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!