How WABC’s Chad Lopez Magnetizes College Kids To AM Radio

Walk through WABC-AM in New York on any given day and you’ll see a striking sight: studios, cubicles, offices, conference rooms, and halls packed with young, fresh faces making their start in radio. It would be especially jarring if you subscribe to the notion that nobody under 30 would want to work in radio – let alone AM radio.

At a time when the future of the band is so called into question, how does an AM News/Talk station foster such an active community of young talent from production to on-air to sales to traffic? Radio Ink sat down with WABC Radio and Red Apple Media President Chad Lopez to find out.

Radio Ink: How many workers aged 30 or under are employed or interning at WABC at an average time?

Chad Lopez: I would say it’s about 40% of the staff. It’s a lot because of production and everything that we’re doing, especially with social media and digital. Plus, we launched our own syndication. We have an advertising agency and a media placement agency that we do out of here as well.

Radio Ink: How did you get so heavily involved in radio internships?

Chad Lopez: I spent four years in the Navy and when I got out, this woman named Catherine Camera, who was the senior vice president for what would become Manpower, helped place me in her husband’s media buying service buying TV, print, radio, and outdoor.

I placed for Stern’s department store, the reincarnation of Pan American Airlines, and we launched Fox Business Channel. I did that for six years, sending orders out to all these radio guys. Eventually, a lot of them said you should get into sales. I got an offer to go over to WCBS. I said to myself, why would I go to CBS? 880? It’s a news station. I don’t want to do that. I’m young. I want to be fun. I want to get into the music side of it.

However, a mentor told me to go for it. So I went there. Two years later, they moved me into management. And I moved right up to the VP of Sales for WCBS. We took Yankee baseball from WABC – full circle – and because of this, we started getting applications from a much younger demo than we were used to. It brought a new energy, so when we put in a new retail business team, I said, well, why don’t we start an internship during the summer? And I found a lot of interns that would come in.

When I moved to WABC under Cumulus, I expanded my intern program. I saw when you brought young interns in how they took to the medium. And they loved the whole process. We had them in traffic. We had them on the programming side. We had them on the sales side. We had them all over and it worked really well.

Radio Ink: How did that translate into full-time hires?

Chad Lopez: A lot of those same interns from the Cumulus days are running departments for me now at Red Apple Media.

Every year since then, I ended up hiring one or two interns to work either in sales or bigger positions in different departments because they liked it. A young lady, Stephanie Bongiorno, now heads my social media department and she came to us from Hofstra nine years ago. Two weeks ago we promoted a former intern. He’s my business manager now. I’m really proud of that.

If they start out with us as a freshman, they have to come back as a sophomore and as a junior, but then when they’re in their last year, if we really like them, we make them an offer before they go to school. We say you have a job once you get out and this is what you’d be doing. We will hold it for you if you’re interested.

Ten out of ten times, that works well for us. After three years they’re already like family. We already know them, and they know exactly who we are and how we’re waiting for them to graduate so they can come back to us.

I think it speaks volumes that when you look at how the listener demographics may still skew older, we have a younger demo working here. I love having conversations with them. They make me more passionate about radio. They make the entire floor excited. And they make their friends excited about AM radio. They say, oh my God, I just did this post on social media with Curtis [Sliwa], and now it’s going back and forth with the mayor – check this out!

Their friends ask where they work; oh, I work at WABC. And so it helps us grow a younger audience too.

Radio Ink: New York is market #1. You have a pick of colleges with great broadcasting programs, but also a great radio culture that runs through the city. Where do most of the interns come from? Do you approach them; do they cold call you?

Chad Lopez: It’s three sources. So, we have more people cold calling wanting to get into news, especially in a year like this year, right? But we definitely partner with the universities and they always send us interns. We have a great relationship with Fordham and Hofstra and so many others.

Many also come from, believe it or not, our clients. They have kids that grow up with the station because their parents have skin in the game. When they become involved in radio and see that it works, they say, “Hey, my son or my daughter is looking for an internship. Do you guys have an intern program?”

And we also pay our interns too. We’re asking them for a minimum of four days out of the week. Some internships, they just want one just so that they can say they did an internship, but they’re still enjoying the summer, right? But when you set a minimum of four days that we need you in and it’s eight-hour days, we know if the intern is really serious or not.

Radio Ink: You truly pay your interns? Now there’s a radio rarity. You’ll have college kids beating down your door by noon.

Chad Lopez: Yeah! We’re asking them to do what we would pay somebody the minimum wage to do. They could be working in events for us, they could be in social media if they have graphic skills. We want a lot of journalists. And we also move them throughout the departments when they come in so they get a really good sense of what a modern radio station looks like and feels like.

Radio Ink: Okay, pay aside, how do you capture and maintain the interest of your interns and build those close relationships you mentioned?

Chad Lopez: So first we will walk them around. We’ll say, see the TV cameras here. We have a green screen. This is multimedia. We’re not a typical radio station. We have a media buying service here. We have a network. We’re operating in a very different way than AM is traditionally viewed.

Then, we actually get them involved and give them a stake. We’ll put them on a show. If they do a really good coverage of a story and we like it, let’s put them on a show with one of our talent. You’re doing what you love, you give us your best story that you covered, and then you’re going to be able to come and do that in studio with Sid Rosenberg, the number one News/Talk morning show in New York.

You know what’s going to happen then? They’re going to tell all their friends in high school, college, wherever – they’re going to tell them. They’re going to tell their grandmother in Italy, “You got to stream this. You got to stream 77 WABC. I’m going to be on with this person.” Right?

I think it serves well for both sides. It helps the kids and also it helps us. We have them be a part of the process.

The intern may not know the guest that we put on, but when we post “Hey, this person is going to be on in the next two minutes talking about X,” then they watch the analytics on the stream spike in real time and they see how it works. Then we say to them what would you do on social media? Think about targeting a younger audience. What would you do and how would you turn that message around to get someone to want to listen to our next interview or to go back and download this interview?

They’re bringing a new skillset to the table. We need them more than anything to help this industry survive and continue.

Radio Ink: If you could give other broadcasters a page out of the WABC playbook to attract young talent and grow the industry, what would you recommend?

Chad Lopez: Number one – I would make sure that the intern will get credit for the internship.

Number two – be willing to invest in paying the intern the minimum wage at the very least. Of course, in return, the intern has to want to work a minimum of four days because, let’s face it, we’re really training the intern too, right? And hopefully we’re training the intern for a future job.

Number three – have a good internship program in place. Managers need to know exactly how much time needs to be spent and what the intern needs to be trained up on, so that it’s worth it for us, right? And it is. In the past year, we had interns covering for people when they went on vacation. Running a board for a show.

Think about this. If you were an intern right now considering a real future in radio, and you go into a company that isn’t paying you, isn’t stable, half the company isn’t coming into the office, it isn’t providing an environment of creativity or anything… Are you going to feel good about that internship when you’re done with it and say, I want to go into radio? Probably not.

Radio Ink: If you went out in the street and asked a bunch of college kids, Family Feud style, “What are you listening to?” Of the top six answers on the board, AM radio would probably not make the list. Do these internships fight that stigma?

Chad Lopez: Absolutely. Do you really think an intern coming in knows who Cousin Brucie is right now? They’re wondering why their parents are making a big deal about this guy they’re on the same station with. But when they’ve been here a while, they get it.

People said AM radio was dead. No, AM radio is not going to go anywhere. It’s just what’s the distribution going to be. And we know it’s going to be streaming on phones and apps and all that stuff. So we show them

If they come to us and they’re looking for a job, it is our duty to make sure that it’s as exciting to them as what we’re doing.

Radio Ink: If there’s someone in college or high school right now who’s reading this and looking to break into radio and looking for an internship, what advice would you give them?

Chad Lopez: I always say this to the interns – if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. The reason I say that is because it was said to me and I live it. If the passion starts in your gut, that fire in your belly is going to move up to your heart, your heart’s going to start beating faster because you can’t wait to get to work, and then it’s going up to your brain. And when it finally comes out of your mouth, it’s going to be a really good idea or something that you’re passionate about that someone’s going to want to listen to you.

It doesn’t matter where you are – find something that you want to do in any radio station, find that opportunity in there, and go for it, but you gotta love it.

Editor’s note: this interview has been reformatted for length.