How Cat Greenleaf Found Success on Her Own Front Stoop
Only a certain kind of person can take an idea as simple as sitting on the steps of your own Brooklyn home and chewing the fat with your neighbors while drinking a cup of Joe, and turn it into an Emmy-award winning show on NBC.
Well, Cat Greenleaf—the host of “Talk Stoop with Cat Greenleaf”—did just that. Viewers fell in love with Cat’s uncanny ability to ask celebrities personal questions with a witty ease. And she does so in a naturally inviting environment (her own front stoop), allowing us to see that, underneath their glittery surfaces, public figures are just real people with real stories.
Cat knew she was destined to put her stamp on the world of broadcasting from very early on. “It was the only job I could find that joined all of my greatest passions: people, performing, learning and sharing,” she says.
Cat attended LIU Global, where she gained incredible handson experience. “For me, there’s no greater way to learn something than by doing it,” she says.
She began her broadcast career as an airborne traffic reporter for KGO radio in San Francisco— but it wasn’t flying over the Golden Gate Bridge in a helicopter at sunset every day that she feared; it was the idea that her poor sense of direction might make her a failure that she found endlessly terrifying.
And fail she did not. Cat made her way back to New York, where she continued to do traffic reports for NY1, and then segued into hard news reporting for RNN-TV in Queens. “Traffic reporting is literally just the facts; hard news requires finding, understanding, synthesizing and presenting all sides of the story,” she says of the distinction between the two. “Both jobs have their challenges.”
Cat still didn’t feel like her relationship with hard news was a lasting one—her clever sense of humor just wouldn’t stay under wraps. Fortunately, NYC-TV caught wind of Cat’s entertaining repartee and offered her a chance to take on her own lifestyle segment, “On the Prowl with Cat Greenleaf”—a self-produced weekly spot highlighting the people and places of New York City. “It was incredibly freeing and satisfying to be doing pieces I actually felt qualified to do,” she says.
Somewhere in between the long hours and the hectic traveling schedule, Cat found some time to have a social life—meeting her now husband, Michael Rey, at an industry party on a Manhattan rooftop. “[It was] a hot August night, involving a great deal of vodka and a lucky shared past,” she says about the night she first laid eyes on him. “Turns out we’re from the same hometown but had never met.”
Shortly after the birth of their first son, Primo, Cat received the ultimate gift for every working mother, delivered right to her door step… literally. She was offered a gig hosting her own show called “Talk Stoop with Cat Greenleaf”—filmed right outside her Cobble Hill three-story town house. The show now airs in the top nine markets and is viewed nearly 12 million times a week.
Cat also founded L.U.S.T (Look Up Stop Texting), which aims to bring awareness to our society’s addiction to mobile devices. She urges everyone to put down their cell phone and take a second to notice the world in front of them.
So, when Cat took her own advice and put her Blackberry down, at what point did she look around and think to herself: ‘Wow, I’ve really made it’? She says that success means different things to people at different times in their lives. “My first traffic job got me into broadcasting, and back then I knew I was the luckiest girl in the world because I loved media so much,” she explains. “These days, having work that I’m passionate about, which also allows me to walk my son to school and wear sneakers every day and ask the most inappropriate things of people also feels pretty great.”
Written by Lindsey Hallman for LIU Magazine
