NEW JERSEY – Matt Ward didn’t set out to be a traffic reporter but his time in that role has become very comfortable. His listeners rely on him to steer them in the right direction on the congested roads of the Garden State.
With some coincidence, Ward was interviewed by JerseyShoreOnline.com during his own commute to work. He recalled his start in the radio business and how he became a staple at his current station.
“I started to do traffic in May of 1989 as a part timer and I became a full timer in August of ‘89 so it’s been a little over 30 years,” he said. “I was in radio for seven years before coming to what was then known as Shadow Traffic and we are now called total weather and traffic network as part of I Heart Media.
“I worked as a sports caster, a news caster a DJ and started out at Brookdale in Middletown, which is now called 90.5 The Night. It was called just plain WBJB back then. I got a good foundation there. I started my professional career in 1982 as a sports reporter on WJLK in Asbury Park. I was hired by the late Dennis O’Mara who would wind up going to Shadow Traffic a few years later,” he said.
O’Mara hired Ward for Shadow Traffic in 1989. “I was also working with Jim Hunter who was the regular sports caster at WJLK. He had just gotten a full-time job with CBS radio and he needed a backup for the local sports reports so that is how I got hired there. Jim is a very successful baseball broadcaster with the Baltimore Orioles. He’s been doing their games since I think 1997. We’re still in touch. He was just inducted into the Brookdale Community College Athletics Hall of Fame, and he was kind enough to ask me to do his introduction at the induction.” The ceremony was held on Feb. 9 in Freehold.
Later Ward briefly became a DJ for WHGT AM and then moved on to a station in Long Branch which was a Top 40 station at the time and later became a hybrid rock station. “That was in 1987. Then I got a job opportunity in Florida. I worked at a local station in Leesburg, Florida and later an adult contemporary station in Orlando Fl Star 101 which is now ironically owned by I Heart Media. It was a nice station but there just wasn’t enough openings coming up and when my regular job in Lessburg closed down I was looking for work and I really wanted to come back to New Jersey. I was only in Florida for less than a year.”
Ward spoke about his return to the Garden State. “I still wanted to be a DJ and stay on the air doing music,” he said. “It was my wife who said, ‘I think you should call Dennis,’ and he quickly brought me in and I watched him do his shift one afternoon. At this time the traffic reporter’s schedule was mostly live and you had to wait for a DJ to finish their record or whatever.” It was a very complicated procedure, reading a traffic screen full of abbreviations.
“Dennis turned around to me after watching him do six or seven reports and he took his headphones off his ears and he said, ‘so do you think you can do this?’ I was in such awe of what he was doing. I was thinking in my mind ‘I don’t think I can do this’ but of course I told him ‘Oh yes, I can do this.’ I studied that list hard. I started doing afternoons and I’ve had the same shift ever since which is the afternoon drive with traffic. Thirty years later here we are,” Ward said.
“One thing I always said about traffic is that they aren’t going to be changing their format they are always going to be doing traffic. It is information based. I wanted to be an afternoon DJ for a long time and I wound up becoming an afternoon traffic reporter and in modern radio it is the spoken word and the content that people are really paying attention to.”
Ward said that even with change in technology traffic reporting “is still very much in demand. I understand that traffic and weather is doing very well for I Heart Media. It is a nice place to be and it is nice to be there and many of my colleagues have been there for about as long as I have or longer. I’m not even the longest veteran there.”
How Traffic Has Changed
New Jersey being so congested, Ward has noticed some traveling trends. “People are getting smarter with how they travel. Friday used to be the big crunch day so now a lot of people get out of town on Thursday and we started calling Thursday the new Friday 15 years ago.”
“We started to notice that Thanksgiving rush. It was always Wednesday being the big crunch but now Tuesday rivals that, too. People are always trying to get out earlier and I always say it is all about the timing. If you want to beat shore traffic on a Saturday leave early. Get your pork roll, egg and cheese, a cup of coffee and get your spot on the beach,” Ward said.
“The patterns have changed but one thing that has improved is the NJ Turnpike where the truck lane used to be on 8A and it moved down closer to exit 6 and you don’t get those delays anymore. They fixed that merge and that was the best thing they ever did,” Ward said.
Ward said construction projects like the Parkway and Turnpike do seem to take a long time to complete. “They have made some improvements. The parkway got wider but you’ll notice going down the Parkway to 132 South to 131 that Woodbridge, Iselin area there are accidents there every day.”
As to Ward’s own commute, he lives in northern Monmouth County and his station is based in Rutherford in the Meadowlands across from the Met Life Stadium. “It is about a 40-45 minute trip for me. I enjoy the commute. I like to be able to decompress after a long afternoon and usually by the time I get on the road in the evening the traffic has died down.”
While helicopters are used at some stations, that is one advance that Ward isn’t interested in being a part of. “I have never been one to fly. I like working in a radio studio. I have never once flown in a chopper. If you do that kind of thing you have to love it. I’m a radio guy who always liked being in the studio and if I can read maps and cameras and commercial copy, that is what I do,” Ward said.
At age 56, Ward is happy. “There are new stories every day. The bad weather days and snow storms that we’ve covered – people get really psyched up about that.”
Ward said, “as reporters there is a comradery that gets built up with the producers and everyone who comes together to cover stuff and it’s not just the snow storms but hurricanes. Superstorm Sandy is probably the worse one we ever had. We had to walk through flood waters to get out of our hotels that day. We were all working on 9-11 and so there is a lot we’ve seen over 30 years.”
