Posted by: Brendan Greeley on October 22, 2005 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

Jeremy Skeet, in the running with Dacia Herbulock for coolest name at Third Coast, is the managing editor for Weekend America. WA has national carriage but is still in the fun place of trying to figure itself out, which makes it a good target for your pitches as a freelancer. Jeremy was at the BBC for fourteen years, which means he uses words like "slag" and wears really cool sneakers. He gave out his own email address (jskeet (at) americanpublicmedia (dot) org) for pitches and talked a little about what Weekend America is looking for: "Furniture," the regular components that'll make up the broadcast each week, bits that can be repeated twelve times or 52 times a year; and one-off features: two, five or seven minutes.

"We know roughly how a show works. We need four or six features, but we never want so much furniture that we can't respond. Itd' be nice, though, to get to the stage where we know the structure of at least a third of the program before we get to thinking about it."

"I think what we're providing is live radio, something that had been missing at that time of the day. Our listeners are doing whatever they do on the weekend, so I'd say the stuff we're looking for should feel above all conversational. We'll do anything if it's fun; I'm quite obsessed by death, and we did a piece about a bloke making a coffin for his wife. It was hilarious and fun, you don't have to treat heavy subjects as downers."

British people are weird.

More from Third Coast Festival 2005 :
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