Cooking Up a Radio Show — Alumni Profile, Emily Botein ’91

Picture this: It is the late 1970s, and a small fourth-grader is walking down the street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She walks past the seafood store and enters the newest addition to her neighborhood, Rosie’s Bakery. She sits at a table and starts scribbling down the conversation she hears — the small talk between the customers and the cashier, the inside jokes of the staff. This is fun, she thinks.

This fourth-grader, Emily Botein ’91, was assigned to eavesdrop on a conversation for class. Although she did not realize it at the time, the assignment sparked her lifelong obsession with listening to people’s stories. Botein is the interim vice president of studios and programming at WNYC — the most-listened-to local radio station in the country — and has an extensive list of shows to her name, producing Peabody Award-winning programs such as “The Promised Land with Majora Carter” and “Blindspot.” But more than critical acclaim, what matters most to Botein is what started her journey all the way back at Rosie’s Bakery: finding people’s stories. 

Exploring College

Botein’s college application process was very different from the one most high school students go through today. She only applied to five schools, and did not even visit some of them. While she did tour Amherst, Botein chose the college for a reason unrelated to her visit.

“I’ve tried to decide whether I’m going to tell this to you [but] my father died the year before I went to Amherst,” Botein said. “I think I went to be close to home, and it turned out to be a really good decision.”

She arrived at Amherst “shell-shocked” and found it difficult to navigate meeting new people while processing her father’s death. “I remember it just came up so much, and I think that was hard,” Botein explained.

Botein instantly loved her coursework, however. Although she eventually became an English and history major, one of her standout courses was actually her Introduction to Liberal Studies (now known as the first-year seminar) on light, taught by Professor of Physics Robert Romer.

“Even the fact that someone from [physics], a world that I didn’t really understand, was so inviting, was exciting to me,” Botein said. “I sometimes regret that I didn’t take science and math.”

While perhaps Botein did not take advantage of the open curriculum, she did take advantage of the Five College Consortium. She took three Five College courses — two history classes at Smith and one film class at Hampshire. 

“That’s a real thing that people don’t take advantage of … It should almost be required,” Botein said. 

The Smith courses were recommended to Botein by Professor of History and Sexuality, Women’s, and Gender Studies Margaret Hunt. Hunt had a profound impact on her and served as her advisor. Botein studied Christian female missionaries in Mexico for her history thesis, and suspects that she chose this topic because, in part, Hunt was interested in religion and women. Botein loved her research because she read the female missionaries’ journals and other rich primary sources, and got to see the world through these women’s eyes and understand their stories. 

“I remember the primary sources of their travels were just so fun to read,” she said. “It’s so fun to read about actual human beings’ lives.”

Washing Lettuce

While Botein had long been interested in people’s stories, she never viewed journalism or radio as a career she could pursue. “I didn’t understand how you could do it, how to get in,” she explained. “I loved listening to [radio], but I didn’t know how to access it.”

What she did understand was food. Botein worked at her friend’s mother’s catering business starting in seventh grade, and when she got to Amherst, she worked both at Valentine Dining Hall and a restaurant in town. After her sophomore year, Botein decided to take a semester off, get her professional pastry certificate, and work at restaurants in San Francisco. She wanted a change and an adventure, but she also wanted to think about how food fit into her life.

“I was kind of always like, ‘This is a part of me. Could it be a professional part of me?’” Botein said.

When she graduated from Amherst, she landed a job at the Quilted Giraffe, a Michelin-star restaurant in New York frequented by celebrities such as Madonna, Jackie Kennedy, and Warren Beatty.

“It felt like an entirely different world,” Botein said. “I was coming out of this fancy college, and suddenly, you know, I was spending eight hours washing lettuce.”

While she had friends in New York, Botein felt isolated because of her work. Her hours were long and went into the night, which meant her schedule did not align with when her friends were free.

Still, Botein loved working at the restaurant. She loved working on a team, and a lot of the aspects she likes about radio were also a part of restaurant culture.

“I always say where I really learned about radio production [was] in a restaurant kitchen, really, because it was all about coordination,” she said. “It’s all about timing and coming up at the same time. [Now] we edit on software, but when we were doing live mixing, it [was] all about … doing the mix at the same time [as each other].”

The Quilted Giraffe closed in 1993, and Botein was left without a job. But now she had an opportunity: She had unemployment money, and there was a radio internship at the “Derek McGinty Show” in Washington, D.C., where she could live with her mother for free. Suddenly, the seemingly impenetrable media industry had an opening, and Botein took it. After this experience, she worked at the Smithsonian Institution for a couple of years, still not able to get a full-time job in radio.

Then in 1999, National Public Radio (NPR) was starting a radio program about food. Since Botein had a lot of experience in that world, she applied. 

Cutting Tape

Botein got hired, but not because she knew about food. 

“[My boss said,] ‘Well, when I heard you had worked in restaurant kitchens, I figured you’d be fine with your hands,’” Botein explained. At that time, radio production was an extremely physical task, where producers would play the tapes and use razor blades to cut them at specific points to edit the sound. Her boss was looking for someone who could cut the tapes, rather than a chef.

Botein put her all into the job. “I ended up staying at NPR till like, 2 a.m. because I was like, ‘This is one of the coolest [jobs] and I just didn’t know how to do this’ … Placing together people’s words — it was so insanely powerful and fun,” she said.

When she does her first round of editing on a segment, Botein always cuts “too tight.” Then she goes back and adds space for pauses in the piece. 

“I think it’s easy to edit tight, and it’s actually more pleasing in the ear to have the space,” she explained. “Some of the most interesting moments are when there’s like five or eight seconds of silence, and it’s like, ‘Oh my God, what’s happening?’”

In addition to preserving silences, Botein also enjoys working on “amby,” or background sound. “That is what makes a scene come to life,” she said.

Botein said that even if she is not personally interested in a radio episode’s topic, the production will always excite her. Still, she loves that she gets to learn so much throughout her work.

“It’s certainly not, it’s not a Ph.D.-level, master’s-level [understanding] in any way. But no, I think that’s super fun — to be able to learn, to keep diving into things,” Botein said.

Over the course of her career, she has listened to everyone from a person born with HIV to people talking about their loved ones dying during 9/11. She is in awe of how vulnerable sources are with her and is often concerned about the ethics of editing and producing their stories. 

“Sometimes we don’t realize what a big deal [it is to people]. [You’re trying to] understand this one little part of the story, but they’re telling you this really big part of their lives, and sometimes we have to be careful not to be flippant,” Botein explained. “People are giving you almost the most personal thing they could give you. So you have to be so respectful of that.”

She could still recall quotes from an interview she conducted with a pediatric nurse for “Blindspot,” a WNYC show about the AIDS epidemic for which Botein won a Peabody Award this year. The nurse was involved in HIV/AIDS medical care in the early days of the epidemic, and discussed how she tried all the medicines before she gave them to her patients because so little was known about effective treatments that she wanted to ensure everything was as safe as possible.

That interview did what Botein said was essential for a good piece: “If you can [make the listener] a fly on the wall to the interview — that’s the most compelling.”

Preserving Radio

Now, Botein has risen through the ranks of WNYC to become the interim vice president of studios and programming, where she is responsible for managing existing programs and determining which new shows should be produced. This job has become more challenging, as the federal government has cut public radio funding this year, and although it is the most-listened-to station in the country, WNYC’s listenership has still declined.

“It’s all the more reason why we need to think about the audience and like, ‘What does the audience want?’” Botein explained. “We don’t have limitless funds, so it’s really important that what we make serves a need.”

This year, WNYC also cut 7% of its positions, which has impacted morale and the workplace culture. “Obviously, it’s worse to be laid off,” Botein said. “The people who remain also are really struggling.”

However, Botein is hopeful. When she started in radio, her uncle said it was a dying industry and that she would be foolish to pursue it. Decades later, it is still here, and Botein thinks it will remain.

“The listener numbers are going down, but they’re not going away,” Botein said. “I don’t think we’re going to change radio listening overall, but I do think we have the potential to … make appointment listening happen again.”

She also said that the magic of radio — connecting people around the world — will never go away.

“Once my car didn’t start, and I was in some weird part of Brooklyn … and it was scary,” she said. “But then I was like, ‘Oh, I can turn on the radio — I’m not alone’ … That is the power of radio.”