In the 50 year history of WJPZ, there have been many trying times and events. But dealing with a once-in-a-century global pandemic was certainly a first for the station. That's what Kyle Leff, Class of 2022, walked into when he was elected General Manager in the Spring of 2020.
In this episode, Kyle walks us through 4 semesters of COVID-19 on campus and at WJPZ. When everyone the campus shut down in 2020, the staff had employ technology and a skeleton crew to keep the radio station on the air. As was the case for all of us, there was no playbook for how to handle a situation like this.
When the students returned in the fall of 2020, precautions had to be taken - from staggering jock shifts to wiping down equipment before and after each person left the studio. And for the entire 2020-2021 school year, jocks were on the air masked. But WJPZ was one of the few campus organizations that could exist in COVID - Kyle talks about what that did for the station's recruitment efforts. Then in the 2021-2022 year, the station slowly got back to normal, now with a much larger staff.
Kyle praises the leadership at the station - both before and during his tenure as GM - as working together to solve problems and keep the station running through the pandemic. And it was this lesson of collaboration that has served Kyle well in his first post-graduation job, on the air at B94.5 in State College, Pennsylvania.
Beyond COVID, we talk about the radio industry in 2022, through a recent grad's perspective. Kyle believes great radio is still being made by smaller radio companies, and he takes us behind the scenes at his current gig. Live on air, social media content, and more.
Join Us in Syracuse 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 am Jon Jag Gay, joined by recent alum. Class of 2022, now currently PM drive at B94-5 in State College, Pennsylvania, an assistant program director of Seven Mountains Media. I think I got all that right. Kyle Leff.
Kyle: Welcome. It's good to be here. And you did get it all correct. It's strange to have a real title having just graduated college, but we'll
JAG: take it.
So we're recording this five months after graduation. And we got a lot to get to today, including the COVID years, which we're really gonna dive into a lot. Tell me how it's been so recently graduating and jumping into the real world.
Kyle: It has felt surreal at times. Having graduated college, I accepted the job the week after graduation.
So I started up just around a month after graduation officially. So I really haven't had a time to stop and be like, I graduated college and now I'm working. So it's been right from one to the other. And I have been taking it day by day, but it sometimes feels surreal that it feels like I haven't had time to like stop, take a step back and think. What happened in life? Where am I now? What am I doing? I just kind of went from one to the other.
JAG: I have to ask, have you been to a Penn State football game yet?
Kyle: I have not been yet. They've only had, I believe, two or three home games, and I've been working for two of them. Okay. But hopefully I'll be going to the Ohio State game on the 28th.
JAG: Okay. We're recording this on October 10th, so hopefully by the time you listen to this, Kyle will have been to Penn State-Ohio State, and it would be wonderful if Penn State had pulled an upset over Ohio State. Since I'm a Michigan guy now. I'd love to see that happen, So,
Kyle: Oh, it would be fantastic.
JAG: All right. The station has been through a number of challenges. We're chronicling them throughout the podcast here. Everything from getting on the air to start, moving to FM, or the traged, of course, of PanAm 103, being on the air on September 11th. We've got an episode on that. But there may not have been a challenge as unique and prolonged as what Kyle dealt with as the GM from summer of 2020 through summer of 2022. And that, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic, As best you can, take us through March of 2020 and throughout it as best you're able.
Kyle: Yeah, so March of 2020 was when the COVID pandemic boomed essentially. Obviously everyone knows this by now. That was when everything kicked off. We had our banquet for Z just a week prior to everything going crazy.
JAG: Perlilously close to it, and if I might add, and we all got back. We were like, Whoa. We were just in a huge group of people and . I mean, there were jokes made about it. That banquet in 2020. We didn't realize how serious it was. There were only one or two alumni who really took it seriously. We were like, What are you worried about? And then a week or two later it was like, Oh, they were right.
Kyle: Yeah, they were right. But we got lucky. No one, as far as I know, got sick. I hope not. But after that, everything went crazy. Obviously. We all shut down. Everything shut down on campus. We got booted off at Syracuse and then didn't come back until August, September going into the new year. And at that point we were told, as I was incoming GM at the time, that we had regulations. They had restrictions for us in terms of COVID and masking in place, but we weren't told what they were, that we were kind of just going off of what the university and the CDC were saying and had to just make do with that.
When we asked what our responsibilities were in terms of making sure we were safe, COVID wise, It was on us to make that. And as college students being told to be healthy and safe is usually not part of the program. Usually college is where is a super spreader anyway, being at college.
So figuring all of that out was a big part of it, but we. We saw a lot of people just wanting to do things after that first summer, which I'm guessing everyone has seen, was that first 2020 summer everyone was just sitting at home, had nothing to do, right? We all went kind of crazy. Netflix only had so much for us to watch.
JAG: You can only watch Tiger King through once and that was about it, if you remember, 2020.
Kyle: And I still didn't watch it. I refused to watch it.
JAG: I give you a lot of credit for that. So was the station on the air in summer 2020 or just kind of automated, or how did that piece of it work?
Kyle: We were automated. The systems we use allow us to automate everything. So the at the time, GM, who was changing over to me was keeping everything going for the summer until we got back. Automation wise, there were no shows on air. We were essentially off air from, I believe it was March 11th through to. August 31st, give or take.
JAG: So March to August. When you say off air, you mean It was essentially just music and sweepers?
No jocks, no specialty shows, Anything like that?
Kyle: Just music. No anything else. Nothing special. Just music playing. Sweepers, the liners, the generic stuff going on. No one talking. And who was the GM before you? Melody Emm was GM prior to me and I took over the summer going into 2020.
JAG: What were the conversations like between you and Melody as you took over and you're in the middle of a once in a hundred year pandemic?
Kyle: They were like, Okay, everything's going to go insane and crazy and nothing's going to make sense, and this isn't gonna be a normal GM tenure. Just do what you think is best and trust your judgment. Talk to everybody and if something goes right, it goes right. If it goes wrong, it goes wrong. But right now no one knows what's gonna happen for this next six months or whatever we thought it was gonna be. So you can't really do wrong, if that makes any sense. That I couldn't do wrong.
JAG: Yeah, and I think that's probably emblematic of how we all felt in that first summer of COVID. It's like, hey, we're all doing the best we can. We're all making the best decisions for our lives personally and our families. Whatever we think is best cuz the information was changing so quickly.
So you get back to campus when in 2020?
Kyle: I got back to campus, I believe August 15th, 2020. I moved into my apartment, but the first day went right to Z. With myself and Melody and we basically sat and she taught me how to properly program the station so it didn't go off air.
JAG: Right. So this is GM and PD at the time?
Kyle: She at that point had graduated, so I was switching over into being GM, but I needed to know how to properly program in case there were any issues and no one else could deal with it. So I learned how to do all of that on the fly.
JAG: Schedule music and all that kind of stuff.
Kyle: Instead of having the months of training we hoped to have, It was a crash course in two days.
JAG: You are coming back in August. And remind me when the general students and the staff came back, was it the same time?
Kyle: It was the same time, but we obviously had to make specific changes to how they could come back into the station which was definitely interesting. We stagnated shifts.
We made sure there was like a one hour gap, I believe, between any DJ shift, any show, everything. We said no one's gonna cross paths with each other. We're gonna limit it to just whoever is in show is in station. And then I would be in my office for emergencies. But that was about it for the first semester at least, of coming back.
JAG: So while we're all as alumni, quarantining mail, and wiping down our groceries, you're staggering the jocks with an hour in between them. I'm just trying to draw the parallel here between what you were dealing with at Z while the rest of the world was trying to figure it out at the same time.
Kyle: Yeah, we stagnated shifts and we also had shows limited to three people and we separated them as far as we could. Everybody was masked on air. We give everyone little mic filters so they have their own. We thought it would help. Any little bit helped and everyone would wipe down the studios before they would go in.
As they'd go in, they wipe it down as they're leaving, they wipe it down. Just we went through too many wet wipes, which I'm guessing most of America did as well alongside us.
JAG: Yeah, those things were like finding gold on Amazon, trying to forget the supply of them. So how long did that last and what was the next phase of it?
Kyle: That specific first semester was the most strict for us, that it was three people per studio, no one else in station. These semester after that is when we got back to more of normalcy where we were able to have more of, every show was going on as it normally would. But obviously we limited the studio to, I believe, four people at the time, and it was still, everyone was masked up essentially. The entire 2020 to 2021 year for classes was everyone was masked up the entire time.
It was, I believe the last week of the semester was the first time we were able to go maskless in studio for a week because Syracuse said, Yeah, you can do it now.
JAG: I remember that was May of 21 when they finally kinda lifted that, right?
Kyle: Yeah, the last week of the semester. Just to give everyone a tease of what it felt like to be normal again. So it was a tough time, but everyone managed. We were masked in studio. We all enjoyed it. And it helped especially with us because at that point, that semester is when all of the incoming freshmen had all of a sudden said, "Okay, we can start doing some things now. I want to do something."
And so we had a wave of new freshmen and new recruits join Z, to the point where we had to limit how many recruits we had per group. Instead of limiting how many groups we did, we had 15 maybe, training groups of 10 plus people, but we had to stagger them like five in five out of the time in the station. It was a lot of moving parts, but it got back to normal.
JAG: So this is spring recruitment of 21.
Kyle: This is spring 21. We had a huge recruitment wave of just chaotic craziness cause everyone wanted to join.
JAG: Kyle was some of that because you were one of the few organizations on campus that was active? I mean, you can't really play intermural flag football in the middle of COVID where people are on top of each other like that.
But in this situation where you're able to stagger the jocks, Was that part of a large recruitment that this was something to do when there wasn't much else?
Kyle: I very much so believe so that a lot of kids who would not normally do radio, I think the non Newhouse kids, a lot of the time, more than half of that group was not in Newhouse or wasn't in media at all and just wanted something to do.
And we gave them an opportunity to just go on air and talk about music or talk about the two sporting events going on in the world at the time, whatever was happening. The one random marble race.
JAG: That's, Oh my god, that's right.
Kyle: And the NBA playoffs that were taking place in the bubble. That was what we were able to talk about. And so we said, yes. Like you can come on air and talk and you can at least make some sort of connection. I mean, being in a dorm as a freshman, at that time you were restricted, you couldn't go out, you couldn't do anything. You couldn't be a normal college kid. So this is the closest a lot of them could get to being a normal college student.
They could see people face to face. You couldn't see their mouths, but you could see their eyes at least, which helped.
JAG: Remind me. So obviously, Fall of 20, people were pretty much in their dorms going to classes online, right? Or not even on campus, or was that kind of a mix?
Kyle: It was a bit of a mix. I know a lot of students who stayed home for the semester instead of coming to campus cuz they could save money on living on campus room and
JAG: board. Yeah, of course. If you're gonna just zoom classes anyway.
Kyle: Yeah. Bingo. So a lot of students had remote classes. I know I had every class of mine that first semester was remote. I would wake up in the morning, load up Zoom. I had a yoga class on Zoom, which was quite interesting to be doing yoga in my hallway on a yoga mat. So it's a lot of that semester was Zoom. The second semester, so the spring semester, was a big hybrid of the two. They said they wanted a push for every class to be in person, but that just wasn't the case. I would guess maybe half the classes at most per kid were in person. The ones that had to be were in person.
So if you're doing the lab science, or if you're doing a video class, then they need you to be in person for part of it. That was where you got it.
JAG: Okay. So now we get into the summer of 21. You're still GM. Were there staff? Was that a little less automated than Summer of 20? How are we at this point?
Kyle: Summer of 21 was less automated because I stayed the entire summer. It was myself and a few sports staff and some grad students who were there. I was on air every day doing a normal show. It was mainly just me in the studio and then people who would come by over time. If someone would come up to Syracuse for a summer visit, for whatever reason, they'd come, stop in the station, do a show, and then head home. Or grad students, if they were there, they could come on air as well.
So it was more back to normal, but it wasn't the same normal summer we have of multiple people being here in studio.
JAG: Got it. So now we get to Fall of 21. Folks are starting to get vaccinated. Things are starting to get closer to normal, but not normal yet. Where are we? Fall of 21, which is now your senior year.
Kyle: Fall of 21. It was my senior year. At this point, we felt like everything was back towards, "normal." as normal as it could be at the time. Everyone was still, I believe, masked in studio to an extent, but we let the restrictions in terms of numbers in studio go up to five or six people.
So you could have an AP or a producer in studio if you wanted to. And our in-station restrictions were lifted because the university lifted their own. So we changed with their times and we still saw though, the crazy recruitment go up. Out of the four semesters I was GM, three of them, we had over a hundred recruits, at least attempt to, if not join, Z, each semester.
JAG: Wow. And that's not just on air, that's just to get involved with an activity.
Kyle: Right. It was to get involved in general, we had multiple people wanna just do social media. We had some that wanted to just do web writing. We had some that just wanted to be producers or do production or business stuff.
We had a business staff as well. We had a lot of people, which was a lot of mouths to feed with content and things to do but always so much to do in the pandemic when you can't do a lot of things.
JAG: Was it weird listening to the station and having everybody on there with a mask, or was it just that was the way it was and everybody's kind of used to it?
Kyle: Everyone was kind of used to it. It wasn't as weird listening to it as it was talking. I think that was the big thing, is that I would listen to our shows to just hear what everyone sounded like and to see if there was anything I could change or make better for us. But honestly, it sounded okay.
It sounded a little bit muffled, but not to a point where it was a problem. The bigger concern was just being on the mic itself. Like I know I was on a show and talking with a mask on. I know we've all done it in general in person, but having to talk into a microphone to a live radio audience with that on was just the worst experience I've ever had.
JAG: Okay, so you get through Fall of 21, things are getting pretty close to normal, and then were you able to enjoy your last semester as a senior and get, have some sense of a normal college career at that point as you're wrapped up?
Kyle: I did. At that point a lot of the restrictions had been lifted. It was mainly a mask in specific situations in classes.
For the first, I think two or three months, up through like March 15th, it was masks in certain classes, but as soon as that was lifted, it was kind of a, you can go and do what you want now and just be as safe as you wanna be. We said, Okay, after every show, still wipe down the stuff in station. But outside of the station, everyone was doing what they wanted to.
There was clubs going on again, there was games going on again, basketball was happening, so everyone kind of got back to a normal college life, and I did get to experience a second semester senior year of a little bit of normalcy.
JAG: I just can't imagine what it's like to have spent basically the second half of your college career going through all this, and especially running the station.
You know, you talked about having to keep it on the air over the summer and all these things. Are there particular folks that you worked with? I know you said Melody mentored you and got you going with the GM and programming music and sort of defacto PD over the summer. Are there folks you can think of in particular that really helped you work your way through this and your team?
Kyle: Yeah, in terms of team, Melody is the first person to start with. She luckily lived nearby, so if I needed to, she can come by the station at the time and help out if anything needed to be helped out with. So she was the major one alongside her were my VPs, which were Rebecca Scaggs, Ryan Baker, Maddie Doolittle.
The three of them over the next two years saved my life more than once. There was multiple days where at Emma Dahmen as well, where we would have some crazy thing happen. The university would say, I know in November of 2020, they said, Oh, everyone's being sent home this week, and we were just wrapping up training.
JAG: Ugh.
Kyle: So we wrapped up training and then everyone immediately got sent home for the rest of the semester. So at that point, I made a decision to stay over winter break in Syracuse to make sure Z could run, because at that point, I believe Rebecca was home in California and then I was stuck there. No one else could run Z if we needed anything in person to happen.
So it was me, myself and I, But Rebecca, Ryan, Emma, Maddie, they helped me make decisions that should not have had to have been made over four semesters. Whenever it came to masks in station or having to not do certain events or not do certain things and restrict people here or there. I know our staff. I wanna thank as well, because I know they understood, like, I didn't want to do certain things that I had to, I didn't wanna make everyone wear masks in-station, but also, I know it's for the health of everybody, so I wanna make sure that happens. And when the University may have gone a little less strict, I may have still been a little more strict with masking because the last thing I wanted to do was have a mask issue in Z.
So I said, We're gonna go as long as I can with this, with everyone being safe. And then as soon as that floodgate opens, let's go. Let's go have fun.
JAG: And it's interesting you say that, that you went a little bit more cautious with the masks. Cause obviously it became a big thing politically where people all across the country were fighting over it.
I was going to ask you if you butted heads at all with the University in terms of mandates, but it sounds like you were a little bit more on the cautious side. How did that play out? Were there any things where you had to say to the University, Hey, this is a very special, unique circumstance. We're a radio station, I know you have Rule X, but can we have an exception because of Y? Did you find yourself in that position at all?
Kyle: In terms of in-station, we ever found ourselves in that issue. Luckily, the university truthfully did not check on us at any point in time. We were never touched on, we were asked questions by their COVID response teams or anything. It was just, we did us and we had to kind of go off of whatever their restrictions were.
The only times we ever did were sports travel, in terms of going to games, but that was tough for everybody. I know a lot of broadcast teams didn't get back to normal broadcast until this past summer. So for us to do sports was the only restriction we ever butted heads with the University.
Outside of that, it was us trying to figure it out and be 21 year olds acting in a political sense. And going off of whatever mandates the 10 different organizations in Syracuse and in the US were saying at the time.
JAG: So you've got the University, you've got the county, you've got the city, you've got the state, you've got the Federal.
Kyle: Yeah.
JAG: I can't even imagine, and I think I speak for all the alumni, when I say we're grateful to you and to your team for navigating the station through such a very, very difficult time. We're celebrating 50 years of the station. This is a once in a hundred year event. Hats off to you and your team.
Let me ask you, whether it's related to COVID or otherwise, what are some of the lessons that you learned in running the station and being a part of the station, that you've now taken with you in your, albeit brief, start to your professional career?
Kyle: The big lesson I learned from the station is that everyone is willing to work together.
If you can find a way to work together that you might be in business somewhere or you might run a podcast, but everyone can work together in some way, shape, or form. We might perform completely different acts, but we can work together and everyone wants to work together at the end of the day. That was the biggest thing I saw with us at Z is that for me, wanting to work with other people meant reaching out to alumni and how I could change things up.
I know I talked to you about podcasting and getting microphones. And getting the best equipment we could use. And then I would talk to, I believe Scott MacFarlane, cuz we wanted to do newscasts again, Wanted to do a bit of those. So we talked to Scott MacFarlane, we talked to other alumni, including Alex Silverman, about what we could do in terms of the news space as well.
So it was just a lot of talking to everybody. Learning that we're a community. That was major, is that I don't think there's any organization college wise in the US that even closely resembles what WJPZ has in terms of a community, a love, a caring of one another. Even if you are from 1972 or if you're from 2022.
JAG: Speaking of that community, any friends, lifelong friends you've made at the station, you feel like you've just made that connection with, and it'll be in your life for a long time going forward?
Kyle: Yes, I, there's a lot of them. Everyone from, I know Melody, the GM prior to me along with Ethan Charlip was the GM in 2019, I believe.
So the two of them, plus a bunch of my staff that I had as well Maddie Doolittle, Emma Dahmen, Ryan Baker is one of my best friends now. We spent every day together. So at some point you're gonna become friends regardless of what y'all wanna do. Whether you are from Washington or Connecticut, you're just gonna be friends anyway.
Right? And so I can safely say I've made friends. And outside of that as well, I mean, I've made friends with alumni just by talking to everybody every day. And through the banquets and the weird remote banquet we had as well. It's a bit of just good luck and happiness that we all brought each other together and became friends.
JAG: Fair enough. Any funny stories that strike you? I mean, I can't imagine with all the stuff that you went through in two years with COVID, whether it's COVID related or otherwise, but any stories that, you know, might be fresher in your mind than some of us other older alumni, but anything that you can think of? Just a real funny story you look back on fondly?
Kyle: I mean, the funniest story is just has to be the Banquet we had a week prior to everything going crazy. I remember spending the entire week in station cleaning it. I slept in station twice on the couch. And then we had our Banquet and then everyone left on the Sunday. We were all decompressing. It was one of the best weekends of my life.
And then on Tuesday, the Onondaga County and Syracuse University were like, Everyone's going home. So it was to 48 hours following everybody leaving from a brunch on a Sunday after Banquet. Still a little bit exhausted from it and just saying you're going home. And so having to come up for that, having to come back.
I went to a vacation for two days, came back, had to drive back up over Spring Break to get all of my room packed up, and at the time no one had masks, so we just put our nose, like our shirts, over our noses, and just trusted that would work. So it was it. That was probably the funniest story. There's a lot more I could, I can't think off the top of my head that happened over the span of two years, but a lot of them were just too insane or too outlandish to even think about.
Off the top of my head, like there was a lot of weird moments we had where we would be masked up in station and something would happen on air. Or just something would go wrong somewhere and we had to just laugh about it cuz it was so ridiculous that it wouldn't happen any other year. But during the COVID years, everything would break.
JAG: Yeah. Oh absolutely, I'm sure. Murphy's Law. So let me ask you bigger picture, Kyle, about the industry. A lot of folks have seen a lot of changes in the radio industry. There have been a lot of cuts, there have been a lot of naysayers about the industry. And I'll admit to being sometimes that myself.
You made the decision, you graduated, you wanted to be on air, you wanted to work in radio despite the changing tide of the industry. What are your thoughts on the industry and getting into it in 2022?
Kyle: My thought is that a lot of people getting into radio, there's opportunities left, right, and center.
It may not be the case at the bigger companies like an iHeartRadio or an Audacy or even a Sirius XM. But I'm seeing companies when I interviewed for jobs, like as I was graduating college, that were like, "We're doing better now than we did in 2018 that we've had a resurgence in sale numbers. We've had more of this and more of that."
A lot of the time radio, you can have one person in studio, like I'm in studio on my own during my show. Like if I had COVID, I could be in there and I could do my show and just be fine and everyone can listen to me still. So I see more opportunities now than there may have been in the past in radio, and I see it as a industry that is booming on the "smaller side."
So if you looked at in a sports way, it may be that the Patriots and the Cowboys are having a rough time, but everyone else is doing well.
JAG: Interesting.
Kyle: Yeah. It looks like the two big companies, or the three big companies are maybe downsizing in their own way, but a lot of smaller companies are getting bigger and growing more to kind of catch back up, which is getting rid of a bit of the monopoly that has been had on radio by these two or three companies in the past few years.
JAG: Do you think that's just a different business model, whereas the iHearts, Audacys, et cetera of the world, looking at national and crunching the numbers and a smaller company like probably the one that you are at, is more focused on the community and the product?
Kyle: I would definitely say so. I know for us, we're focused on, most of our stations are in Pennsylvania and we have some in New York and Delaware.
That for us, I only see more opportunities coming. More people are joining my company by the day. I'm not the most recent hire. I am four months in. I'm nowhere near the most recent hire, especially in the company.
JAG: That's great.
Kyle: And it's good to see. I know I'm not the only radio person who's saying that. Now, if you look at other radio stations that might be in Maryland or might be in California, that they're probably having the same thing. Especially if they're not on the national outlook that an iHeart and Audacy, someone of that nature might be looking at.
JAG: I would remiss if I did not ask you on a podcast, Are you still doing podcasting?
Kyle: I am still doing podcasting. It has become a bit more hectic with my schedule. But myself and my podcast co-host we talk about the Saints and Arsenal usually every week. But it depends on schedules because he's still a student and I have to work 11 to 7:00 PM every day. And that comes with its own's challenges, but yes, still podcasting. Still going strong.
JAG: For all of us that have worked in radio and are curious what it looks like right now.
You said 11 to 7, you're on the air, 2-7. Take me through, and I know no day is the same, but take me through a typical workday. What some of your responsibilities are there?
Kyle: I usually get in a little early. I get 10:30, 11. That way I have 10:30 to 11:00 to kind of sit around, relax, get myself set.
If I have to do anything in the morning in terms of paperwork for a remote broadcast I may have done, I get that filled out. I put my food in the fridge, whatever's going on. And then, if a meeting is taking place in terms of training for production or for programming, I go through that. I take half an hour or so to prep a show.
So I go through Twitter, I go through Entertainment Online, Entertainment Weekly, ESPN. I look at what the headlines are, I write out my show. I then go and voice track a second show, cuz I'm also on air in Bloomsburg. So I go and do that as well. And then I get that done. I get my show done. And then if I need to, I write a web article for the day.
I know this past week I wrote about one of the dogs at Bark in the Park in the Mets game who caught a baseball in their mouth. Golden Retriever. So it's fun articles like that I might write on a day. And then I get some social media stuff done, whether it be just posting on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and just going through retweeting things, liking things, whatever it ends up being.
And then it's just showtime. And then I'm there from 2:00PM to 7:00 PM on air
JAG: Live?
Kyle: I am live on air, 2:00PM to 7:00 PM in State College. And. It's nice. It's nice to be on air. I love voice tracking. I love talking recorded, but being live on air is the best.
JAG: There's just something about that feeling when you're on the air. Your listener interaction. How much of it is on social? Are people calling texting in? What is the listener interaction like in 2022?
Kyle: We have a bit of everything. I know myself, I have one segment every day where I do Trivia Time with Kyle. That I ask a random trivia question of the day. It might be themed for a week.
I know last week I went full video game theme, so I talked about Sonic and Mario with the new Mario film getting ready to come out. If it's something to give away, I'll give it away during that time. So it's a call in if you have the right answer for the trivia question and if you get it correct, you win this prize.
For those ones. I know I've gotten a lot of callers. In the past, we've given away Hershey Park tickets, which is one of the best amusement parks in the us. And we got, I believe, 25 callers on one of the days and that's at one specific time, at like 4:30 PM on a random Wednesday. So we get callers calling in.
We have a text line that we use that's not used as much. I push it a lot. It's not used as much. And then social media, we get interactions. I know if I post a specific question on our Facebook page, that's probably where our most interactions come. I ask the question of what show does everyone, has everyone watched the most?
I got, I believe, 350 responses in a day or two which is more than I am expecting to get on a given post. So things like that is interactions.
JAG: It's a CHR station, right?
Kyle: We are a top 40 station, yeah.
JAG: That's interesting to me that you have so much interaction on Facebook, I think is the perception that Facebook skews a bit older. Is Facebook still the dominant social media platform for the station?
Kyle: For us, I would say it is most definitely the most dominant, I believe. Follower wise, we have our most by a big margin on Facebook. We post on all of them, all three, of the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. But Facebook is where the most interaction comes.
It's where you can reliably say, We're gonna get responses here. We know we are. A lot of our listeners are parents. That's where a lot of our listeners are. I know I have had interactions with people at different events, at different festivals where they're like, Yeah, my kids love you, and we listen to you all the time.
And it's like, Okay, I'm talking to both a parent and a kid. And the parents use Facebook. The kids are too young to use social media, so I have to find a way to talk to the parents while also catering to the kids, which is a very strange concept. I have not still grasped.
JAG: But I think it's a credit to you that you're thinking about it in those terms.
Kyle Leff. GM from 2020 to 2022. You shepherded the station through I hate to use the word unprecedented cuz it's cliche at this point, but an unprecedented time and now you are excelling in your first gig in the business. Congratulations on all your success, Continued success to you. On behalf of all of our alumni, and thank you so much for joining us today.
Kyle: Thank you for having me, and I couldn't be here if it weren't for the alumni and everyone else making Z a dream come true and making it a real radio station that has given real world experiences.