Jed R. Morey
Young Alumnus of the Year
Jed R. Morey graduated from the first class of Hofstra's Executive M.B.A. program in 2002. The program was designed for business leaders like Jed who have limited time to pursue an advanced degree. He said, "I had always wanted to pursue an advance degree in business and figuring out how to do it at an accredited institution was difficult. The opportunity to get an E.M.B.A. at Hofstra was too good to be true and I did everything I had to do to make sure I was a part of the inaugural program. It turned out to be a tremendous benefit to my career."
Jed is widely recognized as one of the most successful young leaders on Long Island. He began his career with the marketing and entertainment company The Morey Organization, Inc.,starting as the station manager for 96.7-FM and 98.3-FM in Albany, New York. He served in that capacity from 1994 until 1996.
When the stations were sold in 1996, he became vice president of The Morey Organization, overseeing the broadcast operations on Long Island, which include radio stations 107.1 WLIR, 98.5 The Bone, and Party 105.3. In 1998 Jed, at the age of 24, was promoted to president of the company, thereby becoming the youngest broadcasting company president in the United States. In 1999 Jed oversaw the purchase and operations of the Vanderbilt, a 47,000-square-foot special event complex in Plainview, Long Island. He later negotiated the sale of the facility to Nassau County, but retained a lease in the building that now houses The Morey Organization restaurant, Maxwell and Dunne's Steakhouse.
The same year as his graduation from Hofstra, Jed put his skills to work by purchasing The Island Ear, an alternative biweekly publication. He transformed the publication into the Long Island Press and increased its circulation from 15,000 to 110,000 as a weekly newspaper. Long Island Press has grown into a respected source of news and information in the area. Jed says about the newspaper's beginnings, "There was no Islandwide competitor to Newsday that did hard news. Long Island has terrific community weeklies, wonderful magazines and trade publications. But really to have a market as big as ours and only one newspaper to us was a travesty. Competition is good, and we knew there needed to be another voice and another opinion on the Island, because we deserve it. It turned out to be a good business model as well."
During his tenure at The Morey Organization, Jed has seen the company grow from 30 employees to more than 100. He is currently chief operating officer of The Morey Organization and oversees the financial health and the growth strategy of the entire company. In 2000, Jed was honored by Long Island Business News as one of Long Island's 40 most influential people under the age of 40.
For more than a decade, Jed has been a mentor for the Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) program and calls his involvement in the organization "a labor of love." He served as its president for two years, and in 2004 he was honored at the BBBS Annual Presidential Gala for his commitment to the youth of Long Island. He remains active today on the organization's President's Council.
"It's important to do what you love," Jed says, "because it makes waking up and going to work fun. All the networking I have done and all the organizations I have been involved with are things I am passionate about. That makes it so much easier to spread yourself out and apply yourself in different directions."
On being named Young Alumnus of the Year, Jed says, "It's a tremendous honor. I hold Hofstra in the highest regard, and I know how important the University is to Long Island as a whole. To be named as an honoree in the company of the other distinguished award recipients is particularly humbling."
Jed and his wife, Eden, live with their daughters, Ava and Maya, in Glen Cove, Long Island.