Posted by: Robin Amer on November 2, 2005 06:36 AM | Comments (0)

I just got off the phone a little while ago with Amy O'Leary, self-described junior producer at This American Life. If you haven't met her yet, she's lovely. Very friendly and generous with her time. (She's also the one who lives in the crazy castle-like penthouse appartment near the MCA.) I was on the phone with Amy because I was pitching her some story ideas. Or rather, I was talking through some ideas that I thought would make good stories for the show, but wasn't quite ready to pitch formally. And I was able to do this because Amy had said I should when I spoke to her at Third Coast. I was talking with her and some other folks over lunch, and sharing some of my thoughts from the pitch session Julie Snyder was on, and mentioned that one reason I found the session so good was that I liked having insight into the brain of TAL, which was good because it's the show that made me want to do radio in the first place, and I've always wanted to do pieces for them. (I am among the great masses of young producers to have been rejected from internships at This American Life. Actually, I think the first year I was at the festival Steve Schultze of PRX interviewed me and a couple other rejects about being rejected by TAL, and what it was like to then be in the same room with Ira Glass.) Amy said, you know, if you want, you can call me and talk over some story ideas if you'd like. And I said, really? And she said, sure. That's my job.

See what happens? You go to these things and you meet people and they're nice and then you can sometimes do work for/with them. I guess some people call that networking. It happened last year, too. At last year's conference I met Peter Clowney, one of the editors for Marketplace (also one of the first producers at TAL, former producer for Studio 360, and a long time arts reporter at WHYY). I said, I'd like to pitch you stories. He said, ok, so...do. Call me when you get back. So I called him a few days after I got home, pitched him a couple stories, and voila. I mean, I'd been working up to it, but gosh, it was so helpful to meet him in person. It made the whole process easier and less intimidating to have a human being rather than a name/unknown quantity at the other end of the phone. I think it also helped that I had pitched to David Krasnow at Studio 360, and even though my pitches to that show hadn't gone anywhere, David liked some of them enough to tell Peter that I should pitch to Marketplace. (Incidentally, Peter is one of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. He is really, really, really fantastic at what he does, and is also incredibly kind. He's so good that I really felt unworthy of working with him. My main goal for the pieces of mine he edited was to just be worthy of working with him.)

Also, through the Third Coast I met Jake Shapiro, head of PRX and former producer at the Connection. We had quite a long talk at 2am the last night of the conference in some Irish bar in Fish Town to which the conference decamped after the awards ceremony. (During which I witnessed an event that at the time seemed impossibly surreal: Jay Allison and Scott Carrier playing darts.) When it came time to help my current bosses hire producers for the new show, Jake was able to pass them my resume for consideration.

Is this interesting? What I'm trying to say is that even if you poo-poo "networking," if you're young and this is what you want to do, coming to Third Coast really helps. You still have to be good at what you do, but there's really never going to be another time when you'll be in a room with so many people who are likely to be in a position to help you get to where you want to go.

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