News – Robin Amer

I’m a finalist in the WNYC Podcast Accelerator

Exciting news! I’m a finalist in WNYC’s Podcast Accelerator!

If those words sound like gibberish to you, I’ll explain. WNYC is New York City’s public radio station. It’s one of the best — arguably the best — public radio station in the country. It produces radio and podcasting behemoths such as Radiolab, On the Media, Studio 360 and Freakonomics, as well as great newcomers like The Longest Shortest Time, Death Sex & Money and Note to Self.

In June the station launched a competition to find its next great podcast. It solicited pitches from all over the country and received nearly 400 entries. My pitch was one of five selected from that batch.

Me and the other finalists will spend the next month refining our pitches. Then we’ll present those pitches to a live audience and a panel of judges at the ONA conference in Los Angeles in September. The winner of that pitch session gets to produce a bonafide pilot with WNYC. The station then has right of first refusal in optioning the pilot and turning it into a full show.

I’m still deciding how much to say about my show idea publicly before the pitch session. But I’ll say this: This is an idea I’ve been developing for some time now, and I owe thanks to people like Third Coast Festival’s Johanna Zorn, ABC’s Julie Shapiro and my close friends Dan Hirsch and Meribah Knight, who gave me a lot of feedback on earlier versions of this idea. I’m excited to bring this project to some kind of fruition and I’m excited to be developing a vehicle that I think will be extremely compelling for audiences as well as very personally satisfying. Also podcasting rules.

I’ll post more news when I have it!

Manufacturing Consent

A worker takes a break from his shift at Finkl Steel. Photographed in 2013. (Robin Amer)

I have a new story out in Belt Magazine today. Belt tackles the future of so-called “Rust Belt” cities from Pittsburgh to Detroit to Cleveland to Chicago. My story is about the future of the Finkl Steel site, which up until last year was home to Chicago’s oldest steel maker. The site is enormous — 28 acres of prime real estate in the heart of the city. My piece explores how it managed to stay industrial for so long despite rising real estate prices, and what might happen now that the steelmaker has vacated the premises.

Update Jan. 30:

I was a guest on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift earlier this week talking about the story. Here’s the audio, in case you missed it.

News! It is exciting!

Shauna Roller Girl — Roller Girl by Shauna Bittle

848

I just received word that WBEZ’s morning show 848 will be airing an interview I did this coming Monday, February 22. Woo! It is scheduled to air during Segment 1, so tune in between 9:05 and 9:20am if you’d like to hear it.

The piece is an excerpt of an interview I did with “Him” and “Her”, an anonymous couple who used to have a LOT of debt. They used credit cards to buy expensive things they didn’t need, like $200 rocking chairs and new stereo speakers, and took out student loans to pay for college.

Seven years into their relationship they realized they had never really talked about money. So even though they had almost $160,000 worth of debt between them, neither one of them knew how bad it was. When they finally sat down to figure it out, Her was the first to reveal just how badly she was in the hole. It was not pretty.

Him and Her write about getting out of the hole at their relationship finance blog Make Love, Not Debt. I originally interviewed them back in April of 2008, before they were debt-free. I’ll post the full interview here Monday, after the piece has aired.

Photographer

My second exciting piece of news is that I have found a most excellent documentary photographer to collaborate with on this portrait project. Shauna Bittle is a super talented photographer who I first met when she photographed the Third Coast Festival awards ceremony this year.

What sealed the deal for me was seeing this fantastic multimedia piece about Midwestern tent revivals. I can’t wait to work with her. We’re doing one final shoot at the barbershop and the surrounding neighborhood next week. Then we’ll wrap on that, and start scheduling shoots for the next portrait, on high schooler, Vocalo user and gay rights activist, Lohan Addict.