Cue Ryan Seacrest. WaPo Announces “America’s Next Great Pundit” Winner

Meet Kevin Huffman, winner of WaPo‘s “America’s Next Great Pundit” contest.

His prize? A weekly column for 13 weeks at $200 a piece. And the enormous pressure of living up to David Broder, Eugene Robinson and various other Pulitzer Prize winning Post op-ed writers.

The search began in October with nearly 5,000 contestants, whittled down to ten. After five rounds of punditry challenges, including writing a traditional op-ed column, blogging on tight deadlines on a range of topics, fielding difficult questions from readers and presenting confidence on video, Huffman came out on top. WaPo received 25,000 total votes and thousands of reader comments, according to a release.

Huffman’s a Teach for America executive. You can check out his punditry work here.

Photo from washingtonpost.com.

>>UPDATE: From our friends at Reliable Source… it’s a small, small district. Huffman was married until a couple years ago to D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee.

MEDIABISTRO EVENTS

Get Social Media Marketing Secrets from Experts

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.