WUWM has been serving the community for over 60 years. To celebrate the work that we do, we're talking with the people who do it. Emily joined the WUWM team almost five years ago as the education reporter. Now during her time she has transitioned to the role of editor and special project leader.
For this segment of Get to Know WUWM, we sat down with Emily to learn more about what motivates her to do this work, how Milwaukee compares to her former home in Alaska and what makes the city special for her.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What were your approaches to each job? How have they changed? What stayed the same?
I think some of the core values of what we want our content to be stay the same. I'm still really interested and looking for accuracy, fairness and having stories that have good characters, good tape and are meant to connect and inform our community.
When I was a reporter, I was writing those stories and now I am editing those stories. So in that way, it's similar in that the goals are the same in terms of wanting the best product to air for our listeners.
What sets Milwaukee specifically apart from other cities that you've lived and worked in?
It's hard to compare to Haines, Alaska because that was a town of 2,000 people. So there's a few more restaurants and bars and cultural activities in Milwaukee, then in Haines, there was no movie theater in Haines, which was something I missed.
I think that Milwaukee has a really good mix. I've told people before, you know, when they ask, 'Oh, you went from Alaska to Milwaukee, but you were in Boston before that and Chicago, like, why do you stay in Milwaukee?' I think it's a really good mix of having a sort of small city feel where you run into people you know, and you kind of feel a camaraderie with the people who live here because it is a smaller city. But it also has movie theaters and like the things that you, you probably won't find in a town of 2,000 people, which I experienced for three years in Alaska. I think it's just a perfect mix of those things, and I love that we're on a lake and have so many parks and, you know, natural beauty, like, that is, of course, one thing that was great about Alaska, but I think we have that in Milwaukee too, just in a different way.
If you weren't reporting, you weren't an editor, you didn't have any bills, money didn't matter, what would you be doing instead of this job?
I would definitely be living in Italy and eating all the Italian pizza and gelato and espresso. That's like my dream to just, you know, retire to a villa in Italy. So hopefully that's what I would be doing if I didn't have any cares in the world and could do whatever I wanted.
