Pitch Perfect

CHJ Fellow

December 22, 2011

Pitching can be the most stressful and daunting part of a freelance career. It's also a part of journalism that does not often get exposure. While many journalists discuss their reporting and techniques, few are asked to share their initial pitches or explain how they sold their work.

The Open Notebook does much to pull back the curtain on story pitching. Two freelancers started the site just over a year ago and won a seed grant to expand its content from the National Association of Science Writers last June. The Pitch Database, a repository of successful science-related magazine pitches, went live in October.

Jeanne Erdmann and Siri Carpenter, "writing partners" who have been freelancing for about 10 years, say they often discussed the science stories they loved and created The Open Notebook as a way to make those conversations public. The pitches shared by freelance journalists on The Open Notebook provide good lessons for how to approach editors with stories you care about.

Be familiar with the publication and the editor. You need to reach the right editor. Read back issues and pay attention to mastheads. Your pitch needs to be able to address the basic question, through tone or explicit explanation, of why should your story be in this particular magazine. Erdmann says that you need to know what department you are pitching to and, if possible, how far ahead they assign stories. Looking at the print publication, instead of reading online, can help you understand how the magazine is structured.

Report before you pitch. Erdmann's 2009 pitch to Nature magazine about "following an infection in real time" was culled from 6,000 words of reporting notes. (The actual pitch is 845 words.) Carpenter says that how much work you put into a pitch varies. Sometimes it takes days to get enough information to form a coherent, compelling narrative. Other times, the story comes more easily.

Pitch stories, not topics. This means that your pitch needs a great lead. Laura Beil's 2011 Men's Health pitch starts this way: "When Gary Bayless of Arnett Oklahoma, got news of his prostate cancer, he did what any man would do. He Googled." The topic of the piece is proton therapy for prostate cancer, but the pitch is about a character's experience.

Appeal to even the busiest of editors. Carpenter and Erdmann suggest putting the words "pitch," "query," or "freelancer" in the subject lines of your emails so that your idea is not mistaken for PR story idea. Depending on how timely your story is, don't be shy to follow up with the editor to make sure they received the pitch. You can email them or even call them. Sometimes Erdmann calls an editor's office early in the morning so she is sure to get voicemail and can leave a message, which can be less time-consuming than an actual conversation but still get an editor's attention.

"I think it's ok to say that this is an important story or timely topic," Erdmann says. "All editors are just people and most editors are overwhelmed and overworked."

If you have waited two weeks for a response and your pitch is timely, don't be afraid to send it elsewhere. Be friendly and professional, but let editors know that if you don't hear from them, you are sending your pitch to another magazine.

Tell the editor why you are the right person to write the story. The mini-resume you include is a small but important part of your pitch. It can vary depending on how well you know the editor. Christie Aschwanden's 2010 pitch to Miller-McCune was invited by the editor so it had just one sentence and link about her experience: "I have written about the nature of belief before, in a 2007 Bicycling magazine feature that was nominated for a national magazine award." But the entire pitch demonstrates her mastery of the topic because it provides context that makes it obvious she has been following the subject for a long time.

Erdmann's 2009 Nature pitch includes this succinct kicker:

About me: I've written for lots of publications, most recently for Science News and Sciam.com. I've attached links to some stories and I'm happy to provide more. While I specialize in medical science, I also write a lot of engineering stories.

Alternatively, Lauren Gravitz's 2011 Nature pitch, weaves her biographical information throughout.

Don't give up. I'll let Aschwanden's explanation of the long history of her 2010 Miller-McCune pitch show why you should pitch and pitch again if you have a story that you care about:

I first pitched the New York Times Magazine in September of 2008, with a recommendation from another editor there, but I never even got a response. Then I pitched it to Mother Jones and got an editor there really interested, but in the end, the higher-ups thought it was maybe just a little too wonky. At that point, it really just kind of sat there. I was feeling a little demoralized, and I was busy doing a lot of different stuff, so I kind of dropped it

In the summer of 2009, I was at the Aspen Health Forum working on a story for the Los Angeles Times, and I was really taken aback by some comments by the then-CEO of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, regarding the new study that had found that mammography was turning healthy women into cancer patients, and that over-diagnosis was a significant problem. This CEO told me straight out that this problem doesn't exist. I thought, "Wow, this is huge." That re-energized me. So I kept thinking about it, and I pitched it to a couple of women's magazines, with the mammogram angle. I think people didn't want to touch it, at least in the way I wanted to write about it. I think they wanted stories reassuring women that it's OK to ignore these findings

I had a lot of encouragement from a friend, who kept telling me, "Don't give up on it." I knew [then Miller-McCune editor] John Mecklin, and although I had never written a story for him, he had invited me to pitch him. I had started reading Miller-McCune and thought it was a terrific magazine and this was a great fit because they did a lot of insightful analyses of complex issues. So I sent him the pitch last November. I didn't hear from him, so a little over a week later I got back to him and it turned out he hadn't received it. When I resent it, he assigned it almost immediately.

Interested in contributing to The Open Notebook's Pitch Database? Here's more information about how you can help grow the repository.

And here are links to PDFs of the complete pitches mentioned in this post, worth reading in full:

"Lights, Camera, Infection" by Jeanne Erdmann, Nature, 2009

"Convincing the Public to Accept New Medical Guidelines" by Christie Aschwanden, Miller-McCune, 2010

"The Magic Bullet for Prostate Cancer" by Laura Beil, Men's Health, 2011

"A Fight for Life that United a Field" by Lauren Gravitz, Nature, 2011

(Photo "Magazines" by Sean Winter in Flickr Creative Commons)

More on freelancing from Career GPS:

How to Pitch to HealthyCal.org

Tips for freelancers from AAJA and beyond

Sell Your Work: Tips from a webinar for freelancers

Pitching health stories to AOL Patch