WARREN — Greg Mocker grew up watching local newscasters telling stories about people and events in his hometown, and he now does the same thing, but in the slightly larger town of New York City.

Mocker, a 1992 graduate of Warren JFK, grew up at a house off North Road between East Market Street and Youngstown Warren Road. His parents, George and Kathleen, still live there.

In high school, Mocker worked at the “Magnificent McDonald’s” at the intersection of North Road and East Market Street within walking distance of his childhood home. The fast food eatery was so named because it is two-stories tall and was the area’s largest McDonald’s.

“I swept the parking lot and emptied the trash receptacles during the early morning shift. I also fried the Chicken McNuggets,” Mocker recalled in a telephone interview. “Whenever I come home for a visit, I always drive past it. It brings back a lot of memories.”

He earned a degree in journalism in 1996 from Ohio University in Athens.

“I always watched the local news growing up. Tom Holden, Stan Boney, Len Rome, Mona Alexander. They connected me to the city and the neighborhoods,” Mocker said. “I liked English and I liked writing. I was on the speech team in high school and I would make home movies with my grandfather’s video camera when I was young, so maybe I was destined to be a reporter.”

He chose Ohio University because it had a campus newspaper, radio station and television station through an endowment from E.W. Scripps and Mocker said he thought he could gain a lot of experience in the field while taking classes.

“I used to listen to news on the radio and I read the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator growing up, so I guess I always was a news junkie,” Mocker said.

He said he worked at the campus newspaper while taking classes and he did internships in Huntington, W.Va., and Parkersburg, W.Va. He worked his senior year internship at WCPO in Cincinnati through the Scripps Foundation.

EARLY CAREER

After graduating from Ohio University, he landed a job at KTEN, an ABC and NBC affiliate based in Sherman, Texas, but his bureau was just over the Oklahoma border in Ardmore. He learned about the job from an Ohio University alum who graduated a year ahead of him.

“I did spot news stories on fires and features on Christmas trees being used for fish food at the local pond,” Mocker said. “I got to know the people in town. It was an honor and so much fun to interview people and share their stories with our viewers.”

He was in Oklahoma for a year before moving to WJBF, an ABC affiliate in Augusta, Ga. There, he got to cover The Masters golf tournament four times, including the year Tiger Woods won his first green jacket.

Mocker was there about four years before spending another four years at KOB, an NBC affiliate in Albuquerque, N.M. His next job was at KPHO in Phoenix.

Mocker decided he wanted to live in New York City, so he moved there with his younger sister in 2008.

He worked as a freelance videographer for a production company during the time when companies were looking for people to produce videos for YouTube and other social media sites.

Mocker said he did the freelance work for about two years when he was told about a reporter opening at WPIX-Channel 11 in New York City, which was affiliated with the CW station and was owned by Nexstar Media Group, a national company that owns CBS and ABC affililates WKBN and WYTV in Youngstown. For his resume tape, he used a story he had done as a freelancer on plastic bottle recycling.

He started out doing stories once a week, then twice a week until it turned into a full-time job.

WORKING IN THE BIG APPLE

“The station was focused on neighborhood stories and everyday concerns like potholes and trash pickup, as well as new restaurants and the arts community. It gave me the opportunity to enterprise and kept me focused on being connected to the neighborhoods.

“NYC is a big city, so there are lots of stories to tell. But it’s still a network of small neighborhoods. It is easy to get overwhelmed by the huge skyscrapers and the skyline, but it’s really just a network of neighborhoods filled with residents with the same concerns as the ones from my hometown. There are happy stories and sad ones, but those are the stories that impact a small town guy like me,” Mocker said.

He said he loves going to restaurants, where “everyone has a story to tell” and he loves riding the subway, where fellow riders will say to him “Hey, Mocker, you should do a story about … .”

Mocker said he loves doing stories about the regular folks who make the city tick, noting he recently did a story about the city’s longest-serving doorman, who retired at the age of 84 after working at the same apartment building on East 90th Street for 60 years.

He said he moved to New York after living out West because he wanted to be closer to his parents and extended family members and friends.

“It’s become more important as I get older to be closer to family,” Mocker said.

He said he comes to Warren to visit every other month and his parents also visit him in New York.

“The culture here is so interesting. There is always something to do. But it’s nice to have quality couch time too sometimes where I can shut the world out and just chill,” Mocker said.

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