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ALUMNA TAKES TO THE AIRWAVES AS PUBLIC RADIO REPORTER
Catrin Einhorn ’99 can pinpoint the moment she
knew which path her career should take. When she was a freelance
writer for Catalyst, a magazine about education reform
in Chicago, she tape-recorded an interview with a mother involved
in a local mentoring program. Later, as she transcribed the quotes,
Einhorn was saddened by the fact that no one except her would get
to hear this woman’s voice. “She spoke with a particular
accent, and with so much emotion,” she recalls. “Writing
the story didn’t seem as intimate as listening to it.”
It was then that Einhorn, already an intern with Chicago
Public Radio station WBEZ, came to fully appreciate the special
qualities of the medium itself.
Today, Einhorn is a full-time correspondent for WBEZ,
and her award-winning work can be heard not only on Chicago-based
shows, but also on such national NPR programs as Morning Edition,
All Things Considered, Day to Day, Marketplace,
and The World.
A Chicago native herself, Einhorn had no thoughts
of becoming a reporter as she majored in social anthropology with
a concentration in Latin American and Iberian Studies at Haverford.
Although she liked writing, she didn’t participate in any
collegiate journalistic activities, aside from her work-study job
with Haverford’s communications department.
Her fascination with Latin America, however, pre-dated
her college years. During her senior year of high school, she spent
a month in Bolivia visiting a cousin. “I fell in love with
it,” she says. “The country is about 50 percent indigenous
and so different from anything I’d ever seen before.”
She missed both her prom and her high school graduation in order
to extend her visit.
At Haverford she relished the attention and advice
of such professors as Laurie Hart, Roberto Castillo-Sandoval, and
Wyatt MacGaffey, whom she describes as “amazing.” She
remembers a specific MacGaffey assignment that called for students
to analyze greeting rituals at Haverford. “It was such a mind
shift, to look at your own world this way,” she says.
Einhorn studied in Chile during the first semester
of her junior year, and again that summer through the Deborah Lafer
Scher International Internship, continuing to research her senior
thesis on Chilean national identity. After graduating, she went
back to Chile on a Fulbright and expanded her previous research
to include economics and the commodification of the country’s
national identity. She also taught English for a year.
During her time in Chile, she began to rethink her
anthropological career aspirations as she became more drawn to journalism
and writing. “With anthropology, I didn’t want to be
so caught up in theory,” she says, “and I didn’t
want my audience to be so limited and elite.” She was also
inspired by a book called Samba by former New Yorker
writer Alma Guillermoprieto, who had lived in a favela near Rio
de Janeiro and studied the people, customs, politics, and socioeconomics
of the place.
“In many ways, journalism and anthropology
are similar,” says Einhorn. “You hang out with people,
observe them, talk to them, and then write about them.”
When she returned home to Chicago, Einhorn contacted
a friend’s father, a freelance reporter who put her in touch
with the editor of Catalyst. After she interned with the
publication, the editors offered her a freelancing package, which
she attended to in the evening while interning at Chicago Public
Radio during the day. She was interested in working for radio, she
says, “because I got so much of my news from NPR.”
After six months of interning, Einhorn freelanced
for WBEZ on an extended contract, and was eventually hired full-time.
She wore the dual hats of reporter and afternoon news producer for
more than a year, and now works exclusively as a correspondent.
She juggles shorter assignments and news spots with longer, enterprise
stories, the ideas for which she often pitches herself.
Last March, she pitched a story for the station’s
Chicago Matters series that called her Haverford education
and study-abroad experiences into play. She went to Chile for eight
days for a piece about the “Chicago Boys,” a group of
Chilean economists sent to the University of Chicago to study free-market
approaches under famed economist Milton Friedman. When the dictator
Augusto Pinochet seized power in the ’70s, he turned the economy
over to the Chicago Boys. Their approach was controversial and polarizing:
“Some say this was the reason why Chile’s economy became
strong,” says Einhorn, “and some say these policies
caused widespread hunger and unemployment, and were ultimately ineffective.”
Einhorn e-mailed Roberto Castillo-Sandoval for help with background
information and spoke not only with the original Chicago Boys, but
also the people affected by their policies. It ended up being one
of her longest segments: 25 minutes on Chicago Public Radio, shortened
to seven and a half for national audiences.
Einhorn feels that journalism dealing with political
and social issues is vital to public radio today, particularly coverage
of the war: “So much of the time we act like we’re not
at war at all.” She recently interviewed a soldier returned
from Iraq, in a “non-narrated” story where only the
subject himself talked about his time in combat and the psychological
distress he suffered at home. In September she rode the bus with
war protesters headed to Washington, D.C., for a rally, and once
there she also spoke with a young counter-protester and war supporter.
Einhorn doesn’t seek recognition for her work,
but it’s found her nonetheless. She won awards from both the
Public Radio
News Directors Incorporated (PRNDI) and the Radio-Television
News Directors Association (RTNDA) for her first Chicago
Matters story, concerning a gentrified community’s stand
against prostitution and some prostitutes’ perspectives on
it. The Associated Press named her Best Newswriter of 2004 (she
took second place in 2003) and honored her for a series on the next
generation of veterans.
One of the things Einhorn loves most about her work
for WBEZ is what photographer Richard Avedon, in his own NPR interview,
referred to as “unearned intimacy.” “You get to
speak with people you might not come across otherwise, from prostitutes
to politicians,” she says. “Then you get to ask them
the real questions, the ones that would be inappropriate at a dinner
party.”
— Brenna McBride
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