Towards a theory of the pitch

0:01Hey, everyone. I'm Emily, and I'm here with Andrea, and you are listening to another bonus episode of the Culture Journalists just for you paid subscribers. This time around, we wanted to do a little bit of like governance via audience. So we started like a little thread on Substack, keep an eye out for those moving forward. And a couple people chimed in with some ideas. One kind of stuck out to us as something we felt that we would be down to brainstorm about. And it's a little bit advicey, but we also wanted to be a little bit more philosophical. This was a question from a fellow culture journalist named Peter about pitching and why pitching is such a crazy-making thing to do these days.

1:01Shouts to Peter. I've worked with him before. He is an excellent culture journalist, and I've gotten some of my favorite pitches that I've ever commissioned from Peter. So the fact that he's asking for advice on how to forge forward in this murky and chaotic freelancing environment tells us that, you know, we've got a situation on our hands and we're hoping that today's discussion can help us all out or at least offer some insight. So here's his actual comment on the thread. He said, I'd be curious to hear your take on pitching stories. I've seen a kajillion pitch guides circulate online over the past few years, including some great ones, shout out Music Journalism Insider, which is great for transparency, but constantly being told to pitch publications ideas gets a little demoralizing.

1:49I have so much great advice on how to do free legwork for a publication, but very, very few publications are actually accepting my pitches or offering me stories. So what are the economics of pitching? How many pitches, like actual good ones, actually get accepted? do editors have the time slash bandwidth to recruit writers and offer unique assignments or is mapping out coverage just a matter of stopping by the all-you-can-eat pitch buffet now do you have any like immediate responses andrea pitching is hard being an editor is hard it's an ever-evolving landscape and so much of it has to revolve around this sort of amorphous ecosystem of first and foremost budgets, right?

2:31And then bandwidth and resources. You know, increasingly as editors, we're getting asked to do more than just our original job descriptions. Again, shout out to my favorite phrase that Emily coined, jobflation. You know, the demands on what kind of stuff we're getting asked to focus on or what we have resources to focus on at any given time are constantly changing. Of course, remember, we can only just speak to our experience. So I think, you know, I'm sure it's different for like editors at like The New Yorker or something like that. Or maybe it's not. I don't know. Maybe it's not. Yeah. I also just think freelance budgets have really, really taken a hit since the pandemic as well in a way that they haven't recovered from.

3:18And so internal staff is also being asked to shoulder a lot more than we would have previously. so all of which is to say I also think that like pitches have to kind of be stronger than ever like you really have to be bringing a story that also really couldn't necessarily be done by someone in-house well it depends again on you know my most recent job was as an editor of a publication that had no staff writers and so everything had to be done by freelancers so it really depends But I think this all sort of falls within the context, this larger context of journalism not being in a very good place economically, not finding a financial model that works, shrinking returns, etc.

4:09And companies trying, you know, in various ways to save money. And yes, like in some cases, there's been shrinking freelance budgets. In other cases, freelancers are used directly so that you do not have to hire full-time staffers with benefits. Something that I think maybe a lot of freelance writers don't know about also is that editing staffs themselves have become more contingent. I can't tell you how many people I know who used to have full-time jobs as editors for, you know, almost like the entire 2010s, right? And now they are all either working contract jobs, like part-time contract gigs, sometimes receiving benefits, sometimes not.

4:55But without that, like, you know, usually it's not a union job, doesn't have a lot of stability. Or people who are kind of going from like maternity or paternity leave backfill to maternity paternity leave backfill. and these are people who were like really good like they were like you know editors in chief senior editors deputy editors of some of the biggest digital media publications in the 10s so there is a lot of change going on there too and I think this all affects freelance writers but I think I also want to use this space in this episode to sort of talk about how we're all sort of in this together and it's not just like this traditional relationship anymore I would say between the full-time gatekeeping editor versus the contingent freelancer like we're all getting more contingent together and the symptoms that you might experience on the writer side are you know if you're experiencing it that's probably because there's something that the editor is going through as well that is not super fun.

6:02So, okay, let's go through the questions. What are the economics of pitching? And that's it for the free preview version of this episode. There's lots more ahead. You can get full access by becoming a paid subscriber for just five bucks a month over at theculturejournalist.substack.com. Also, if you're a media worker or journalist who has lost work or been laid off, we will happily send you this episode for free. Just email us at theculturejournalist at substack.com or hit us up on socials at The Culture Journalist.