Feb. 28, 12 p.m. CT
Editors are busy folks who receive many more emails each day than they can ever hope to answer. How can a writer, who’s new to a publication, craft such an impressive pitch, that even if the story doesn’t sell, keeps the door wide open for next time? A panel of top editors will talk about pitches they loved and could not walk away from. Using examples of successful pitches-to-story, they’ll explain the formula for pitches that are memorable – in a good way – starting with the subject line.
Perhaps most important, even experienced writers can struggle with writing pitches that identify a story and not a topic. Writers may do so much pre-pitch research that it’s easy to forget that we’re actually not prepping for a master’s thesis; there’s a great story somewhere in that pile of PubMed searches. Our panel of editors will give their best advice on how to make your pitch communicate that story, and impress them in the process.
Participating editors:
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Jim Giles, Matter
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Robin Lloyd, Scientific American
More about the speakers:
Jim Giles writes about the interface between science, technology and society. He is the co-fournder of Matter and a Medium editor. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Nature, New Scientist, the Guardian and many other outlets.
Robin Lloyd, a science writer going back to the Galileo mission to Jupiter, is Scientific American’s news editor, responsible for planning, editing and assigning stories for SA‘s website and managing its home page. She also oversees SA‘s social media efforts. Previously, she was a senior editor for LiveScience.com and SPACE.com. She has experience in print journalism (Pasadena Star-News), wire service journalism (City News Service in Los Angeles) and network online journalism (CNN.com). She worked for five years as a science publicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and received a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the 1998-1999 academic year.
The webcast will be moderated by Jeanne Erdmann, a freelance health and science writer based near St. Louis. She writes about cancer, genetics, genetic testing, genetic counseling and osteoarthritis. Her stories have appeared in Women’s Health, Slate, The Washington Post, Nature Medicine, Nature, Cure and others. Erdmann was chosen for a 2013 AHCJ Reporting Fellowship on Health Care Performance, with assistance from the Commonwealth Fund. She also co-produces The Open Notebook, a craft-focused website for science writers.