Where to Pitch This Week 8.30.24
Editor requests from Salon, Business Insider, Vox, and a chance to write about not loving your kids enough.
Happy Almost Labor Day Weekend. It’s the first real Where to Pitch! With pitches!
Quick review: Where to Pitch comes out every Friday with tips on what editors are looking for, the Life’s a Pitch Column (helping you turn ideas into stories), and it’s all written by me, Amber Petty. Before I get to the pitching tips and editor calls, I need your help.
Next week will be the first Life’s a Pitch - send me ideas that you can’t quite form into a pitch and I’ll show you how to turn it into a sellable story. This is great for life events you want to write about but don’t know how to tackle or ideas that are too broad/specific/amorphous and never seem right in pitch form. If you’ve had trouble with an idea, send it in and I may be able to help!
To submit your idea for consideration, click here and fill out the form. I’m doing this column every other week, so there’s a good chance your idea will be selected.
What Editors Are Looking For
Get on your cozy sweaters and light the cinnamon scented candles, editors are ready for autumn/winter stories. Break out your Halloween and Thanksgiving stories or anything that fits the theme of fall. Not all editors are clamoring for Christmas yet, but you can start pitching December stories, too.
Movie Anniversaries
The window to write about movies is pretty slim. You’ve got right before they open and a couple weeks after they open to get your story out (for the most part). But what about all the movies you’ve come to love after their box office debut?
Though I’d personally love to read your hot take on The Phantom of the Opera starring Gerard Butler, you’d have to make a case for why readers would be interested now in a musical flop from 2004. Maybe you’d find a connection between a new film and the old one or maybe there’s a strong Emmy Rossum story you could tie it to. It’s not impossible to write about The Phantom of the Opera in 2024, but it’s a hard sell.
That’s where anniversaries come in! Readers naturally like to look back on films ten years or more after they originally came out. You’d still need an angle on why you want to write about The Phantom of the Opera, but the fact it’s having it’s 20th Anniversary makes the pitch a little easier.
Now, do I really think anyone cares about the 20th anniversary of a very poorly done musical? Probably not (though, it’s also the 35th anniversary of Robert Englund’s Phantom of the Opera, so maybe there’s a collision of Phantoms story in there). But here are some interesting anniversaries coming up that might inspire a story:
Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead - 20th Anniversary
Shaun of the Dead - 20th Anniversary
The Mummy - 25th Anniversary
Sleepy Hollow - 25th Anniversary
Pulp Fiction - 30th Anniversary
The Santa Clause - 30th Anniversary
The Shawshank Redemption - 30th Anniversary
Gremlins (also good to pitch near Christmas) - 40th Anniversary
The Godfather Part II - 50th Anniversary
The Towering Inferno - 50th Anniversary
Young Frankenstein - 50th Anniversary
Creature from the Black Lagoon - 70th Anniversary
Also from Amber: The Pitching Hour. Meet every week to write pitches, grow your platform, and promote your work. Basically, it’s accountability for all the stuff you want to put off (that’ll make the biggest difference in your writing career). Find out more.
Where to pitch this week!
Below, we’ve got editor requests from Salon, Business Insider, Vox, and a chance to write about not loving your kids enough. Plus paid opportunities in lifestyle, travel, parenting, sports, business, movies, gossip, and more.