single one of those people the same day. And all of a sudden we just sat in the station together and very quickly became friends. And day one started from there. True. And just blew up.
JAG: The documentary that Scott MacFarlane did for the 40th anniversary of the station 10 years ago, talked about the same person being at 89, whether they were the class of 75, 85, 95, 24 in this case.
That Z89 and JPZ kind of attracts a certain kind of person that's usually open and warm and friendly, and these people tend to be like-minded and connected with each other, and it seems like that's the case here,
Maddie: I would say so. It's weird because I haven't met someone with the exact same humor as me ever or anything like that. We will talk over each other and it will not be weird because we're just both we're saying the same exact thing, but we're talking at the same time. People are like, guys, you gotta, one at a time. And we're like, okay. It's very strange, but there are a lot of people like that here where it's I have met my closest friends in Z89. It's really weird. It's weird. It's great, but it's, that's very like, that is so strange that we all ended up in this one place and we're all the same person.
JAG: Typically, I ask alumni, who are the people you met when you worked at the radio station that you've stayed friends with throughout the years? So obviously I'll modify that here a little bit, but who are some of the people that are on your exec staff or on the station staff? I know you don't wanna leave anybody out, but are there certain names that pop to mind that you've got just really great relationships with?
Maddie: Besides Grace, Joe Puccio, we've been like a trio deal for like almost a year now. Another one of the, those people that like has the same exact humor as me and just can talk to about anything. And like Ilana is our VP of operations who started around the same time, like spring 22. She was a freshman. We didn't really know her very well at all, but since then, like she's been one of those people that, okay, you have a good idea. Let's go. Has the same kind of mindset, everything like that.
So I think those are the two that stand out to me in terms of who I've met here and like we'll probably be friends with forever.
Grace: Yeah, those are the two that stand out the most. Us and Joe were very much a trio of the same person three times since the beginning. And then with Ilana being younger than us, we've joked that she's our child.
That we might have corrupted her into our little group because she just joined. We adopt them. Yeah. She joined as a music director, as a freshman,and was so new to Z89 when she got that position. But then all of a sudden we dragged her in and. Is the VP of ops now.
Maddie: It was one of those situations where some freshman will join the exec staff and like they don't necessarily know that Z89 is their thing yet.
They'll do tv, they'll do University Union, they'll do the Daily Orange. So they're doing, spreading themselves super thin, all of this stuff. Ilana was one of those people, we were like, Nope, you're choosing Z. This is your thing now. And she's ridden with it and she loves it. And she's one of the most productive people that we have here, and like the biggest ideas person ever. We were like, nope. You're saying we. We recruited her. We were like hand picking. Thank you.
JAG: Every generation at the station has their own unique set of challenges. Obviously the two of you started in Covid and that was a huge deal. But even now with the radio industry changing so quickly and the increased interest in podcasting and so many different directions to go in.
What is it like for the two of you helping run this radio station in 2023? What kind of challenges do you face? What kind of dynamic is there for folks you know, looking to get a headstart professionally?
Maddie: I think the biggest one is that college students now on Syracuse campus are not listening to Z89.
They are not listening to Z89 on an FM dial because maybe 20% of them have cars. And most of them are not tuning in to the iHeartRadio app or at Z89online.com unless they're a part of the station. So that's a challenge where we've faced, how do we get our name out there as a brand and as a company more than just a student organization, two people who aren't listening to us on broadcast radio?
So we've embraced the idea of a multi-platform kind of deal where we have leaned so heavily into social media so heavily, into just content creation and putting our face in front of Syracuse students. So whether that be tabling at events or The Kid Laroi came here last week and we just MCed out on the quad just because there were people there.
It's like a captive audience kind of deal. We're gonna talk to these people, we're gonna do ticket giveaways with local places and do it on social media because we know that's where we're gonna get our engagement from. I think it's just embracing that idea of being multi-platform, knowing where your audience is, and even though we're a radio station, yes, but social media is so important in terms of radio, especially in the kind of environment we're in.
So we do focus a lot on our on air content. But we focus just as much energy, if not more at this point, into our off-air content, our website, our press, concert photography, videography, reels from on-air content. We don't want our on-air content getting lost in the ether. Not that it's getting lost, it's hitting someone's ears, but it's also content that we can use and use to grow our numbers later.
I think that is one of our biggest challenges is trying to grab an audience that isn't on our main platform.
JAG: I think that's really interesting and very 2023 of you to think of this station as a brand as opposed to a radio station. It's not 89.1, it's Z89 the brand, Maddie, I think it was you who posted on LinkedIn a couple days ago about the Kid Laroi stuff that you guys just did.
Maddie: I did, yes.
JAG: And then interviewing Parmalee, the country band recently. And I'm seeing it across my social media feed. I'm not in Syracuse listening to 89.1, but I'm seeing it pop up on Facebook and LinkedIn and everywhere.
Maddie: Exactly. That's the goal. I think that was another one of the things. Grace should talk about it, but ran on the idea of Z89 and being a brand like branding is a huge part because a lot of the time,
Z89 has been very internally focused, like how do we get people to stay on DJ shifts and like community building within the organization? But a lot of people forget we are a company and we have a big opportunity to be a branded company and make branded content and be like a multimedia outlet. So I think that's something that we've embraced.
Grace: Because it's 2023 and we've just heard from day one. Both of us are Newhouse students and no one is afraid to tell us radio might be a dying industry. And whether or not everyone agrees with that is, up to the individual. But it's obviously competing with streaming to a insane extent where streaming is on top of the world right now.
We have to think about all these kids are coming into college and very few of them are going to think, I want to be a DJ and I wanna go off and work in radio. So the only way to keeping Z 89 alive is to use those other outlets, and the only way to get people from the outside viewing us is those other outlets.
When I started doing social media, that was kind of my only outlet on Z89 because I wasn't really on air at the time. It was just a dj shift. And it was just about trying to capture an audience. And also because of Covid, no one was going to be in station. There weren't that many shows going on. So it was what can we put out there where people still see us?
And I know we compete, like Maddie said, with University Union or Citrus tv, and they are different in that they have their faces out there, their names on everything. And we didn't have the same discovery at the time because we were just on the air or on iHeartRadio and didn't have that many people on our social media.
My goal from that point on was just we need a strong brand identity, not just a random mix of things that we're trying to put together. It needs to be a defined brand identity, a defined station like Maddie said, like you said, as a company, because that's what makes us look real. That's what makes us sit in with huge radio stations that have way more attention than we do.
If we are only acting as this is a club or just something you do for fun on the side, we're not going to get people interested and that is okay, but at the same time, we do still go out on the FM dial. And it's important that if we do that, we're going to do it responsibly. And that's all done by getting more people interested, whether it be by being part of the station or more people interested in listening.
And the best way we've been able to do that is just force ourselves out there, force that we do random things on social media, whether it's crazy or not, just putting up wild things. Maddie and I had one TikTok that we just made for fun and it became like our most popular one. Yeah, so it's just accepting everything, which is how I think we run the station. It's just accepting any reasonable idea and being okay with it, even if it's a little crazy.
Maddie: It was like getting Z89 a personality that other people wanted to follow on social media. It's like I follow my friends on social media because they're my friends.
It, this was so funny. Our design director one time said this. Her name's Laura and she said Z89's social media is like "Z 89 is your best friend."
JAG: Okay. I love that.
Maddie: Where it's. If you think of Z89, you are thinking of ticket giveaways to Westcot Theater or St. Joseph's Amphitheater. You're thinking of ticket giveaways to these places.
You're thinking of funny segment videos from the Z Morning Zoo that they filmed and they posted on Instagram. You're thinking of album reviews from The Appraisal or New Music Monday. That's what you're thinking of because that's what you're interested in. So people interested in music should be following Z 89 and we're trying to prove to those people.
This is the platform that you want to be on and this is the platform you wanna follow, if that's what you're interested in.
Grace: Getting back to the Kid Laroi tabling we just talked about.
Maddie: Recently bias.
JAG: Full disclosure, we're recording this on March 29th. I'm gonna get this out as soon as possible. We are recording this on March 29th. I'm sorry. Go ahead Grace.
Grace: That would be some good context there. We started on a small scale and said, we need our personality to be shown on social media where everyone knows it the same, that people know the iHeart Instagram has a personality, the MTV Instagram has a personality.
Maddie: Shout out Matt Gehrig..
Grace: Yeah this is all other Z89 people.
JAG: Yeah. Matt Ryan, who runs MTV's Instagram. There you go.
Grace: Allie Gold on Z 100 doing their stuff for Elvis Duran. They do it and that's where we get the inspiration from it.
They have a personality on those accounts and we wanted to do it, but the really cool thing was then putting that out into the community around us, and that's why we started branching out into the events and the press, which we weren't doing for a long. time What we just did with when the Kid Laroi came to Syracuse, we just decided that we are going to set up a table and play music and play games, give out our merchandise where we knew he was going to be and we got a ton of followers. We got people entering a giveaway. We got people just knowing that Z89 was a thing that existed.
Maddie: We had people coming up to us asking, when's he getting here? When's he getting here? Is this where he is this where he is gonna be?
JAG: You have that authority.
Maddie: We were like, We were making ourselves the main event. It's also really exciting to note that since we started doing this, we started doing this about a year ago, almost exactly a year ago now, and we've increased our follower count on Instagram by 33% ish.
JAG: Nice. Congratulations.
Maddie: From like 900 to nearly 1300 at this point. It's fully from putting our face in front of people and being like, you're gonna follow us because we do cool things and you like these cool things.
Grace: So we just figured out the ways to make ourselves known no matter what, and honestly demand attention from the people around us. And yeah, that's what changed Z89.
Maddie: Exactly.
JAG: World's greatest media classroom, teaching you how to succeed in the real world. And this is what it looks like in 2023. You're both showing that.
I wanna talk about alumni for a second. You mentioned Allie. You mentioned Matt. Grace, you talked about Josh,
Maddie. I dunno if you remember this, the very first time I met you last year, I think it was at the Sheraton Bar. Your opening line to me was, "Hi, I'm Maddie. I'm from Western Mass and Brian Lapis is my weatherman."
Maddie: That is true. He is my weatherman. Yes.
JAG: That is the very first thing you ever said to me.
Maddie: That's a wild first line from me, but Okay.
JAG: Like basically that was your introduction. Hi, I'm Maddie, I'm from Western Mass. I'm like I'm from Boston. So Great. Cool. Are there other alumni that we haven't mentioned yet that you've had interactions with that you felt have been beneficial to you, that you've learned from, that you've just enjoyed getting to meet? Just on a personal level, anybody that comes to mind?
Grace: So many.
Maddie: So many.
Grace: The first thing that came to mind when you said that was when we were at Banquet. I don't know if it was before or after we had done our speeches and award, or if it was, I don't remember.
Maddie: I know who you're gonna say.
Grace: Yeah. I don't know if it was before or after.
JAG: There's that, they're saying the same thing together now.
Grace: Okay. Noah Sheer, who was the keynoter. Then, Adam Eisenberg, Dion, Ryan Sampson was there. The four of them came right up to us, and I am going to say it, although it might be a little embarrassing that we were a little bit starstruck.
Maddie: Oh my gosh. I'm not embarrassed about that. I don't care. They came up. Noah Sheer was like. Dion was like, you are amazing. I've been looking for you all weekend. Noah Sheer handed me his phone. He said, put your number in my phone. I swear I almost fainted. I almost passed out on the spot.
Grace: I was trying to be like professional,humble.
No. It's honestly to be completely honest, because that's what this is for. We're like fangirls of the alumni. Many of them. When this happened, we were just standing next to each other with Dion and Noah and Ryan and Adam in front of us. Oh my goodness, they wanna talk to us. What is going on?
Maddie: I was like, what have we, what did we do? It's crazy. There's people like we will just casually mention these people on an everyday basis. I swear, I talk about Allie, Corey Crockett, Sam Kandell, Alex Brewer, Molly Nelson, Andrew Winshenk, who wasn't at Banquet, but he works for Spotify now and he's really ralphie really helpful for me.
Ralphie versa, like all of these people we mentioned because we just. It's so strange to sound, but it's like a low level of idolizing. This is not embarrassing because I just respect these people to see them doing things that we could possibly do in the future. And knowing that Z89 was that catalyst for them in getting to their professional careers and like their personalities even it's just super great to see all of these people who are so dedicated to the station and seeing I think the class of 2014, they're like a little friend group still and it's been 10 years almost.
So we're seeing these people and we're like, oh, I'm gonna be the Eileen Spath of the Class of 2024.
Grace: We actually compare them to ourselves.
Maddie: We're like, oh my gosh, we admire their friendship and what Z89 gave them so much. And we understand and we're able to identify that we're living that right now and like hopefully that's gonna be us in 10 years.
So it's really interesting, not only professionally to see the alumni, but just to, on a personal level, see the relationships that they have and be able. Value what we have now before we all graduate and go different places for a little while.
Grace: And I wanna mention this is a personal story more than a professional one, that also completely exposes what we normally talk about. So we mentioned before, us and Joe Puccio are our little trio.
JAG: What's Joe's role?
Grace: He was the sports director when I was social media director, and Maddie was VP of programming. Now he's just on sports staff. We've been our little trio and Joe and I are dating.
And Maddie has said that Joe and I are gonna be Molly Nelson and Alex Brewer, and she's gonna be Corey at our wedding.
JAG: Oh, that's great!
Maddie: Like we're already planned. It's already planned.
Grace: So then we see them and we just think those things, it's like, having a bunch of other sets of like parents that you look up to and compare ourselves to.
Maddie: We made this joke earlier today before this podcast recording. We saw the episode title where it was like Alex Brewer and Molly Nelson's like love story from WJPZ.
And I said, I'll make the hundred year podcast and I'll interview you guys for that.
JAG: Maybe it's for 60. Who knows?
Grace: Yeah, I know. Maybe. No, but we have so many of those. I didn't even realize how much we really put them in our lives. But then also, just completely looking up to what they do. And Allie Gold was the first alumni I was ever told about, and Kyle told me about her because she did social media, he knew I was really interested in that.
So the day I was found out that someone who was on the same radio station as me was doing Elvis Duran, I was like, that is insane. I want to be her. Crazy. And so being so impressed by what she does and so inspired by her entire career was just an awesome thing, knowing that she was also on JPZ, but then getting to meet her and talk to her and the fact that she's just so supportive of everything we do just adds a whole nother level.
And I think that's what's so special about Z89, that we look up to their careers because we wanna do the same thing, but then they'll come and talk to us and say, we love what you're doing, and it is probably the most validating thing in the world.
JAG: Yeah. You're not the only one who feels that way about Allie. She's one of our most downloaded episodes at this point, by the way.
Maddie: Understandable.
Grace: Yeah. Good.
JAG: And to the point you just made, Grace. I told Maddie this in person in Syracuse. We broke into the radio station Thursday night of Banquet. Somebody let us in. And it was Dion and Adam Eisenberg and myself.
Grace: We saw, oh, we saw.
JAG: It was on social media. Dion, who is the head of urban programming at SiriusXM, is looking at the playlist and. "Wow, this is on point. Like they are on it." This team is playing all the right music, they're doing is what they're supposed to be doing. And to hear that you guys hold the alumni in such a high regard is really warming to my heart too.
Because I remember sitting with the two of you at the station, I think on Friday when I was done on the air and I was like, ah, I dunno if they'll want to, but like I'd love to have them on the podcast. Let me ask if they wanna be on the podcast and you're jumping outta your chairs oh my God, yeah, let's please be on the podcast. I'm like, "Yes!, this is awesome!"
Maddie: Oh, we're so excited.
Grace: We have a very deep running love for Z89. It feels like we've been here for 50 years back.
Maddie: We're obsessed at this point. Yeah. Yes. And to touch on what Dion was saying, like I heard multiple times throughout the week, I didn't get to meet Dion until the night of banquet.
But multiple times people were like, oh my gosh, Dion said the programing sounds so great. And like I'll hear like programming compliments from like Corey Crockett who does programming at Audacy and all these stuff. And I'm like, for one, students here don't understand the programming like the alumni do.
If you're not the PD or you're not the music director, you don't necessarily understand how the programming works and everything. All I hear when I'm here is why are we playing "About Damn Time" five times an hour? And I'm like, guys, there's a reason. I'm like, there's a reason. And so. to hear the compliments about the programming actually come from alumni who do this for a living and they understand it.
It's really refreshing because PDs just on its own most of the time when it comes to programming and making the schedule, it's like people don't understand radio programming as much unless they're like really interested in it here. So to hear it from alumni that do it for a living is really insane. It's like one of my favorite parts about Banquet is just being able to talk to people who get it.
JAG: This has been such an awesome conversation. I wanna ask you a little bit of a, I don't wanna call it a loaded or a tricky question. But one of the, I don't wanna say complaints, but one of the shortcomings of JPZ over 50 years has been that for, especially in the first half or so of that 50 years, the station and the active alumni for the most part, are a lot of white dudes. It's a lot of men. It's a male dominated industry. Historically. Historically, the station's been very male dominated. You are two women running this radio station. I'm wondering what your perspective on that is. Cause I feel like also since Allie and some of the folks in the last 10 years, I feel like there's been a really 10 year or so string of really strong women leading this radio station.
Grace: I think the best sign that the people before us were doing a good job is that. I started when I came in. I never felt like there was anything wrong with me joining. I never felt like I was getting excluded. It was very welcoming, which is credit to Kyle for welcoming us in when we applied. And to just all of the women before us who set that precedent that it was okay for us to be a part of it.
I never felt on the outside when I was signing up or joining. Definitely eventually you've noticed that just in the numbers that more males are interested. But knowing that there were people before us who did the same thing and who paved the way, I think is a huge motivator and makes us want to do the same thing and get other girls involved, and that's definitely been a big thing we try to focus on in recruiting and training new members.
I said before, but getting to know everyone's interests and passions and backgrounds makes it that they feel welcome here too. So I know there's a lot of girls on the station who share the same interest of me being Taylor Swift. She is also a fantastic female role model, but just because so many of us looked up to her, that has been one of those connecting factors where we all have the same mindset.
I find all these girls in the station who listen to the same kind of music as me, and then we go crazy talking about it. And I remember last semester I was sitting in on Maddie's training group and they were talking about their favorite songs and someone said something with Taylor Swift and I like popped out of the office and I was like, who said that?
Maddie: Because we are best friends now.
Grace: So it's totally something that we very much try and keep up because obviously we've been through it and we know that other people have been through it. There were have been a bunch of guys running the station and then we're just here, but without the people who did it before us, we would probably have no place here.
So it's really thank you to them for starting it. I'm just very honored that we get to continue it because obviously if it has not been made abundantly clear, we love Z89 and we're very happy
Maddie: Say that again. Say that another time!
Grace: Yes.In case everyone thought we hated Z 89. No, we love it. And getting to welcome other people into it and just knowing that this was something that started 50 years ago and other women made it a place for girls to join and be a part of something special, and that we get to play a role in that. And I know we're, I believe the first full VP's GM group of all girls.
Maddie: All girls. Yeah.
Grace: Which is really great. And we didn't know that was gonna happen. Yeah. And then did after elections and we were like, oh my gosh. That is so cool.
Maddie: Yeah. I think also, so I started on the exec staff in the fall of 2021, and I was one of three girls on a 14 person exec staff. Of all white men.
We say historically, but like this was less than two years ago. I was on a staff of all guys. There was one VP that was a girl, it was Emma, and then I was the music director, and then our legal director was a woman, and other than that, it was all guys. It was really interesting trying to like, not navigate a staff that was all guys, but it was weird too because I was a sophomore and a lot of them were juniors and seniors guys. So like it wasn't an issue like getting taken seriously, but I guess being listened to in a way.
JAG: Okay.
Maddie: I don't know. I don't think it was because of the fact that they were men, but it was just very, it was a very interesting dynamic.
So then the next semester, table completely flipped. We had three men on the executive staff, 11 women. And then from there, I think we had three guys on the exec staff last semester. Yeah. And now we're on a VP staff of all women. So it has been like a culture shift. I don't think it is a hundred percent a gender thing, but to be able to build the respect that we have, not only because we've been here for a while and like we've been through it, but feeling comfortable under people like Ryan Baker and Kyle Leff, who championed any idea that I had.
I think developing the music department as music director a lot of the time, like I came here because I love music and I find a lot of girls who come here because they love music and they want to do things with music. Maybe they don't wanna be a broadcast personality on air, but. I'm not like, I don't champion myself as a broadcaster.
I'm not an on-air talent, but we are. We have the best drive time in the world. It's the tagline. We have the best drive time in the world. It's called Third Wheel.
JAG: And when can our listeners listen to you on the iHeart radio app?
Maddie: Friday's four to six with Joe. It's called Third Wheel. It's really cool.
Grace: Our pride and joy.
Maddie: Yeah, it's our pride and joy.
JAG: Is Joe, or is Maddie the third wheel?
Maddie: See, it changes sometimes actually. It's me in the concept, but a lot of the time when we play a game of "most likely to," It's Joe.
Grace: So every time we get in a disagreement, it's usually Maddie and I on one side and Joe on the other.
Yeah. So I guess it's up to the interpretation. Yeah. That's why you should listen.
Maddie: Yeah. It's a whole thing. Anyway, getting back to the female thing, I think we're very lucky again with the people that came before us. I've never felt necessarily uncomfortable in a room with people who, like all the guys that are on Z89 because we've made the effort to become friends with them. They are very welcoming of everybody that talks to them regardless of what department they're in. That's been a culture shift recently too, especially all of the men on the sports staff. Very willing to speak to literally anybody in any department on the station.
It's just a really welcoming environment overall. So I think that's it. I've never felt any sort of imbalance because I was a woman, and I think that has been because of the culture and the people that have come before us that have made sure that no one ever felt like that.
JAG: I don't wanna end this on a serious topic like this. I wanna end it on a lighter note. And I'm afraid of opening a can of worms here, but I'm gonna ask you both to give me a funny story or two from your time at the station that you still laugh at this point.
Grace: Oh, that is so tough!
JAG: Maddie just fell back in her chair against the wall. By the way, for those of you listening,
Grace: We have so many, I'm thinking of multiple from the past, like two days.
Maddie: That's what I say. I'm like, I could give you like three from the last three days.
Grace: A couple good ones is that I think are funny stories are the way that we force ourselves into any opportunity we want and then it is always a really funny story.
It's things that Z89 deserves, and we are very sure of that, that these are things we wanna do and we deserve them. So if we want something, we will make it happen.
JAG: Give me an example.
Maddie: Like press opportunity kind of deals where it's like, oh, we should go do press for block party or something, but that's never been done before.
One thing that comes to mind, my mind is, SG Lewis is a DJ from the UK who came to the Westcott Theater. And this was like the wildest. This was our first in-person press opportunity, that we'd experienced at least. I was in contact with the manager probably three days before the show trying to get an interview with this guy.
He was like off the grid all day. And what happened was I ended up skipping all of my classes that day, just waiting for an email from this guy, hoping that SG Lewis would come into station and do an on-air interview. What ended up happening was me, the zoo director at the time, and Ilana, the VP of Operations, she was the music director at the time.
We all went to the Westcott Theater, brought a bunch of microphones and things, and stood around waiting for the show to be done. And we ended up doing an interview in the back parking lot of the Westcott Theater at 12:45 AM after the show.
JAG: Wow.
Maddie: Like we ended up doing a pre-recorded interview and then airing it later.
But it's just, we have a lot of like really wild stories like that where it's like we just threw everything against the wall and we're like, something is gonna stick here. And what we ended up getting was standing in a parking lot with mics that look like this one that we're talking into, and just talking this guy outside his tour bus when his manager is I really wanna go to bed right now. And we're like we really appreciate you letting us hound you for the whole day.
Grace: We make it our point that if there's something we wanna get done, we need it to happen. We deserve this opportunity, so we're gonna do it.
Maddie: It's always a funny story too, because we had never seen any of this done before a year ago when we spearheaded the executive staff. Things like this hadn't happened before that. It was like you go on air and then you go home. Now we're like, how do we do everything possible ever?
Grace: Yeah. Literally ever.
JAG: But you're picking up with two things that have historically been true, as I've talked to different generations throughout the podcast. And those two things are one, sometimes it's put together with duct tape and bubblegum. And sometimes it's just way better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.
Maddie: That is my motto. That is my motto. Every time someone asks me to do something, I'm like, don't ask me. Just do it. And then if I have a problem with it, then I'll say no later. It's the same philosophy with if someone wants to pitch a show, don't come to me with an idea. Come to me with a plan.
Cuz if you have a plan, I'll likely say yes. That's the kind of like idea that we've been pushing for everybody for a really long time now is again, ask for forgiveness not permission. Just do it cuz there's a likely chance that what you're doing is correct, or it could be really great.
Just do it. Like Nike says. Shout out Nike. But just do it and then ask for forgiveness later. That's another training motto that we've come up with. I'd rather you make a million mistakes in front of me and I can show you how to fix it than not try it all.
JAG: Wow.
Maddie: I don't know where I was going with that.
Grace: You went past the funny story.
Maddie: Yeah, I know. Can we go back to a funny story?
Grace: I was gonna say, so basical. It ties to the same thing, but we started doing all of the press coverage last spring, about a year ago for University Union's block party. And I'm pretty sure I just texted Maddie and I was like, hey, we should do this. It would be fun.
And she's okay. And Kyle let us do it. And we went and that was another thing. We had no idea what we're doing but, we did it.
Maddie: We showed up with a camera that I bought off eBay and we're like, we'll figure it out. Like Daily Orange and Citrus TV, there were there with giant cameras and like reporters and stuff and we're like, we have no idea what we're doing. Fake it till you make it.
Grace: And because we did that, we all of a sudden became besties with the PR department at University Union. And then we're back for Juice Jam. And Juice Jam was a jam crazy day for us.
JAG: For the older alumni. What is Juice Jam?
Grace: Juice Jam is a music festival, music kind, music
Maddie: festival concert in the fall that's outside on South Campus.
Grace: It's run by a campus organization, University Union, and they get four artists and just pretend it's a music festival, but it's on South campus. And we went and were very determined to get content from Young Gravy cuz he had a song we were playing all the time at that point. We were like right in his face to take pictures.
That sounds awful. But we were trying to get content for Z89 nd trying to get an interview, trying to get whatever we could. I got one picture. It's so funny. It's so funny. He just has both his middle fingers up at me because I had a camera at him.
Maddie: A foot from him. Yeah.
Grace: He's he in my face. He was just right in my face and I had my camera around him and I'm like, smile, smile!
JAG: And he did not feel like smiling. And instead he flipped you off.
Grace: No, it's a really funny picture. And then another thing was we brought a Z89 shirt and we said we're gonna get this to Young Gravy cuz we play his song and it has our logo on it.
Maddie: We wrote our phone number on the tag.
JAG: Hang on. 443-HITS or your actual personal numbers?
Grace: My actual cell phone number. And I would like to clarify that it was from business reasons only.
Maddie: So what happened was we ended up getting a call about a couple hours after we went home from Juice Jam. And it was this random girl that was like, hey, I found your T-shirt, and we were like, Okay. It's for Young Gravy. And she was like, oh, it, I found it on the ground.
Grace: And I'm still to this day, convinced that it was actually his secret girlfriend. Trying to be like, what is this shirt? Why you trying to do? I think he still has it. I am convinced.
Maddie: We're gonna tell ourselves that at least.
Grace: Yeah.
JAG: Wherever your careers take you and you meet up with him later in life, I'm sure he will love that story.
Grace: Hey, you probably have my cell phone number somewhere, so I'll manage you or something. Yeah,
JAG: Maddy Doolittle, VP of Programming. Grace Denton GM, class of 2024. I'm almost choked up now because as an alum sort of speaking for the alumni now, we are all so very proud of the two of you and your staff and everything that you have accomplished and you continue to accomplish to uphold the legacy of the world's greatest media classroom. Hearing the enthusiasm in both of your voices and the personality and the generosity that the two of you have for each other and for the staff and the willingness to bring people in, make them feel welcome and teach.
Is everything that this radio station has been about since the 1970s. And so I wanna thank you both on behalf of the alumni, for all that you do, for the radio station, and for coming on the podcast today.
Grace: Thank you. Wow. Thank you so much. That was very sweet. Yeah, it is. We, every time someone compliments us for upholding the station, we're just like Yeah,
it's just, another day on the job.
Maddie: It's crazy because it's just what we love doing. So to hear people be like, we're so happy that you're continuing this legacy. It's yeah this is what I wanna be doing. It doesn't feel like a job at all.
Grace: This is what we talk about and text about 24 hours a day.
Maddie: It's actually concerning sometimes, but that's okay.
Z89 before class.. That's another motto. There we go. Yeah, there's another liner there.
Grace: Yes 89 over school always. It is such a great feeling to hear that. Do your homework's, doing what everyone else has done and keeping up a good station because we think about it a little too much, so it's very nice to hear that actually does something.