Phil Lipof was born and raised in Newton, Mass. He attended the College of Visual and Performing Arts (VPA) at Syracuse University, where he earned a degree in speech communication with a minor in writing. He began his career at KIDK, a television station in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Since then, Lipof has worked across numerous outlets and networks, including WFOR Miami, WCVB-TV and NBC.
Lipof joined ABC News in Aug. 2021 and has reported across all platforms, including World News Tonight with David Muir, Good Morning America, GMA3, ABC News Live and Nightline. He’s reported on some of the world’s largest events such as the refugee crisis in Poland, the Uvalde School Shooting in Uvalde, TX and the damage caused by Hurricane Ida in New Orleans, among many others.
Bella Ishanyan
So you started at Syracuse and then immediately jumped into the field. What inspired you to pursue journalism?
Phil Lipof
I went to the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse, and in my junior year, I was watching the news and thought to myself, ‘I wonder how they put that show together.’ It interested me. I don’t know why I thought that. I went to the local student run TV station at Syracuse out of Newhouse, I was like, ‘Hey guys,’ they were looking at me cross-eyed, ‘You know you don’t go to Newhouse,’ but they let me do some stuff. And the minute I did my first live report, I took a wire copy and rewrote it into my own words, and I did a live report, I went home, I watched it and I was sold.
I tried to get into Newhouse, but it was late my junior year, and I did poorly my first semester freshman year because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I just partied…I went and I finished VPA, I studied speech communication with a minor in writing in VPA and that’s how I got into the business.
Bella Ishanyan
What part of broadcast journalism took your heart?
Phil Lipof
I was inspired by people who I’ve since been able to work with, which is really cool. Christiane Amanpour, she’s with CNN but she’s the most incredible foreign correspondent of all time. Now she anchors a show, but she was the woman who was going into Arab countries when they weren’t allowing women to be journalists. She would have to cover her head but [would] go right for the president of Iran; she’d get the interview. She’d go meet the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization and get the interview. I just want to be in the business. I want to go out every day, have a different story, meet different people, cover a refugee crisis on the border of Ukraine when that happens, and then interview Green Day when they come out with a new album.
Bella Ishanyan
It’s particularly cutthroat.
Phil Lipof
There’s cutthroat in two different ways. The business is intense, you’re living on deadlines, people who you’re working with [will say] ‘don’t give me that long story, tell me the short version of it.’ We live in this very fast-paced world, but it’s also cutthroat in that everybody’s trying to get the next big job, and everybody’s trying to get to where they’re trying to get.
In almost 30 years, I’ve come across some people who would literally cut your throat to get ahead. I’m not one of those people, and to my detriment maybe, but I was always of the thought [that] if someone wants me, they’re going to ask me to do something. Me stepping on someone else is not going to make my boss want me more, but I’ve been burned, specifically once in this business, by someone I really trusted, and it is cutthroat in that manner.
Bella Ishanyan
How has the field changed throughout the 30 years that you’ve been working?
Phil Lipof
When I got into it, the business was making this correction. For a while, it was all white men doing the news. You [would] turn on the evening news in the 80s, and two guys were sitting there next to each other here in New York. So the introduction of women, and then, when I came in, women were all over the business. It was integrated in that sense, but we still didn’t look like the communities we covered. For my 30 years in the business, I’ve watched the business correct itself, and now newsrooms are diverse places…it makes us cover news better when we have people from all backgrounds giving their input and having their voices heard in the newsroom.
Bella Ishanyan
Since you’re working on general assignment, you have to be a representative of different kinds of stories. How do you shift between each story and make sure that you’re giving it the attention that it needs and giving it the right coverage?
Phil Lipof
I’ll give you a perfect 180 degree whiplash experience that I had. Since I’ve been here in 2021, that’s [approximately] when the Russo-Ukrainian War started, they sent me to Poland a day before Russia invaded Ukraine because we knew the mass group of refugees would come through the border into Poland from Ukraine, and that’s what happened. I was there for three to four weeks, 20-hour days, going to the border, coming back to Lublin, Poland, up to Warsaw, where there were shelters, back to the border. It was a crazy time, and it was a really emotional time. I had never covered a refugee crisis before.
[After] I came back home, the first story I covered was for this music series that I do called “The Prime Playlist,” and I was about to interview Taylor Momsen, who was in Gossip Girl and was Cindy Lou Who, and now she’s in a band called “The Pretty Reckless,” which I love. She said, ‘Come out to Brooklyn at this secret location where we’re shooting a video,’ and I was like, ‘Cool.’… [I went] to this warehouse in Brooklyn where she was shooting a video, and [ABC] wound up not being able to shoot any of it because it was this secret video. I forget the name of the song that it was for, but it was a simulated orgy…and I remember thinking to myself, ‘What an odd job I have,’ but that’s both odd and awesome. A week ago, I was covering a refugee in another part of the world, and now I’m in a warehouse in Brooklyn watching this thing happen for a music video. That’s what I love about this business…You just have to do it. You have to compartmentalize and go, ‘Okay, that was what I covered a week ago. It changed me as a human being, but this is what I’m covering today.’
Bella Ishanyan
What are the day-to-day expectations of professional journalists?
Phil Lipof
When I was a reporter in local news, you’d come in and have a 9 a.m. meeting, you’d decide what you were going to cover that day, grab a photographer, go out, cover it, do a live shot, go home. That’s the day of a reporter. When I anchored the evening news, I would come in, we’d have an afternoon meeting, figure what we’re going to do, talk to the managing editor, and write some scripts and just kind of, you know, they’re, you’re sort of a newsroom leader. That was a very different thing here at Network, they have so many reporters all over the world every morning. There’s a global call at 9 a.m. or 9:30 and if the president of ABC News holds the call, everybody all over the world is part of the conversation.
If something is happening in one particular part of the world, like the Middle East, whoever’s in charge of that will say, ‘Okay, this is what we have today. We have Ian Pannell in Tel Aviv, we have James Longman in Beirut, Marcus Moore in Jerusalem,’ and if they want to talk to a correspondent, a correspondent will pipe in on the call. If not, people just tell you what’s going on in [their] region of the world and how they’re covering it today. If there’s a discussion to be had about how the network, if someone’s like, ‘I think we should do more of this in our coverage,’ these are the discussions that are had. Depending on what your position is here at the network and what your lane is, your schedule is different. For me, I spend a lot of time with ABC News Live. I anchor on the weekends, those two days are anchoring for ABC News Live, the other days, I’m available for shows. … I am all over the place. I’m used to fill in holes on Nightline [or] Live Prime for Lindsey Davis, so my schedule is different every week.
Bella Ishanyan
What kind of toll does that take on you and your personal life?
Phil Lipof
It takes a toll. If you’re not willing to sacrifice and you’re a nine-to-five person, and you want your Fridays and Saturday nights with your boyfriend, girlfriend, or your husband or wife, then you know this isn’t for you. Fortunately, I’ve been married for 23 years and with my wife for 25 years, and she was one of my first co-anchors. I met her at my second job, and we anchored together in three different markets. She’s a journalist, and she knows what the job is, so when I say to her, ‘I’m sorry there was a shooting in Uvalde, Texas, I know it’s Memorial Day and I know I need to be with the family, but I gotta go,’ she looks at me and says, ‘Go.’ There are a lot of partners who wouldn’t understand and just be like, ‘You’re choosing work again,’ she understands. I’m not choosing work, but we both chose this life and sometimes you got to go, ‘Hey, I’m not available,’ but the minute you say [that] someone else is available. That’s what keeps us motivated too.
Bella Ishanyan
Do you have any regrets about joining the field?
Phil Lipof
No, absolutely not. My life has been enriched in so many ways, and I’m the person I am today, because of a lot of things, but this business is one of them…I have so much more perspective now than I did before I started this business, because on a daily basis, I’m meeting people a lot of times at the worst moment in their lives, and to treat someone with kindness at that moment is an important thing to do, and perhaps you were put there at that moment to do that.
Bella Ishanyan can be reached at [email protected]
