Hello Lisa, Kiah, Diane, Kristy and Nicole!
Please share an experience you’ve had with pitching a story idea to your editor.
Include the following: How did you get the idea? How did you pitch it (via e-mail, conversation, a combination, etc.)? What was the upshot (thumbs up or down or a mix)? What did you learn from the experience that will make/has made you more successful in pitching subsequent ideas?
This is a really important post. Please make heroic efforts to reply. 
Deadline is a little later (Wednesday) because I had computer problems this week and couldn’t get the post up earlier.
Hope you have great weekends,
Colleen
Lisa Song
03.20.10
Back in January I pitched an essay for the back cover of HCN. These essays are usually ~700, centered around some “big idea.” I had written an essay back in grad school about going fossil hunting with a paleontologist and learning the value of “unglamorous” fossils (ie plant fossils vs. dinosaur bones). It was around the right length, so I pitched it verbally, then sent the essay to the editor. She said it was a bit too science-y and not general enough for the back cover. Then she suggested that I rewrite it as a profile of the paleontologist: why would he choose to study seemingly boring plant fossils when there are so many cooler specimens to study?
Since I’d been in the field with this guy, I had no problem calling him for an interview. Then I wrote up a pitch, and it was accepted at the next editorial meeting. HCN even funded a trip to Denver so I could meet him in person. This turned out to be a much better idea than the essay. It ends up that the paleontologist has been doing some unique work melding art and science, so that will end up as the focus of the profile. Plus, I might even have a chance to make an audio slideshow for the online component. I guess the most useful thing I’ve learned is to really pay attention to the department that a story is best for. My original essay was about one person’s approach to science, so it makes much more sense to profile him instead.
Diane
03.21.10
I find it challenging to pitch a fresh story idea that hasn’t been covered/written before. Being new to this place, I think everything is a story! I came up with a couple great story ideas, but was disappointed when I found it in the archives. I’ve learned to always check the archives. And the paper has covered A LOT of ground, especially since they have reporters dedicated to covering different counties and communities. I’ve pitched several ideas revolved around upcoming events, and they were shot down by my editors. I’ve learned so far that my editors want hard news stories, as opposed to feature type stories. They want well-researched ideas with a focus. They want to know you’ve done initial reporting and interviews to find a trend and why the story needs to be told now. Really, a “story idea” is a story that just hasn’t been written yet.
Nicole Norfleet
03.31.10
Hey, guys! I’m going to give an example of a lesson I learned about one of my story idea pitches. Most of my story ideas have been given the green light and published in some form, but I did have one story idea that would have received better play in the paper if I had done things differently.
Since the beginning, my editor has told me that he wants me to write about residents’ personal stories. In our conversations, he has alluded to the fact that our department needs to include more voices in our stories. He asked me to routinely get a feel for what people are talking about so I joined several local Yahoo! groups and also follow some DC blogs on Twitter. Late one week, I was checking one of the groups when I read about a tour of a building for Black History Month. I didn’t think much of it because events are normally posted on the group message board. I ignored it and the other posts and continued with my work.
I don’t know why, but later that night, I checked back at the board and actually read the message instead of skipping over it. It was what I expected until I got down to the bottom. The last sentence mentioned how the tour might be the last because the government department housed there was moving. It also said that nobody knew what was going to happen to the building. That interested me. Later the next day after I had done work for other stories, I made a few calls about the notice and found out that this black historic building was being vacated by the agency, but nobody knew what was going to happen with the building.
I don’t know if it was from lack of confidence that early in my internship or something, but I sat on the story for at least a day before I ended up telling my editor about it. He liked the story and liked what I had found out.
I ended up spending time going to the Historical Society to get info on the building and even taking a tour myself. It was treated as an evergreen story and put in the Local Living section of the newspaper. I had shot video of the tour, but the multimedia team did not have time to invest in editing it (at the Post reporters don’t actually do the editing).
What I learned from this experience is that even stories that most people would tell you are evergreen or could run anytime still have timeliness factors. I had found out about this story on the tail end of February. If I had taken the weekend to write the story so that it could have been published in a February paper, it would have gotten better play because it was Black History Month. If I hadn’t waited until I did a lot of research before I told my editor, then I could have maybe got it in sooner too. I guess my points are that while you should do some research before you approach your editor, don’t think that you have to have everything flushed out before opening your mouth. You may lose valuable time and miss out on getting good feedback from your editor that could help you in your research. Also, every story can be timely. Don’t let people tell you that your story can run anytime. Think of reasons why your story should run at a certain time, and it will get a better position in the paper.
Kiah Haslett
04.05.10
Oh man, I’m sorry I’m so late on this. I really liked everyone else’s posts. I have two stories, a fail and a kind of success.
Fail: Working on an assignment about faces of the recession from my editor, I was amazed by how many job-seeking individuals worried about age discrimination in rehiring. One guy shaved his mustache and quit smoking, one woman worried about age discrimination in her 40s, people were throwing around words like “overqualified” and talked about fear of recent college grads taking all their jobs.
I thought there might be a story here.
So I did some research and looked at the Chicago Department of Human Rights about age discrimination complaints, which had increased during the recession (no surprise). But most of these didn’t involve hiring, only firing, promotions or benefits.
Nothing had been written by the Tribune (archive check), nor by any major paper (competitors check).
I pitched to my editor the idea of looking into the fears of older workers getting rehired and any strategies to combat a possible age bias. And then I wanted to talk to hiring employers, temp agencies and employment experts/consultants if age discrimination in hiring exists, how it’s manifested, if it’s illegal, what someone can do to combat it/prosecute it, etc.
I pitched it to my editor and he said: It’s not new.
Even though he hadn’t read it anywhere, he said most people already know about it and writing an article will just repeat what everyone says.
Lessons: 1. I’ve learned not to become too attached to my story ideas. They’re probably not the best in the world and sometimes, they’re not even my best. My editor isn’t saying anything against me when he shoots them down. (thick skin, all)
2. Novelty (as in newness) is very important. My story had a lot of “this is important” and “this is relevant to people” but it wasn’t anything new. It was just formally articulated. For some papers, that works, and knowing what your paper is looking for in ideas is important.
Kind of success: I was handed a press release by my editor and if I wanted to do anything with it, I could. The press release was about a new product (boring), but the person was interesting: a woman who had just gotten laid off and decided to become an entrepreneur (cool, but the story’s been done). The hook: she’s a mom as well. The story: accidental mom entrepreneurs because of the recession/layoffs/stores closing.
I did a lot of research and called a bunch of women before focusing on new entrepreneurs, the three kinds I wanted to feature and the experts I wanted to speak with.
And the editor who shot down that “Fail” example loved this story. It hadn’t been done before. It featured a new angle of recession entrepreneur because I also talked about being a mom and the work from home angle.
The kind of success part come because as the story was going through formal editing, my editor told me Metro was thinking about doing a similar story idea. He decided to give metro a break and would allow the additional notes to be meshed in with my story. But instead, it happened the other way around and I lost ownership of my story because of a communication fail between metro/biz editors/reporters. And then the metro editors decided to rewrite it and essentially strip out all the business aspects and the special mom angle-news hook. And the story took another 3 weeks to run.
Lessons: 1. When approaching a story, look for demographics that surprise you, or face additional challenges (being a mom/not speaking English very well/not being legal to work in the U.S./being very young, etc)
2. Own your stories. If something makes you uncomfortable, tell your editor right away. I didn’t really understand what was going on between biz and metro, and I lost ownership of my story and now have something that’s not really mine with a double byline, when I had a perfectly good and unique story by myself. And I spent more time reporting on this when I could’ve been working on other stories.