You probably don’t know Blakeney Schick’s voice, but chances are you’ve listened to her. She produced thousands of hours of radio and podcasts for WNYC, New York Public Radio, the New York Times and, most recently, New York. Her name is buried in the closing credits that many listeners skip. She covered presidential elections and major moments in business, technology and culture. She wrote probing and newsmaking interview questions for hosts like Alison Stewart, Leonard Lopate, and New York’s Kara Swisher. Blakeney trained dozens of interns and producers who, like her, went on to create hit shows and deliver important audio journalism. “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are,” was a Teddy Roosevelt quote that Schick once wrote “seemed to be following” her. And she followed it.
Blakeney Schick died on July 24 after a sudden cardiac arrest, at 40 years old. She did a lot with her too-few years, wherever she was. Schick got her start as a production intern on The Leonard Lopate Show in 2004. There, she spent the subsequent decade on the slow-and-often-out-of-service elevator that carries a public radio career, demonstrating her commitment and chops as part of a team that won a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence in 2012 and a skeleton crew that kept the program on the air during Hurricane Sandy. She went on to produce the comedy podcast Adulting, the live daily talk show All of It, and the Times interview show Sway before joining Kara Swisher and me at New York. She was the first hire on our podcast, On With Kara Swisher.
Radio stations and newsrooms have a way of filling you with stress. There are never-ending deadlines, editors with infinite notes, reopenings of episodes everyone thought were finished to account for breaking news and said notes. Blakeney persevered not because she was numb to these things (to be sure, she noticed everything) but, at least in part, because she found a release. In 2012, she became a certified yoga instructor. A couple of years later, she took a break from radio to build out a yoga studio. Around the same time, she discovered a new passion: running. She ran marathons in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia, but her favorite race was a 10k through Central Park called the New York Mini.
She was in many ways the quintessential native New Yorker: She went to St. Ann’s and Bowdoin, devoured musical theater, lived on the ground floor of a brownstone her parents purchased over 50 years ago in Fort Greene. But she never took any opportunity for granted. She cared endlessly about the work and even more for the people who made it.
She loved, as she put it, “solving problems in tape,” which is the audio-geek equivalent of what Project Runway’s Tim Gunn means by “make it work.” She could smooth a seemingly impossible cut or ever-so-slightly separate the cross-talk between two speakers so the words became intelligible but the energy of the moment wasn’t lost. She was a genius at figuring out the moves that made a scattered storyteller make sense. She had a knack for hearing the lacuna of exposition in an episode and filling that void with a piece of audio recorded in a different location with different room tone and somehow making it match … and doing much, much more to educate your mind and ease your ears. Mixers remarked that her ears were more attuned than those of many audio engineers. In a world where many listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed, 2x speed, even 3x (what on earth are they hearing at 3x?!), and some producers are tempted to do the same on the umpteenth pass of an edit, late at night when there are minimal changes and only a cold cup of coffee at hand, Schick would listen to it straight, even though it took that much longer. She was, according to her fellow senior producer Cristian Castro Rossel, “an audio purist.”
She was a purist about much more than that. Her desk is still filled with carefully placed Post-it reminders, a notepad with to-do lists that have been checked off, and pens of different colors to do the checking. She aimed for predictability and order. She wanted things to be done neatly and particularly, so she was both exasperated and amused when she met the folks in life who struggle with time and space and coloring inside the lines. When she gave me subway directions the many times I was late and lost, Blakeney told me not just what line to take but what corner I should use to enter the station and even which car I should sit in to be closest to the most efficient exit when I arrived.
She was also, it turned out, forgiving. When I invariably screwed up these immaculate directions, she’d tsk and tilt her head in laughter. She just liked people. She wanted to be around them. Whereas many millennials have been happy to retreat into virtual work, Blakeney found excuses for our whole team to come into the office and told her cousins that she longed for a water-cooler moment. She rallied us for live-audience events, producing interviews with Hillary Clinton, Walter Isaacson, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Audie Cornish and spearheading in-person tapings with the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Monica Lewinsky. That last one took place in a janky studio where we had to have Lewinsky duct-tape her microphone to a weird glass chalice. Blakeney loved the zigs and zags on our show’s schedule, from politics to business to culture and back again. She excelled at these dizzying subjects because she was the type of person who equally enjoyed poring through 560-page Patrick Radden Keefe books and binging Emily in Paris. She could do highbrow and lowbrow with the best of New York.
Blakeney had many plans: to produce a whole series of live events for our podcast, and to see Camelot with one friend and the US Open with another, and for many more dinners with her parents and holidays with her extended family, and to celebrate her 41st birthday, which would have been yesterday. She was looking forward to the New York Marathon this fall, on a November weekend when we’ll instead attend her memorial service. Friends, family, fellow runners, and colleagues will gather to celebrate a life that was too short but had so much impact precisely because she did what she could, with what she had, where she was.
Part of what our team at work could do was make a tribute episode for Blakeney Schick. And because she spent her life meticulously caring, we spend this episode extending that care to anyone who’s lost anyone, through a conversation with psychotherapist Esther Perel. I invite you to listen to it. This time, please stay through the very end, so you hear the name: Blakeney Schick.
