Before the ads, there were words.

Every Sunday morning, Marina Burtseva Levinson makes a journey from northern New Jersey to Coney Island, Brooklyn. Upon arriving at her workplace, she saturates her hair with hairspray, sings lip trills to strengthen her voice, and prepares a cup of tea to keep under her desk. For at least the last decade or so, she has worked for Davidzon radio and the RTN TV channel, which are integral to New York’s Russian-speaking community.

Ms. Levinson began her career in Russia in the 1980s, working as a TV anchor and host on Channel 1, the largest government-sponsored network. There, she led a program called "Time" and hosted various entertainment segments, including a New Year's Eve show that captivated the entire country. Before relocating to the U.S., she also led a TV program in Israel for a couple of years. I reached out to Ms. Levinson for this interview because of her extensive industry experience, both in the U.S. and internationally. Now based in Brooklyn, she writes her TV programs, which are nostalgic, heartwarming, and witty.

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Her two-hour segment on Sundays takes a whole week to prepare. "Our station does not have a CNN or Fox News budget," she says jokingly - "so we have to do a lot of things by ourselves”. Her job isn’t just showing up to work and reading off a teleprompter. Ms.Levinson spends hours combing over music, literature, and movies to present to her viewers each week. She handpicks the topics she wants to cover and runs them by her manager. Once the topic is approved, she plans out the specifics, like arranging each talking point to blend seamlessly with the main theme. Ms.Levinson’s program is broadcast simultaneously over TV and radio, so she must make her program dynamic enough to be audibly and visually engaging. For instance, she told me that on one of her very first broadcasts, she made the mistake of showing a silly video clip of a cartoon parrot flying. She later realized that there were several seconds of silence on the radio while the bird was flying without producing a sound. As funny as it looked to the viewers, radio listeners were left quite a bit confused.

“Our station does not have a CNN or Fox News budget, so we have to do a lot of things by ourselves.”

I asked Ms.Levinson how she conjures new ideas for each segment- and she said that the key is being well-versed in cultural content. She usually uses current events and holidays as a stepping stone, but sometimes has to comb through her memory to find the hidden gems of her viewers’ childhoods and tie them in with the present. Her audience mostly consists of older generations, so she does a lot of research to understand some of the references and turn them into conversation pieces.

Ms.Levinson caters to a mostly Russian-speaking audience, yet that is not the full extent of her outreach. In the part of her program where she receives live phone calls, from time to time, she gets a viewer who spends a majority of their time speaking English, but is thankful to her for helping them experience nostalgia. Phone calls are not always so pleasant, however, and sometimes there are calls with annoyed people, angry people, or no calls at all. I asked Ms.Levinson how she deals with that. She said that it’s mostly improvisation and knowing how to search for keywords to subtly guide her talking points. She says that her training and experience in theater have been invaluable in helping her structure her conversations.

Talking to Ms.Levinson helped me understand how important it is to be well-read, educated, and eloquent for a career in media. Essentially, every time she goes live on TV, Ms.Levinson has to make sure that she is engaging at all times and not just keeping her audience, but actively drawing in new viewers. It is not only the content that draws viewers in, it is also her credentials and the way she presents herself. She usually has about thirty seconds at the start of each program where she introduces herself and her broadcast. Those seconds are crucial to whether or not thousands of people press the remote to switch the channel.