How a Cleveland woman became one of the world’s top podcasters

By JOHN KEREZY, eyeoncleveland.com founder

CLEVELAND, JAN 6, 2026 – Through grief and loss, Portia Booker found herself and the strength to overcome a host of setbacks that almost ended her life.

It was 2017. Portia had left a television news production job in Oklahoma, a position she thought would be her first stop on a career in broadcast journalism. Portia was in a severe depression, and about to jump off a bridge in Tulsa into the Arkansas River.

“I was going to jump, but I had a guardian angel who called my phone and talked to me,” Portia recalls. “She said, ‘you need to get off that bridge and get to the hospital right now.’ Later, she called again to make sure I’d gotten care. That saved my life.”

PART ONE OF TWO PARTS

It also helped propel Portia to leave Oklahoma and return to Cleveland, where a year later she launched what would become a podcasting career. When I moved back in 2018, I attended a networking mixer with all the TV personalities in Cleveland. A man approached me, said he heard that I was looking for work, and invited me to be a guest on his radio show at 95.9 FM, WOVU. Later Portia took a position as the producer of the show.

“That experience propelled WOVU to offer me an hour slot on the radio, and on October 4th, 2019, Groove with Portia hit the airwaves,” Portia explains. “Outside of my show airing weekly on the radio to an audience of 80,000, I also placed the show on my YouTube channel — my first podcast platform — before expanding to Apple, Spotify, iHeart Media, and Spreaker in 2020.

But we’re getting ahead of the story.

FOUNDATION IN HIGHER ED, INFLUENCERS

Booker graduated from Cleveland Central Catholic High School in 2010. She began attending Cuyahoga Community College with a goal of becoming a teacher, like her mother, Sharonne Lopez. In her first week on campus, a friend suggested that she join the staff of The Voice, the college’s student newspaper.

“I began feature writing for The Voice, and eventually became editor-in-chief,” Booker recalls. “Jack Hagan (the student media adviser) really cheered me on, and helped us with major stories as well. Bronson Peshlakai (now deceased), Sara Liptak, Felicia Jackson, Alexis Wohler, and Steve Thomas, Sanyika Patterson, were some of the other Voice staffers, and Sarah Szweda was our adviser at the East Campus also.”

With Hagan’s guidance, Booker and Peshlakai wrote articles about a Tri-C student worker who was unjustly terminated. She was fired when “Tri-C found her mentioned a police report about a bar fight that had happened eight years before she’d even become a college employee,” she recalls. “Bronson and I co-wrote an exposé about this, and the story took second place for investigative reporting in the Ohio Excellence in Journalism contest in 2013.”

By then Portia was ‘hooked’ on becoming a journalist. She transferred to Kent State University after earning her associate’s degree at Tri-C, intent on a career in broadcast journalism. There she flourished in her studies, especially in classed taught by professors Susan Zake (Public Policy and Writing), Karl Idsvoog (Data and Computer Assisted Reporting) and John Butte (Video Storytelling and Beat Reporting), who was also the faculty adviser at TV2, Kent State’s student media. “Those three instructors honored and nurtured my storytelling skills,” she says. “I learned a lot in those classes.”

Portia also participated in both TV-2 as a fill-in 5 PM Anchor, and, co-hosted a radio show on Black Squirrel Radio with Pearline Young. The show was titled “The Crib: The Twin Moves In.” 

While at Kent State, Portia obtained an internship in the summer of 2016 with NPR | PBS NewsHour and helped in the coverage of the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Everything she did, both in her studies and internship, pointed her in the direction of a career in broadcast journalism.

But even while in college, Portia Booker had a sense of determination and purpose which set her apart. She worked, usually at a full-time health care job, even while taking classes. “I had my own car, I had a job, and I didn’t want to be saddled with student loan debt,” she explains. “A lot of college students don’t have the benefit of that, I wasn’t one of those who were born with a silver spoon. I didn’t want to burden my parents financially either.”

MORE THAN FIRST JOB FRIGHTS

With the ink barely dry on her diploma, Portia accepted a news producing position with a television station in Tulsa, Okla. Google Maps will announce that it’s a 950-mile drive from Cleveland to Tulsa. From first-hand experience, Portia can tell you it’s also a different cultural and economic world than in Northeast Ohio.

“My biggest supporters were my mom and my great-grandmother, and I moved away from that,” she recalls. “I arrived in Tulsa not too long after police officer Betty Shelby, who’s white, shot and killed Terence Crutcher, an unarmed Black man who was holding his hands above his head at the moment of the shooting. ”The stories that I thought needed told, and the culture and environment in the newsroom, were vastly different than what I’d learned and experienced at Kent State, NPR/PBS, and with TV2.

“It just wasn’t clicking for me, it led me to a depression, to the point that I was coming to work in the newsroom every single day feeling anxious and nervous,” she adds. “The racial tension in Tulsa, which has existed there for many decades, didn’t help either.”

Portia didn’t feel she was a failure, yet her job was ladening her with strong feelings of guilt and shame. The job – and the career she’d envisioned for years now – wasn’t working out. 

“I didn’t think about a Plan B (when I went to Tulsa), and I didn’t have an avenue or an exit plan, and I certainly didn’t want to come back home and tell everybody I had failed,” she remembers. I didn’t want to be the laughingstock of my journalist peers, and so I almost ended my life over my TV career’s end. But – thanks be to God – it wasn’t my time to go. When I was sitting in the hospital that day, I remember hearing a still, small voice saying, ‘There is more to Portia’s life than this.'”

As she continued treatment for her depression, Portia received devastating news: her mother Sharonne had been diagnosed with stage 3A  non-small cell lung cancer.

“My Uncle called me in a frantic about my mom having severe nosebleeds. She wouldn’t go to the hospital,” she recalls. “We didn’t find out about her diagnosis until I moved back home, as my mom was also taking care of my great-grandmother full-time.”

Her mom’s health situation helped convince Portia to stay in Northeast Ohio, and before long Portia became a caregiver for her mother. Portia’s mom transitioned from life in 2022.

WATCH OR LISTEN

“Groove with Portia” comes out regularly each Wednesday. Here’s a link to bookmark and use for the YouTube of the podcasts, which you can also find on all major podcast channels (Apple, iHeart, etc.)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW_Dc_7HSv0358MT-v-lddNYPd3KENsPD

In PART TWO, we’ll trace Portia’s mastery of podcasting, how she’s risen in the ranks of podcasters, and what some clients say about Portia’s work on their behalf.