John Ferracane was one of the key figures in the survival of WJPZ when the station was temporarily moved to an off-campus house on Ostrom Avenue for the 2000-2001 school year. With the help of an incredibly dedicated staff and some supportive alumni, we were able to keep the station on the air, then upgrade when we returned to Watson - and the new "Menchel Media Center" in the Fall of 2001.
As the sophomore Chief Engineer, John and the rest of the team arrived at the station's temporary digs on Ostrom in August of 2000. The University had moved all of our ancient, shoddy equipment to a new location. Most of it was on its last legs, and was, as John puts it, "a dumpster fire."
Fortunately, Hall of Famer Dave Gorab, then in New York, came to the rescue. His network had done a massive equipment upgrade, and he donated all of the previous gear. This was able to keep the station on the air while the new studios were built at Watson. Then, John and GM Dave "Peterman" Peterson found a way to trade the extra equipment for new gear for the station.
The early aughts were a very different time than the station's heyday a decade earlier. Facing crippling legal debt and many other issues, the station did not have the financial means to survive long term. John did his homework - he knew there was a time in the station's history where University funding may have meant University control. This was something the station staff vetted carefully, then when convinced that wouldn't be the case, secured funding from SU. And it's thanks, in part, to that funding, that the station has survived and thrived 20 years later.
Finally, John takes us through his career since graduation - from Syracuse to South Carolina, Detroit, Miami, then eventually to ABC's Good Morning America, where he met his wife. Now, he's working for Nexstar, building out their News Nation network, designed to be a non-partisan cable news source.
John's hiring, and always willing to talk to students and alumni. You can reach him at JFerracane@Nexstar.tv.
Join Us in Syracuse for Banquet on March 4th: https://bit.ly/WJPZ50BanquetTickets
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast is produced by Jon Gay '02 and JAG in Detroit Podcasts
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I'm Jon Jag Gay. I think for all of us, when we worked at the radio station, you'd have somebody come in as a freshman and they just had this IT factor about them when they walked in. You're like, wow, this person is going to do good things. This person's going to really have a career.
They just have something about them. That's how I feel about today's guest who is a year behind me. He's from the Class of 03. Welcome John Ferracane.
John: Hey Jag. Thanks. I really appreciate you letting me join. And I think we're gonna go down a path today of things that I haven't thought about in a really long time.
So I'm actually excited to dive in and remember some of the great relationships and some of the incredible things that we did together to keep the radio station on the air.
JAG: Absolutely. So how does a guy from Wisconsin end up at Syracuse?
John: The honest truth is I knew I wanted to be in media. I had worked at a radio station in high school, a tiny little 1000-watt AM station in the middle of farm country in the middle of nowhere.
And I had a sort of an obsession with Peter Jennings. I really thought television and television news was where I was headed. But I loved radio as well. And then I just happened to have a high school teacher that said, have you looked at Syracuse? And I really hadn't, cuz I'm a Midwestern kid. I was looking at Northwestern and I was looking at University of Wisconsin.
Yeah. So that's how it happened.
JAG: How did you find the station when you got to campus?
John: This is a really long time ago. This would've been, I didn't start my first semester cuz I was, look, this is either embarrassing or cool, but I was in the marching band. My first semester there.
Which was fall of 99. So I didn't have any free time. We were constantly marching around the Dome. And so I joined in January of 2000. I went to one of the recruiting fairs in the Schine Underground. That's how I first got connected. And I remember Peterman.
JAG: You come to the station and you really were interested in the tech side of it, I think more than being on the air as I recall. Do I have that right?
John: Yeah. I came in as part of Greg Dixon's engineering department. And at that time there was no money and there was no equipment and there was not much that could be done except we had a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and a bag of have Q-tips. Every other week or once a month, I don't remember.
We would literally pull the cart machines and clean all the shrapnel of magnetic tape. And, there are lots of people listening to this, like in school right now, who have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about right now. But even the carts were old. Some of the carts were probably still from the eighties, and they were the magnetic, little shards were shredding, so we would clean them out with a Q-tip and rubbing alcohol while we were on the air. Like there was probably a moment where you were on the air doing your shift and Greg and I would come in and say, can we take cart machine three? And we'd pull it out and it was all chewing gum and toothpicks and band-aids, that was what it was.
And yeah, I never had a regular shift as a jock, which is probably rare for any, future VP of Ops or GM to never have done a shift. I just got so interested in at that moment, keeping the station on the air. We owed $50,000 to a law firm. We had FCC problems. We had the microphones were falling apart and duct taped.
The Wheatstone boards were falling apart. Recruiting, like we had so many other problems at that point. I had been a DJ in high school. That wasn't the thing that was really interesting to me at that point. Yeah, I never had a regular shift.
JAG: What I love about the podcast here is that we're not talking, there's people who were on air, we're talking to you who did all different things at the radio station.
Like you said, toothpicks and bubble gun and duct tape in that final year in the Watson studio there in 1999-2000, and then it really hit the fan in 2000-2001 when we were temporarily relocated to a house on Ostrom Avenue while they built us a brand-new studio. This is probably a long, loaded question, but take me through that process as best you can remember.
John: So Watson was a dump. The carpeting was ripped up, the walls had, 20 layers of paint on them. Everything was crumbling. The ceiling tiles were falling apart. It was tiny little space. It was a small studio and an even smaller production studio and one tiny little office that I remember Matt sitting in that he could barely turn around in, and that's about it.
And just a hallway of dumping ground. And so we needed to get out of there. And I think the university recognized it, that whole area, which included UUTV at the time. And the dark rooms and whatever it needed to be gutted. And I think that the folks at the dark rooms got a grant. And they gutted the whole thing and built a terrific new facility, I think, most of which is still there now, but they needed to get us out of there so we could operate from someplace for a year, and I felt like the project manager. When I was in school, I wouldn't even have known what a project manager was, but I remember meeting with the general contractor with, the team from the University who was overseeing it with student services and then alumni who helped us, and we'll get into that story too, I think.
But what I remember is we all disappeared in, May of 2000 and went home for the summer. The engineers from WAER moved us over. They essentially shut us down for a day or two and picked up the Wheatstone boards that were practically falling apart. Yep. And I remember, I think we had, you'll remember this, we had one Sennheiser studio quality microphone.
And the windscreens were popping off, and I think there was electrical tape around it. And you'll remember the story. I'm not gonna say the name, but somebody got a bloody nose that bled all over that microphone.
JAG: That is in a previous episode of this podcast. You can go back to the September 11th episode. We ended on a lighter note where Peterman told the story of Bosse bleeding all over the microphone.
John: He was doing a sportscast or something. Anyway, we had the CD players were falling apart and nothing really worked. And so they picked up the crap that we had, and moved it to this, I don't know, I would call it like a shithole house on Ostrom Avenue.
There were a couple sororities there. And then the University I think had bought up all these, probably a hundred-year-old homes.
JAG: And I wanna say the Daily Orange was a couple doors down.
John: Yeah, exactly. And they had university offices in 'em, and most of them, they like gutted the philosophy department's offices were there.
And a lot of them could have been beautiful old homes. But this one was not. This one had a couple of disgusting bathrooms, hadn't been painted in years. Like the studios were in bedrooms upstairs, they cut a hole in the wall between two of the upstairs bedrooms, which was where the production studio and the On-Air studio were, and put a piece of like plexi in there.
They didn't consult any of the students about what we needed. They just threw it in there cuz they knew it was temporary. And this is a crazy story, but I remember. Jana made me cookies because she said we basically, this, the radio station had a terrible buzz on one of the channels. Like the right channel sounded fine and the left channel was, there was a hum underneath it. Which, to any normal person would make the radio station completely unlistenable. It would've sounded terrible, but I think we were all listening and dealing with it cuz we thought, how are we gonna fix this? So I went and found the engineer at WAER, Nick, and built a relationship with him and, was it the connection at the Mount, was it the connection at Ostrom?
Was it something in between? And I somehow convinced him to go figure it out because I couldn't have access to these areas. And he had it. It turns out a manhole had filled with water.
JAG: Oh my God. That's right.
John: There was water dripping out one of the circuits that created buzz. So they pumped that out and then we, so Jana made me cookies cuz I solved it.
JAG: And that strange year to, just to give you an idea of the hierarchy of the staff. So you were the chief engineer I was VP of Ops, cuz nobody else was gonna do it, and Jana was the program director.
John: She was like, nobody's listening to my radio station because there's a terrible buzz on the right channel who can fix this?
So I went and fixed it. But that was just a symptom of the fact that the radio station had no money. It hadn't had any investment in any equipment in, I wanna say decades, probably by that point. This is fall of 2000 when we're all back from the summer and we're all just getting back to the fall and we're like, oh wow, we're in a new place.
And like the equipment's just as bad and the environment is even worse. And you're trying to recruit people. into this dumpster fire of a place that's literally, it shouldn't even be on the air. It was so bad. Remember the CD players would skip, the CD carts would get jammed in the machines.
There was nothing computerized. There was no automation. There was no playlist. Any spots we were running, spots. I don't even know how we were editing them and then transferring them to a cart. There was nothing.
JAG: As is the case with many times in the history of the radio station, we relied on alumni for some help. We got to this place and tell us how we ended up getting some equipment improvements.
John: The thing should not have been on the air because it was technically such a mess. And as part of that, move to Ostrom. There was a little bit of a Christmas present. We came back to these terrible situations as far as the buzz and a bloody broken microphone and CD players that skipped.
But we also had an alum. It was Dave Gorab who was working at Sony Radio Networks at the time, and they had just gutted everything in New York and they were modernizing and he sent us three gigantic Arrakis systems consoles and two, like 500-disc changers. And some new CD players and maybe some new cart machines and minidisc recorders and players.
So something that probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars initially, and probably didn't have much value to a massive radio network. But was very valuable to us. However, it was like, I think Dave drove up a van in the middle of the night and dumped it in one of the spare rooms in the house,
And then was like, you guys figure it out. Cuz I'm not a tech guy either, right? So I remember walking in and I'm like, oh, there's this new stuff. Okay, the CD players can go in quickly. We can put the CD players in, we plug this and we plug that. And I'm not an engineer, like I'm not.
JAG: Really? Could have had me fooled.
John: I figured it out, again. Many current students, Aren gonna understand this, but the internet wasn't what it was. You couldn't find every single manual on a company's website. You couldn't interact with people with like live customer service chats like that didn't exist. Then you had to do pound the pavement.
Even emails were spotty at that point. You had to call people. I remember we put the CD players in and I remember seeing these boards with all the IO modules, which are essentially, the pots with the faders on them and you can customize how they go, right? Yeah. You can have 10 input modules and then an output and then this and that.
And Rob Crandall and I, who, he was a freshman at the time and he had a very good tech mind. He was in Newhouse like I was. He was a step ahead of me as far as tech went and the two of us called Arrakis and found somebody who would befriend us and like the whole, Hey, we're these college students story, in Colorado
He faxed me a few pages of the manual of this thing that was, even at that point was still probably eight or 10 years old, and Rob and I figured out how to put the boards together and figured out how to wire them. And we pulled out the Wheatstone boards that were on their last legs.
Rats had chewed on the power cords for those things, so we put these newer boards in and we like shut the station off for a night and switched from one to the other. Late fall or winter some, something like that. And then we brought in the mini disks, we got rid of the cart machines and all production record went to the mini discs.
And then we played out commercials... spots, sorry, on mini disks. Sponsorships. So we replaced the backup studio, the production studio, and I think we did the On Air studio. And I remember we were halfway through it all. And this is like kids being driven by Dunkin Donuts.
Yeah. And we didn't know what we were doing. Many people were listening to this will understand what out of phase is. But many won't. So I didn't know what it was at that point. I should have known what it was if I'm rewiring a whole radio station. But the founder of the radio station, Craig Fox, owned the Radio Disney station in Syracuse at the time and had lived there for a long time and was a loyal listener.
The phone rang when I was in the process of rewiring this and he says, you're out of phase. And I'm like, who is this? What are you talking about? What does that mean? Cause I didn't know. He talked me through what to do to fix it. We fixed it. And still in less than stellar physical space in this house, we finally got back to the point of, okay, we can operate, yeah, CD players work.
We can create sponsorships and play them back on mini discs. I still did get calls about the mini disk jamming in the machines on my cell phone in the middle of the night. When I was living in Lawrinson that year, I do remember that. But we got back to the point of okay, the place can operate. Yeah, we're gonna survive.
We don't have a terrible buzz. And long gaps in programming because the equipment is just so bad.
JAG: We weren't losing their station under bridges like it was on AM anymore. Remember that was a problem at one point too. And I do remember stuff actually working, being there over winter break that year, that 2000, 2001 winter break because we split it, I remember, three ways. Where we had Paul Chambers took the first third of the break. He was our GM at the time. I took the middle of the break as, hey, let the Jewish kid work on Christmas. And then Brett Bosse ran the station the third third of the break. And we ran these high school kids ragged trying to keep the station on the air.
And I remember one of the early days of automation at the radio station, I got my hands on a five-disc CD player. And I burned five 60-minute CDs with a legal ID at the beginning of each one so we could rotate our five-hour overnight shift, even if every hour you heard whirrrrr.
And then I remember I was down a CD because of the CDs I burned. I realized I used the album cut, not the radio edit, of Eminem's Stan with all the swears in it. So I had to pull that CD out of the rotation. So we were, like you said, duct tape and bubblegum. But then we got back in the spring, we were back to our full staff and we kept the thing going.
John: I know that there were glory days of the radio station that, people were beating down the door to come in and they were giving away cars and they had amazing promotions team, and there was zero problem staffing the radio station around the clock. In fact there were probably people competitively fighting over the overnight shift.
And that was, late eighties, early 90. This was a different time period. It was just a different world and the facilities were a dumpster fire, so recruiting was harder. Interest in the radio station was different. We were doing what we could at the time to get by because I think interest level in the radio station and technology and the internet, so many things had changed between the late eighties, early nineties time period, which I think anybody would agree was the pinnacle of the radio station versus when you and I were there.
JAG: Which is what's cool about doing the podcast is we are highlighting all these different eras of the station. One year they're giving away cars to the New York State Fair. The next year we're on a five-disc changer overnight, and, swapping out bloody microphones and cart decks for mini disk players and donated equipment from Dave Gorab over at Sony.
John: Yes, but let me interrupt you there because, but the point here that I wanna make is that it's still evidence that it's the greatest media classroom in the world because it's not just the on-air product, media classroom, or it's not just the promotional media classroom. It's engineering. It's operations, it's leadership, it's recruitment, it's solving problems, right?
Like I've had a lot of jobs and worked all over the country. And I will absolutely tell you that the things that I learned at WJPZ- make a to-do list of all the problems that we had when I walked in there. And you were a big part of it. And Peterman and Matt DelSignore, and I could go on and on, about how many people roll up their sleeves and put their brain power together.
The station shouldn't have been on the air and the station shouldn't have even existed in that timeframe of, 2000, 2001. But we figured it out and became problem solvers and made it continue to exist. Technically, operationally, we adjusted to technology. We needed to be putting in computer systems, that could play music.
Just to educate people who wanted to go into radio, who were gonna work at Clear Channel or Citadel or whatever. At that time, they needed to understand how the basics of automation worked and we saved the radio station from going under. We saved the radio station from the University taking it over.
We saved the radio station from the FCC probably pulling the license from lawsuits for not operating properly. All those things were in play at that time, and, I learned an ungodly amount about how to solve problems and how to bring people together, people who know nothing and have just enthusiasm and interest and that would describe me.
I knew nothing. I was on the phone with lawyers and pulling FCC documents. I didn't know anything about that. You didn't either. Neither did Peterman and we kept the thing going, so we're still having the conversation today about its future and its history and how it's servicing Syracuse University students right now,
JAG: I should mention, as an aside and talking to alumni from the 2010's decade.
The next time they revamped the studio, they actually put them on out of voice track studios in Newhouse. I think there was a lesson learned of don't put 'em in a house off campus cuz that's not gonna serve the station well. But same thing, history kind of repeating itself. They were in voice tracked and studios and Newhouse.
They had a skeleton crew. By the time they came back to their new station, they had to start recruiting all over again because they had a skeletons crew that didn't have a home and a radio station. So we get to, what was my senior year? Your junior year? We get to our new Menschel Media Center. And it was like Christmas cuz we had like new state-of-the-art stuff.
John: At that point it was because we had a stunning space. We had a production office, we had a, a GM office. There was storage space. We had a beautiful, huge studio. We had a production studio. Everything was pristine. Literally pristine. I remember the soundproofing on the walls was this crystal beautiful white.
And it didn't last that long. It got very dirty and ripped up. But it looked beautiful and we could recruit and we had like bumper recruitment classes. Having the facilities was a big part of it. When you walked into Ostrom or the old Watson, it was embarrassing and gross and you didn't wanna be there.
And this was, there was energy from the existing staff because everybody was excited and proud. And that translated into a hundred new people who showed up to the recruitment and were interested. And then when they actually get to the station, Then it's oh wow, this is special. This is great.
There's something happening here. There's momentum, there's technology. People are solving problems. It was night and day. I remember, being part of the group that wired the new station, and again, like this is something that the University should have helped us out on. They should have hired real engineers, but it was students, it was me and it was Rob and it was like a friend of mine from high school and it was Stephen.
And we designed the console desk that was in there. And I remember I screwed up the measurement. The board did not fit in there. I based the measurements that I gave the contractor on a manual and the actual board was different cuz the meter bridge was different. So it was six or eight inches off or something.
And so we had to cut the end of the thing of the actual formica. But anyway, we were just figuring it out with our own ingenuity and our own blood, sweat, and tears. So we wired that whole radio station. And one other thing that you and I had chatted about is there was a lot of leftover gear from the Gorab donation.
There was an extra board and a bunch of IO modules and these huge CD changers and stuff I don't even remember, but stuff that we didn't have space for and couldn't use, but I knew it had some value to it, in the early days of the internet here, shopped around and found this gentleman in North Carolina, a really southern gentleman who said, oh yeah, kids, you drive that stuff down here and I'll give you a couple thousand dollars for it.
And so Peterman and I rented a U-Haul or a Ryder truck or something. And drove all night, and Katie Bell was VP of Business at the time and she was like, stay in cheap hotels, don't spend any money. Make sure that like you come back with a check. And she was right because there was debt at the time.
There was a lot of debt. So we drove down there and sold the stuff to this gentleman. And we ended up secretly, I think, spending all the money with trade. So we came back with a new set of Electro Voice studio monitors and two or three Shure studio microphones and, but it was stuff that we desperately needed, so that key donation.
And the ingenuity and the, just the work ethic of me and a team of others, getting it in place and figuring it out and then selling the rest and buying other new equipment that we needed desperately at the time. That was actually a turning point.
JAG: There's a previous episode interview with Dave Gorab, and I'm mad at myself for not remembering that it was Dave who made that donation asking about it on the podcast, but I'm glad we're giving him his props here for as much as he's given to the radio station of time and effort and donations.
That really was huge for us at the time you're talking about, money and being strapped for cash. So you become VP of Ops your junior year, and then GM your senior year. A decision that I think was controversial at the time but needed to be done in retrospect was a two part of it.
We ended up taking the radio station off the air somewhere of 2002, which was right before your senior year. I had just graduated, and then making the decision to go back to University funding, which had been done in previous iterations of the station many years ago, but realizing that to keep this thing going so we weren't duct tape and bubble gumming everything.
We actually needed University funding. Talk to me about that decision.
John: I think anybody who's worked anywhere in this business and radio and television and whatever it is, in any business really, gear has a life. You have to replace it. You have to have a capital expenditure plan.
To replace your boards and everything. Things don't have infinite lives. And what we put into, Ostrom and Watson and what was the heart of the radio station, those Arrakis boards. They were okay and 10 years old already, and we needed a sustainable system to keep the radio station going. And more than that, what my plan was, and I remember having lots of conversations with Scott Meach at the time because I think the general feeling of the alumni association was, and they weren't wrong because of what they had experienced.
They had experienced, when you take dollars from the student association it wants to control you. Yeah. And that happened. That happened. And that stunk because it's not a University owned radio station. It is a student organization, but. Again, the university, the student body, everybody was at a different time.
Technology, it was all at a different time. And I was pretty confident after having conversations with the VP of Student Affairs and even the Dean of students, I remember talking to and the head of the student organization that's not what they wanted to do. They did not want to control us.
So I vetted that because Scott and I and many other alums had other conversations. And my goal wasn't to just keep the radio station on the air and get a couple bucks. Like I didn't want 20 grand to replace this widget and replace that thing and whatever. And what we did was we shot for the moon, and I think we asked for $300,000, 25 years ago, 20 years ago.
And we got most of it. And that allowed the station to flourish. We replaced the boards with state-of-the-art brand new boards that you would find at Z100. . We put in a real computer system where you could play your music and all your spots from a computer. I'm not gonna say the word automation.
Replaced the microphones. We put in better studio monitors, like we gave the sports department a fighting chance. They had a 25-year-old Comrex system that worked over telephone lines. We bought them a system that allowed it to transmit high quality audio over IP, over a phone line. Survival of the radio station, it was gonna get figured out, right?
I was there at a pivotal moment, but I guarantee you, if it hadn't been me, it would've been somebody else, just because that's the way the place has operated since the early seventies. What I wanted to do and what I was pretty confident that university wasn't gonna take over any editorial control, creative control.
What I wanted to do is set the station up to succeed for the long term with wonderful facilities and technology that people would be able to learn and grasp in college, that they would then see at Infinity or wherever they were going when they graduated in 02 or 03 or 04, whatever the case may be.
JAG: I think that's key because again, in talking to alums from the two thousands and the 2010s in this podcast, they've talked about going out and broadcasting high school football games. They've talked, to your sports point, on all these different things that the way the medium landscape had changed at that point from, 1990 to 2003, 2004, we needed that money to modernize the station.
If you graduated, you would know how to use the equipment at whatever job you got. And I think in many cases, thanks to that funding, some students and some guests in this podcast have said the equipment at JPZ was better than anything they got to in the real world, wherever they started.
John: Yeah. Or at the very minimum was at least a bridge.
And they may not have had the performance talent yet, but they knew how to run the machine. They knew how to run the computer, and that was a shoe-in where we're a clear channel and some small market said, hey, come work here cuz you, you've used this before. And look, I know that there are probably still, alums who predate me, who, think negatively on our decision to go back and ask the student association for funding.
But I think we went to them in 02 because here's the funny thing. I wrote the proposal, I came up with the budget and this was spring of 03. And we put it through and I got it. And then I graduated, right? So none of the fun part of putting all that shit in service. And seeing the place go from like a broken-down Yugo to, an okay Ford Taurus to a Ferrari.
I never got to experience that. But I know a lot of alums have, mixed feelings about that. But I think it was the right decision and we started implementing in 03, and you and I are sitting here having this podcast conversation in 2022. So by my count, that's 19 years. I don't think there's been a problem.
I don't think there's been a point where anybody's ever said, knock knock. Hey, you can't have this person on here. You can't run that song. You can't do this kind of programming. You can't do this.
JAG: And I think that's a credit to the University too, when they realize that having a state-of-the-art WJPZ could be a great recruiting tool for high schoolers who come and see this radio station.
John: You and I both know that in every recruiting brochure of Newhouse and Syracuse University, there is we have two or three campus radio stations. WAER WJPZ. They use it to market and recruit and it was a dumpster fire and they did nothing about it until we rattled the cages and I will say you're right, it was a credit to the university, a bunch of people's names.
So I don't remember. But Chuck, I think Merrihew, ran Student affairs at the time, and he was a good partner. There were people who recognized it that it can't just be a regular old student organization because there's an FCC license. Yeah. It's not the same as, whatever else, whatever dance troupe or you name it, you pick whatever the other intramural sport or whatever.
Yeah. It's not the same. There's a federal license, so it's a little different. And when you're gonna use it to recruit, you've gotta put a little bit of focus on it and energy into it. But I agree with you. They stepped in and helped us out and they worked with me and we fixed all the legal debt that we had and fixed a bunch of stuff. But then left it alone.
JAG: You referenced earlier, John, the lessons you learned and how it applied throughout your career. Take me through your career after JPZ, cuz you've had a heck of a run. You've produced television in major markets, you've worked the network level, you've got a bunch of projects since. Take me through your journey since Syracuse.
John: The beginning of my career and JPZ intertwined my senior year when I was GM. I was also producing newscasts at Channel three. I produced the six and 11 o'clock newscast on Saturday and Sunday at the NBC station in Syracuse. I was very lucky to do it, and so by the time I graduated in May of 03, I had a year's producing experience under my belt in market 80.
I remember that time, that was a crazy time. I knew that I would have zero days off. I worked over the weekend and I had meetings at the radio station all day Friday, and I think our senior staff meetings were like Tuesday or Wednesday night, and between school and it was a crazy year.
But I think it set me up to succeed as far as career goes. And it also taught me work ethic. If you wanna get ahead, if you want to get promoted, make more money, be able to be involved in bigger, better projects. You have to sacrifice and you have to work hard. Yeah, that's the one thing that I would really like to tell people who are younger, who I'm hiring now and working now, and those who are in school.
So I worked in Syracuse then I jumped to a Hearst Station in South Carolina for about a year. Then I jumped to WDIV in Detroit, which I spent a very long time there, almost eight years working there. I know you, you're in Detroit and I think we just missed overlapping actually. I left in early 2011.
You and I have a lot of love for Southeast Michigan and Metro Detroit. And I love going back there. That was where I learned to really do TV. I learned how to interact with really fabulous talent. I produced the morning show, then I was consumer investigative producer. Then I was the EP of the Morning show, and that was where I also first learned I learned live television as a producer there.
I learned investigative reporting, I learned storytelling. And I learned leadership at 28 or something. I was running a morning show in Market 10 at, a really strong station. And then I decided I was 30 years old and needed to get out of the cold weather. So I moved to Miami, worked at WPLG for a couple years and was an EP there and loved that.
And that was an ABC station. And that became a bridge to ABC News in New York. And I was about 32 in 2013. Got a dream job. And the timing was perfect. It was a dream job, and it was the perfect fit that I got the job as showrunner of Weekend Good Morning America. I could oversee the team, I could oversee the budgets, I could run the show day to day.
And it was a big enough role that I, that it was a major challenge and I had autonomy, but it wasn't so big that it was too much for me. It was right on that line. But I was able to go in and really successfully run weekend GMA. While learning how to do the weekday show and then I moved over and was doing the weekday show as the number two in the morning.
One of the ninjas in the control room every morning, who's making all the decisions like 2015, 2016, the crazy time when Trump was running in that crazy election. And every single morning there'd be a new headline that would come out and we'd blow up the show. So I learned a ton there at ABC News, everybody is the cream of the crop.
Everybody has an Ivy League degree. Everybody's traveled the world. Everybody will put their personal life to the side and work to make the product better. It was an inspiring way to, work with George Stephanopoulos and David Muir and a lot of the just unbelievable journalists and leaders there.
I met my wife. And we decided after five years of it to walk away and decompress and take some time off. So we lived out of suitcases for about a year and hiked in Montana and Wyoming and Big Sur, California, and spent some time in Hawaii and went to Mexico and reconnected with family that we'd ignored for, the five years we'd been at ABC.
And then decided we're gonna move to California and spend some time in San Francisco and landed in Los Angeles. And I was again, I think my relationships, and I'm saying this not to toot my own horn, I'm saying this hopefully for, young people who are listening. My relationships and my work ethic helped me reinvent, from news into entertainment and that doesn't happen that much. I think the West Coast entertainment producers and leadership and that whole Hollywood thing doesn't necessarily understand news in New York and how that works, certainly not on the scripted side. I was always on the unscripted alternative side, but did a show for Fox Entertainment and then did another one, and another one, and did a project for Vice and did a project for YouTube Originals.
And just through relationships and, having good conversations, one thing led to another and was building a. Book of work there in LA. My wife lives in LA. I still have a home in LA but about a year and a half ago, another old relationship came to me and said, hey, I just got a job building News Nation in Chicago.
We're turning this old cable channel, WGN America, which now runs reruns of Tim Allen and Tom Selleck. We're peeling away this syndication and we're turning it into all news. Because the world needs an unbiased news source. CNN and MSNBC or this and Newsmax and Fox and whatever are on the other side, and the world needs a non-combative nonpartisan, hey, let's just stick to the facts thing. I joined him summer of 2021, thinking that I was gonna help launch a morning show cuz they had some programming in the evening and they had nothing in the morning or during the day at the time. And I'm a Midwestern kid, my wife is from Chicago.
I thought, I'll spend three or four months in Chicago staff this thing up, build it up, and then, make my way back to the sunshine of Los Angeles. And to be honest with you, the project of building and creating, hire a talent, hire an EP, work with them, build the staff, create the graphics package.
Figure out the rehearsal schedule and how we put this thing on. What's the format? What's the brand? How do we do this and that? How do we market it? Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat every three or four months. It became too attractive. It became too interesting. It was a no-brainer fit for both me and NexStar.
So I'm really appreciative that a NexStar is letting me partner with them and do this. We're part of the way there. We're hiring, so either kids in school now, or any alums at any point. I'm looking for people in New York and Washington and Chicago and our bureaus around the country. Big thinkers and people who wanna work hard.
JAG: You've hired JPZ alumni in previous roles.
John: Oh, no doubt in Detroit, in Miami, in New York at ABC, absolutely no doubt. I have nothing but really positive feelings about WJPZ. I've given back a little bit. I need to do more. I need to come back more. I need to be more available.
JAG: Please come back to the banquet.
John: It's really about the interaction with students and how I can help them. Yeah, so I hopefully current students will listen to this and maybe take a little grain of something that I did and realize I'm not gonna do it that way, or I am gonna do it that way. I need to figure out how to get more involved and get back into it.
JAG: Are you comfortable sharing any contact information for folks to reach out to you if you're hiring?
John: Yeah, for sure. My email address is JFerracane@nexstar.tv. Nexstar has only one T. Yeah, I'm happy to jump on the phone with people. I'm happy to take resumes and have conversations.
A lot of it, I'll probably ship you off to the right department, but I would really love to get back in more engaged in Z89. And I feel deeply about preserving it and making sure that it's at its fighting weight for the future. So it can do what it did for you and for me and for all these other names that we've talked about. It's launched careers, it absolutely helped launch my career and put me in a way better place at every moment of critical thinking.
JAG: Since you bring it back to WJPZ. Last question for you, is a two-part question. Are there relationships from the station that folks you still stay in touch with? And if you can think of one, give me a funny story from behind the scenes at your time at the station.
John: I think Josh is probably my closest at the moment. Josh Wolff. Jana Fiorello has been a good friend, and Matt DelSignore. We had a few great dinners when we were living in San Francisco cuz he's there and I feel like I could pick up the phone and call Peterman at any time. And honestly, Scott Meach is somebody who I consider to be somebody who was foundational in teaching me stuff.
He and I butted heads when I was GM and he was president of the Alumni Association, but I feel like the two of us came together at a time when he was building the Alumni Association into something. It was a drinking club for a long time. And Scott did fundraising and smart financial investing, and he and I actually are the two that put our heads together that came up with fall conference because I told Scott, most of the students see the alums as folks who like to come back and throw a few back and be nostalgic.
And I said, how do we figure out what's the next bridge? How do we get the alums to interact better? So Scott and I came up with that and we did the first one.
JAG: We have a previous episode of the podcast with Scott Meach and talked about building out the alumni association. So I'm really glad you mentioned that.
John: He did a terrific job. He took it from a social organization into a real powerhouse and helper of the station and the students. That is 100% Scott, and he mentored me and helped me out with a lot of different things. I picked up the phone as GM many times and talked to him. And he was always fair and really classy about everything that he did and taught me.
So I would say Scott was another person. A funny story? The Bosse bleeding on the microphone is a pretty funny, hilarious story. But any story that involves Peterman is funny. Marty D was always a crackup. There isn't anything that's popping directly into my mind.
JAG: I'll give you one, cause I had one in the chamber if you didn't have one at the ready. So I remember we'd had a party on South campus. I wanna say it was Jana Fiorello's apartment.
John: Oh, I know this. All right, go ahead. This is embarrassing, but go ahead.
JAG: So it was a weekend party, and then I think it was a, you'll have to help me with the details here. I think it was a Monday night. And we had half a keg left and we're like we're college students.
We're poor. We don't wanna waste beer. Hey everybody come down to the apartment on Monday night. And let's try to help finish the keg. And there was just too much beer left in this keg for the group that was there. And John Ferracane, as he did, as he stepped up whenever he was called upon at the radio station, stepped up.
And I don't know how much of that keg you drank, but you were gonna make sure that we didn't waste the beer. And I just remember all of us being in awe. I dunno if it's your Midwestern roots or what it is, but you finished so much of that keg because as with your time at the radio station, there was a job that needed to be done and you were sure to finish it.
John: That's completely true. It was at Jana's House, Jana's South Campus apartment. And I didn't go to the initial party. I wanna say it was a Saturday night. And then everybody was probably hungover Sunday and Jana was like, oh I've got a keg of beer that's swimming in water, no longer ice, it's room temperature or nearly room temperature.
And I think we watched Monday Night Football and sat around and watched a game or two. And drank that beer. And I don't, I drank a lot of beer that night. That's all I remember. And I do remember. There probably are old photos someplace of us lifting the empty keg up over our heads.
JAG: Well, John Ferracane, thank you so much for your contributions as a student, as an alum, and for spending a few minutes today with us on a Saturday as we're recording this. Always a pleasure to reconnect and we'll talk soon.
John: Yeah, same. Back at you. And thanks for all the work you're doing on this. This is probably gonna amount to thousands of your hours that you're giving back to Z89. So thanks for that. And I can't wait to listen, to pour through, all my friends and all the great stories about the history of the radio station.