Greg Corombos is the news director at Radio America, located in Arlington, Virginia. Corombos is the host of popular podcast “Three Martini Lunch,” and runs the intern program at the station. He graduated from Hillsdale in 1997 with a Bachelor of Arts. in history.
What do you do at Radio America?
Radio America is a content creator. It started out in 1985. At that time, we were literally producing documentaries and having people record commentaries that we would send out on cassette to radio stations to play. Then in the 1990s when talk radio really took off we moved more in that direction. Right about the time I got there in 1997, that was when we were a 24/7 program network. In the last decade, we’ve moved more into podcasting while keeping the radio going. So that’s mostly what I do now. I co-host “Three Martini Lunch,” help produce the “Sara Carter Show,” and host “Veterans Chronicles” where I interview veterans about their histories. We got a couple of paying clients branded content that I worked on as well. Plus, I run the intern program.
How did you get into radio?
I got into radio when I went to Washington, D.C. for my internship after my sophomore year of college, in the summer of 1995. I went to the National Journalism Center, and they sent me to Radio America. It was about eight blocks away from the Capitol. That’s a great neighborhood. NJC was not run by YAF at the time. It was run by Stan Evans. He founded it sometime in the 1970s. I knew pretty quickly that Radio America is where I wanted to be. I mainly did intern-level production stuff. They had an hour-long news magazine called “Dateline Washington.” I worked for the producer of the show. That meant rolling on reel-to-reel audio tape recordings to record sound bites that we would use later in the day. Cutting those up, putting them on carts. At first, there was nothing digital. I did a little bit of voice work. The next summer, Radio America had me back. When the producer was on vacation for a couple of weeks,.he had me pretty much running the ship. I got to do the two-minute congressional reports. I did a lot of those. I got to do a lot more on the air stuff.
How did you find Hillsdale?
My two older brothers went to Hillsdale. My oldest brother went here largely because we started getting “Imprimis.” He was very conservative, as were the rest of us. And so he came. I wanted to do media and at that time Hillsdale didn’t offer much. So, I really didn’t think I was coming here,but because my brothers had such a good experience, my parents insisted on the visit. When I went in for one of my interviews while I was here, he talked about how you can learn to write, but you need to know what you’re writing about, whether it’s economics, or history, or political science. The core curriculum feeds into a good journalist.
How did your show, “Three Martini Lunch,” come to be?
That pretty much landed in my lap. My bosses, Rich McFadden and Rich Lowry, who’s the editor-in-chief of National Review, wanted to have a collaboration. Rich Lowry picked Jim Geraghty for the National Review side. Rich McFadden picked me, and so given the fact that Jim is a really funny guy, we wanted it to be kind of a lighthearted and fairly short program. Itt has gotten a little more long-winded over the years now that we know each other better. But basically, the show contains three topics that you can gobble up in part of your lunch hour, less than a half hour of your commute. We keep it light and informative at the same time. We got our name when we were on a conference call and thought of three topics we wanted to post around lunchtime. We started in October 2010. We just hit 11 years. Now we’ve covered three different presidential elections together. We’ve covered wars and craziness. We have the good, the bad, and the crazy martinis, and I tell you my opinions, all from the perspective of how conservatives would look at that. It’s my favorite thing that I do.
What advice would you give to your college self?
I took advantage of about as much as I could have on campus, but that certainly would be my advice to students now. Even if it’s not necessarily going to be connected to your career, writing is always gonna help you. You’ll probably have to be able to present your work at some point. Being involved in things like the campus radio station really gets you ready to be in the workplace where you’re going to have to collaborate with people. The friends you make here are going to be probably some of your best friends for the rest of your life. I like to say that you’re never going to have a higher concentration of quality people in your life.
Do you still keep in touch with your classmates?
I do. Especially all of my housemates. We lived in a house on Barber Drive for a year and we called it “The Shack” because we’re big fans of “Caddyshack.” Every year, we get together for what we call the Shack Classic, which is our golf tournament. This year coming up is our 25th Shack Classic. I am by far the worst golfer, but we use the handicap system, so I have actually won a few times. We figured out ways to keep it going even in the COVID-19 pandemic when the British Open was canceled. Three of my former housemates live in the Grand Rapids area and I live out east, so we played in Akron, Ohio.