Scott Greene, '93, grew up just outside Boston wanting to be a newspaper reporter. He did it in high school and came to Syracuse wanting to pursue that career. But WJPZ quickly drew him in, and he says the only columns he wrote for the Daily Orange ended up being Wrestlemania previews.
Scott came to the station as the classes of 90 and 91 were taking the reigns. His group quickly got their footing, and passed the torch to '94 and '95. And yes, Scott names names from all of these groups.
While a student, Scott worked at KIX FM, before it became B104.7. Not interested in country, he went over to 95X to become the promotions director right around graduation.
After a few years there, Scott headed home to Boston, where he worked in marketing, with partners like Rolling Stone magazine and more. Another reinvention, he got his masters' degree and began teaching middle school. He continued in that field after following his wife home to western Massachusetts. After he tired of disciplining middle school students (can you blame him?) he went back to his first love -newspaper. He's now the sales manager of Reminder Publishing, which puts out several local, weekly newspapers in the area. We spend some time talking about the newspaper business, and where he sees it thriving at the local level through strategic partnerships.
Scott leaves us with two classic Z89 stories. One involves Bruce Springsteen tickets - and the other involves all the commercial overnight jocks in town playing the same record at the same time. He explains, and the story ends at a very familiar place.
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, joined today from the class of 1993 by Scotty Ballgame. Mr. Scott Greene, welcome to the show.
Scott: Hello. Thank you for having me on, sir.
JAG: We first started chatting about a year ago at the banquet in 2023, and you were telling me you enjoyed the podcast, and I said why don't you come on as a guest?
Scott: Took us a little while, but here we are. Yes. It's the best time to do it right now.
JAG: You grew up not too far from where I grew up. So I always start by asking our guests where they grew up and what got them to Syracuse. And then following that, what got them to Z 89?
Scott: Yes. I grew up in Burlington, Massachusetts.
The 128 belt, so Burlington is a suburb, about 25, 30 minutes Northwest of Boston. So I had easy access to the city and the sports games and to go away to college in Syracuse, New York was a five hour, maybe a little bit more than five hour trip from Boston. And I had never really spent a lot of time west of Worcester, Mass.
JAG: Me too, yep.
Scott: When people say, oh, Western Mass in Springfield, it's oh my goodness. That's like another country. Going out to Syracuse was a great call for me. And I went to be a writer. I went to be a journalist. I wrote for my high school newspaper. I wrote for the town weekly newspaper. I covered sports.
That's what I went to Syracuse to do. And the first student activity meeting and group that I saw on campus was an informational session for WJPZ, Z89, and the rest is history. I started doing news and sports and trying out to be an on-air jock. And I did everything radio. And I think in my whole time at Syracuse, I may have written three, no more than four articles for the Daily Orange, and they were all WrestleMania predictions, articles.
And that was the extent of my writing and journalism, print journalism at the time. And I ended up going into radio. I'm back in print journalism now, and that's what I do full time. As a sales director for a local community paper.
JAG: Which is funny how everything comes full circle, that you had all this newspaper stuff, and then you had the radio at Syracuse in between.
I want to ask you, because you were class of 93, so you were perfectly situated in the middle between some of those great folks from 90 and 91, and then also there when that class of 95 came through, you got to see both sides of it as the young and as the more seasoned vet, who were some of the folks that were there running the station that made a first impression with you when you first got there?
Scott: Hold on a second, because you're giving me bookends of the 91 and the 95 folks being the really great folks. There were some good ones in between from my class too, my friend. I don't want to think that we're chopped liver or anything. People that I remember learning from, as a freshman and doing sports casts and newscasts, there were guys like Jim Gallagher and Matthew Berry and Hal Rood on the air.
And Henry Ferri, I think was the general manager and Scott Meach was doing so much. So I remember some of those folks that are a little older. Then I was, and then not too much older, but he is still a senior to me. And that's my good friend, Brian Lapis. And he was the chief announcer. I think maybe his senior year when I was a sophomore, junior. These years ,30 plus years ago are a little hard for me to remember exactly.
JAG: One of the lessons I've learned in 100 plus episodes of this podcast is that there is no aging for Mr. Sweet Lippy Love.
Scott: Exactly. That's a good, that's a good thing.
JAG: Obviously, there are a cast of characters. I'm not going to exclude the middle of the sandwich here.
Yes, that massive stretch from, 90 to 95 where so many folks of every year. What were some of the lessons and things you remember learning when you got to Syracuse as, a newspaper kid, but you started doing radio and all this stuff at the station?
Scott: One of the biggest lessons for me was to be on time always be on time, if not early.
And I take that today in my job as a sales manager and running meetings for staff and getting into the office a little earlier than everyone else, you cannot just show up on time or even be late when you have to have a 6 to 10 AM shift on the radio, we've got to be there 5:30, maybe 5:35. At the time we were going off of the AP sports wire and the printers that were printing out our news blips back in the day folks, when there was no internet yet and we didn't have cell phones.
So we were reliant on these other services for us to do prep for our shifts slash shows. And I just, I couldn't be late to come in and do a very good newscast or sportscast and build the rapport with the others that were there and on at the time. That's something that I think is one of the best lessons that I've learned.
JAG: It speaks to the culture, Scott, of so many years of the station of this high standard that we've set at WJPZ, and that gets passed on from year to year and so on and so forth. So let me ask you about the other side of it. Who were some of the folks that came up under you that you remember working with and having relationships with? They came in 94, 95, etc?
Scott: Right off the bat, if I could mention a few names that I know were from my class that I worked closely with at the station. 93 folks like Stacey Simms Eric Stangel, Eric Reinhart. Some of these great 93 folks were wonderful. After that, and you get into the who's who of, are they really great WJPZ Mount Rushmore folks like our friend Chris Velardi? Yeah. Jordan Guagliumi, like Tina Mussolino, and my good friend Jay Nachlis. So these are some of the folks that were a little younger than me. If you ask me to go into like the 95s, 96, 97, I'm not gonna be able to do that. I was in Syracuse until 96. But, working off campus, I was a little bit away from the Z crowd during those mid nineties years.
JAG: Fair enough. You're teeing me up to ask you my next question, which is, walk me through your career from graduation and what you've done since, Scott.
Scott: I didn't have a job up until the Thursday before graduation.
JAG: Still way ahead of most people.
Scott: At some point, I was thinking that I was going to be the next on air guy in Chicago, and chase my girlfriend at the time, who was moving back home. And I think I had cassettes sent to every station in Chicagoland area, and... I don't even know if I got a response from any of them, but I ended up working at 95X, WAQX. FM in Syracuse. At the time, Syracuse's best rock. I had interned and I had worked part time at the classic rock station KIX FM. 104.7 up through close to the end of my senior year. That station was sold and acquired by the Y94 folks. And they turned the station into B104 country station.
At that time I had no interest in working country. And I didn't actually stay on with, they actually moved Kix to a translator signal out in Oriskany or the Rome area. Or Westmoreland I think it was. And it was like further than the Turning Stone Casino. And I went out one weekend and worked one shift.
It was right before graduation. And I actually said to the program director on the second day, I said, I'm done, I'm not coming back, I'm graduating, and good luck with the station. I don't know how many months after that, that the station was no more. But.
JAG: I believe that is our first reference to Oriskany in the podcast, although I will say I did get a speeding ticket in Westmoreland on my way back to the Syracuse once.
Scott: Yes, I believe it's that exit off the thruway. So anyway to make a long story short, I ended up becoming the promotion director at 95 X right out of college. I think it was Alexis who was their evening on air personality that had been doing promotions at the time and she wanted to focus on her on air.
They wanted to hire someone to come in full time to do promotions. I, of course, coming out of college, they could pay next to nothing. And I ended up taking the job working for three years there in Syracuse, had an absolute blast running the station events and branding. And I learned a heck of a lot there. And then after three years, I moved back home to. Eastern Mass and basically started over.
JAG: So let me ask you a quick follow up on that though, Scott. So you did promotions for 95X. Did you have much experience doing that at Z89 or was more of your experience the sports and the on-air side?
Scott: Yeah, on air was more of my experience. I had done some promotions for KIX FM over the two years leading up to graduation with summer internships and part time work and being on air part time there. But the majority of my time had been on air and I shifted to the off-air role. They still featured me sometimes with morning show, guests, with their producer who was a buddy of mine and I'll drop his name, Mike Kramer.
He lives out in Houston now, but Mike Leader Kramer was part of the Z for a little while during his tenure at school. And he was the producer for Dave and the Fat Man morning show at the time in Syracuse. So they put me on once in a while and they're big events. Like we had a requesta-thon for Make a Wish foundation.
We had some other game shows that we did live downtown, some. We did a celebrity lookalike contest once a year at a local club. So I was on the air here and there as a character, but pretty much still a nobody because the listeners didn't really want to know about who Scott Greene was. They didn't care about me.
JAG: And these, all these promotions you're talking about, this is your time at 95X now, you mean, right?
Scott: That's correct. And I remember some big promotions at Z89. But I think it was probably during the last couple of years when I was working off campus at KIX FM and I was spending majority of my time, when I wasn't in class, heading over there multiple times a week and on the weekends.
It took my time away from JPZ my last couple years, unfortunately. We all do what we have to do and I thought that may have been the best point for me in my career at the time.
JAG: And that's another thing that's come up in the many episodes of the podcast is the idea that some folks get frustrated when somebody leaves the station as a student to go to one of the commercial stations in town.
But that's the point! We're training you at JPZ to work for a professional radio station. So you do that like so many others before you and since. So you mentioned going back to Eastern Massachusetts. So tell me about your career path since headed back from the 315 to the 617.
Scott: Yeah, so I moved back to the 617. At some point became the 781. And I was working for a friend of my parents in his auto parts industry and he was grooming me to be their promotion and sales manager. In my head, I knew I wasn't going to be working in the auto parts industry for a long time.
JAG: You almost lived the movie Tommy Boy.
Scott: Exactly. That's what I thought of when I was there. I didn't travel to sell parts though like those guys did. I ended up getting into an event marketing position for a company in Boston called Collegiate Advantage. And they eventually would become acquired by Student Advantage. And we ran marketing tours for clients that wanted to reach the college market and the college demographic.
And we had tours that went around the country. And one of my first gigs, it was a contract position for a few months. And I traveled around the country on this tour for Rolling Stone magazine. It was called the Rock and Roll Bowl. And it went to all college campuses over the course of two months on the quad or in the outside of student center.
And it was just, it was a lot of fun. And that tour finished up. And then I did another part time tour for them, and then it ended up turning into a full time account manager role in the office in Boston. And I did that for several years, and eventually going into other marketing companies in New Hampshire, I wound up getting burnt out.
And in 2003, when we were right about to have our first born, my son, Adam, I went back to school to be a teacher. And I ended up getting my master's in education. I ended up getting a job in a great school district outside Boston Groton-Dunstable Regional School District. I worked in the middle school.
Few years later, we moved out to Western Massachusetts where my wife's family is from and where they still are. And I landed a teaching position in Windsor Locks, Connecticut. I was there for four years. I ended up finishing up my teacher career in 2012, outside of Springfield. And that is when I got back into business, because guess what?
I unfortunately got burnt out teaching, and I was doing more disciplining than teaching at the time.
JAG: With middle schoolers? I'm shocked!
Scott: Yes, 5th and 7th graders in Windsor, Connecticut. How about that? Oh my God. I got back into business and I've been in my current company for the last 10 plus years and I'm really happy with where I am right now. So it's a long period there.
JAG: So where are you now, Scott?
Scott: So right now I am the sales manager for Reminder Publishing, which is a local media company in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. And we have 12 weekly community newspapers and two monthly magazines and one daily paper and. A whole slew of special publications that we do, and print media is still alive.
JAG: I was going to ask you about that, because we've talked in many episodes of the podcast about the radio industry and the ups and downs of where radio is at. The print media has had a really tough go of it in a lot of recent years as well, and there's been a lot of naysayers about print media. Obviously, you've got all these publications you just rattled off, so you're still doing well there. Talk to me about the state of where the print industry is right now.
Scott: I think that there are a lot of newspaper and magazine companies that are ratcheting down and they're not growing. And we are in a unique position within my company in a lot of the smaller weekly community papers around the country.
We are part of a larger organization called the Association of Community Publishers. And one of the best things about being a member of that is sharing best practices with other successful print companies like ourselves around the country. Sharing the practices of what is working and keeping the heartbeat of the newspaper still going.
Now, that's not to say if I deliver 5,000 newspapers to every home in my town right now in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, a good number of those people may not even read the paper. It's in their driveway, or their front walkway, or on their front step, or even hanging from their mailbox. Many of them may recycle it.
They may not even bring it in. They may not look at it, but a majority of them do read it. And our customers know that they are able to reach every home in our area. And that's what advertisers want. They want to be able to reach their homes. We're a free paper, so everyone gets it. And our revenue and our survival is really based on our sales.
JAG: Spoken like a sales manager. What's interesting, and you mentioned the local papers who, you know, back when we were kids, they were probably daily, now they're probably weekly, which is probably a reflection on the resources available, but you can put more into it if it's weekly, because you've got that different bandwidth for it.
But then also, I wonder if there's an avenue for hyper local in print that's a little bit of a void left by some of the voice tracking that's done in radio.
Scott: You're absolutely right. And I think that as a sales manager of my company, I am reaching out to and creating new relationships with our local media, TV, and radio stations.
So we can work together to help each other, and some of it's trade, which is okay, it's still revenue that counts, but that is a great point. Because I really want to leverage that relationship of we're able to be in all the homes, the radio stations and TV stations via their medium, they're able to be in all the homes. So how can we help each other?
JAG: It's interesting to think how it would have been 30 or 40 years ago where the local radio station was competing against the local newspaper, but it's almost like survival by cooperation as opposed to fighting each other.
Scott: Yeah, I'll tell you, the daily paper in our neck of the woods, which is the Springfield Republican, its circulation numbers have dwindled.
The number of pages in the paper has dwindled. And I understand that people are going to get their daily news in whatever format they want. Whether they're watching the evening news, whether they're going on to their phone and checking out their favorite news websites or the apps and getting updates and notifications that way.
I do myself. But there's still a niche for that weekly community paper where people will want to know about their town, and their school committee meetings, and new businesses that are opening, and what sales might be going on in the area. That's what we do well.
JAG: Fair enough. I want to pivot and ask you about your sports fandom your baseball fandom, if you don't mind me going there, because I know you've been a pretty active sports fan over the years as well, and I don't just say that because we grew up rooting for the same teams.
Scott: I would love to tell you about that, but I do also want you to remember I've got a couple really funny stories on the radio side of things that I do want to share, but.
JAG: You still have it because that's a hell of a tease. We'll hit the sports and then we'll come back to that.
Scott: Thank you. I like the tease when I can.
I grew up outside Boston. My dad was a big Red Sox fan. I started really getting into watching the team when I started collecting baseball cards in 1978. And I've been collecting baseball cards since 1978. And I'm a fiend when it comes to the hobby. I learned to watch the Sox and never had great moments with them winning the big one because they never did.
And lost the World Series in the mid 80s when we should have won. But I also got into the other local sports and I watched the Celtics and I watched the Bruins and I watched the Patriots. And then the Patriots were good there for just a little while in the mid 80s and they got blown away in Super Bowl 20.
But the Celtics were good. They were traditionally good. And growing up in the late 70s and then through the 80s, it was a special time to be a Celtics fan. Because, my God, they were so good. And if they weren't winning the Finals, they were losing the Finals, but they were in the Finals. If I can remember, four or five out of six years.
The Bruins. I guess they were always my fourth favorite, but they were still local. I watched my local teams and I wasn't really into any college sports until I got to Syracuse. I'll be honest. I went to all the basketball and all the football games and some of the lacrosse games. But I honestly don't remember going to a lot of other things back then, which was probably the same story with many other students.
Although now, on campus, I wish now I'd be going to soccer games and to, volleyball contests and whatnot. I think I had a girl that I liked who was on the volleyball team, so I did go watch some of their games, but there was a reason.
JAG: That's fair. Okay, let's bring it back to the funny radio stories. There's no way I'm gonna let you go without talking about some funny radio stories.
Scott: There's just two stories that I think of and I really wanted to share, and I know that one of them has never been shared on your podcast. The only way another one would have been shared would have been with Jay Nachlis.
And I don't think that he touched on the story, so I might be good here. So my summer in between junior and senior year, I was in Syracuse. And Jay Nachlis and John Marsh were the program director and music directors that summer. They had a weekend off and we all decided to go to my parents house. In Burlington, Mass.
So we took the trip out there, and right before we got to Burlington, we're on Route 128, and Jay looks over at me and he says, Scott, can you get us to the Columbia Music Office in Lexington? I said, I know exactly where that is. It's right off the exit next to Denny's. So we get off the exit in Lexington, and this is about 10 minutes from where I grew up.
And, they say, we just want to go in and we want to say hi to our music rep, Charlie Walk. He's the guy that sends us all the CDs from that label. All right, so they have the relationship. We walk in, they go up to the front desk. They say, Jay and John from WJPZ Syracuse. We're here to see Charlie.
Do you have an appointment? No, but we'd still like to say hi.
So we're waiting there, probably five minutes in the waiting room. She says, all right, he'll see you now. They call us in. Charlie is this little guy, and now we're talking. I'm going back to the summer of 92. Charlie's this little guy, and, for me, maybe he's in his late 20s, early 30s, I don't know.
And he's behind his desk, and he's holding a phone in each hand. He's got both hands. He's talking into two different phones before cell phones, by the way. So these are landlines. He just motions his hand for us to sit down. Jay and John sit down across from him. I sit in the chair to the side of the table.
His desk is covered with CDs. Piles high of CDs. He finally gets off the phone. He said, hey guys, how you doing? Jay, John, so good to meet you. They say this is our friend Scott. He lives right in the next town over. So we stopped by. He says, what are you in town for? Are you in town for the show? They look at me like I would know what concert it was.
I didn't know. He says, Springsteen. Tonight. In Worcester. No. Yeah. I look at them like, guys, I think I remember them announcing the concert months ago when I was home. And I had never been to a Springsteen show. I was just becoming a big Bruce Springsteen fan. He says, you know what? I think I got some tickets here.
He opens his drawer. He pulls out a wad of tickets. It's probably three inches tall, and he's just shuffling, he's shuffling through all these tickets for all these shows that he's doing, and then he takes three tickets and he throws them down on the desk. Jay and John look at each other, their jaws basically drop to the floor, and I just look over, reach over on the table on his desk, pick up the tickets.
I'm like, dudes, we're going to Springsteen tonight, and it was my first ever Springsteen concert. And it was in Worcester, August of 1992. He wasn't even touring with the E street band. And then, we had great seats next to the stage. I remember Charlie came by that night just to say hi to us and make sure we were having a good time, but that's my free Springsteen tickets, Columbia music, Charlie Walk with Jay and John story. And that was pretty cool.
JAG: That's great.
Scott: The other one is an on air story and I'll make this as quick as I can. So during my senior year. I am working overnights at KIX FM Classic Rock in Syracuse and it's the midnight to 6 a. m. shift. And who is listening between 3 and 4 in the morning? We don't know.
But you're still talking to that one person that you think is listening because when you're on the air you're having a conversation with one person. So I'm on the phone with my friend, Mike Kramer, who's doing overnights at 95X. And we're also on the phone, on another landline, by the way, with Jay Nachlis, who's doing overnights at Y94.
And then one of us, one of us got in touch with Lisa Daniels, was not a WJPZ person, but she was on air at 93Q. And between the four of us, We figured out, and we played one song, the same song at the same exact time on all four stations in Syracuse, New York. It was probably 3:30 in the morning. But, we loved it, and we couldn't get enough of it, and to this day, Day After Day, by Badfinger, Will always be remembered as a song that really what do they call it now?
Mainstream, right? It went across four different formats at the very same time. We were thinking like if someone was turning their Syracuse radio dial that night to the main three Powerful signal stations, and they're hearing the same song, they must have freaked out or what the heck's going on?
And then at 6:30, 7 in the morning, when our shifts were done, we all met at Denny's on Erie Boulevard to laugh about it and have breakfast before we went home and crashed.
JAG: Yet another story that ends at Denny's on Erie Boulevard, like so many before in this WJPZ at 50 Podcast. Scott Greene from the Class of 93.
Thanks so much for coming on and sharing some great stories with us today.
Scott: Thank you.