9 Pitch Calls Paying $50→$1,000
Where to Pitch This Week (5.23.25) | Pitches wanted on video games, sleepovers, travel, and more!
Welcome to Where to Pitch This Week!
Today, you’ll find some thoughts on the AI book supplement hot take phenomenon. Then you’ll find nine pitch calls paying up to $1,000, from Business Insider, MIT Technology Review, and more.
Fake Books, Real Problems: Sympathy for the Freelancer
Y’all, am I the only one who feels bad for the freelancer at the center of the AI-generated summer reading list fiasco?
You know the one. A roundup of fake books—The Last Algorithm by Andy Weir, Salt and Honey1 by Delia Owens—ran as a print supplement in the Chicago Sun-Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. The authors themselves noticed and posted about it. And it was so clearly ChatGPT “slop” (the word everyone feels compelled to use) that media pounced, too. The hot takes have been coming all week. And the freelance writer who “wrote” it told 404 Media: “Yeah, I used AI and didn’t double-check it. I can’t believe I missed it. No excuses.”
But here’s the thing: I can! I can believe it! I have no problem whatsoever believing it!
I say this as someone who’s been there. Not with ChatGPT, but with the desperation. Back in 2008, when I was first freelancing, I was thrilled to land a $800 gig writing a 10-page health and wellness advertorial for my local alt-weekly (still a thing then). I’d just been laid off from my awful $38K job, my partner had been laid off from his awful $36K job, and $800 felt like huge money—in fact, it was, at the time. But the reality of the gig was one of those greasy nightmares, me hunching over my laptop way past my bedtime, scraping together half-baked “trends,” Googling for any health-adjacent buzzword that might pad the word count, and trying to turn a marketing brief into something even sort of readable. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t supposed to be good. And yes, I wrote every word myself. Which is why I absolutely understand the temptation to AI-bot it in.
And that $800 I got? That’s basically still the going rate for pieces, advertorial or otherwise. In many cases, it’s more than the going rate. National publications today are now paying for articles what my alt-weekly paid back then, and at the same time, the buying power of those dollars has plummeted. Meanwhile, freelance timelines have only gotten tighter, if only because so many people work multiple gigs/jobs. Oversight has vanished. Every masthead has been hollowed out. Huge swaths of media have been handed over to advertiser-funded “custom content” operations with zero guardrails. America itself is, arguably, a zombie media brand!
There is every chance this guy had no idea where his piece would run, knew that no one to edit it, and had no time to make it better. Maybe he was working another job. Maybe he was filing while his toddler climbed all over him. Maybe he just needed the money and knew no one would be looking at it closely anyway.
I don’t know all the details. But I’ve got my hunches. Anyway, the question is: Do we really blame him? Are we really gonna pile on? Now that is shameful.
Before it’s all over—this era, I mean—we’re probably going to see a lot more of this: freelancers thrown under the bus for outcomes brought on by collapsing pay and content-farm-type takeovers in the absence of an actual viable business model for journalism. Notice I don’t blame “editorial negligence,” either, because I know those people are overloaded, too, and clinging to their last-man-standing jobs by their fingernails. What oversight “should” exist at overloaded organizations themselves only weeks, months, or years from ceasing to exist? Why do we think we know so much better than the people employed in them?
So the freelancer, in this case, didn’t do the “right” thing. But the instinct to roast him feels more like an eagerness to decry AI and draw an us-them line than anything else. Personally, I don’t want to dunk on him. I want to buy him a beer. And if he can parlay this into a tell-all at The Cut? Honestly, I hope he does. Maybe one of the calls for pitches below might help place that tell-all.
P.S. Turns out I’m not the only one. That’s good.
Where to Pitch This Week: 9 Paid Writing Opportunities
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