Day #72 – National (unofficial) Recycling Week

First a hung parliament, then a hung grandfinal. A year of inflated hype and promises with unsatisfying results. I’m pleased to report that pitch fever is no exception.

Destination of global significance or puddle with a cow?

Last week was declared the week of Great Telephonic Pitching Project. It should have been declared the week of rude switch-bitches, leaving voicemail messages, panicked hang ups by yours truly at the point of contact, unreturned calls, more voicemail messages, the occasional flustered editor not knowing what I was talking about, and one minor breakthrough in the form of a request for more information. Only problem was the request was for photos of the ‘worlds oldest village’ pitch and on the day I happened to be there it was raining so torrentially we couldn’t get out of the car. So the photos look a bit like a distant grey blur of a what might be a large puddle and not, in fact, stone huts and ancient eel traps as promised. What are the ethical considerations on pinching some stock photos in these trying times?

Any band who ties themselves together with helium balloons on a rooftop is alright with me

As it turns out, the most phone action I got was not actually the kind I was bargaining on. During the week I was asked to interview my very-first-actual-real-life-band, the Hungry Kids of Hungary. If you haven’t heard these boys, YouTube them immediately. You will understand my excitement: any band fulfilling my lifelong dream of levitating above a city using helium balloons warrants worshipping in my books. But the conditions: 20 minutes maximum. Over the phone. Here I was thinking I’d casually get a mobile number and give them a tinkle, but it turns out interviewing moderately famous bands  is a serious business involving third party conference call suppliers and an automated termination once your time is up. First lesson of freelance interviewing officially learnt: record, record, record. I have three pages of unintelligible notes that I’m now attempting to decipher. It turns out references to band members Ben, Kane, Dean and Ryan all look identical in shorthand scribble (what are the odds of so many n’s, a’s and e’s in one quintet?)

While I wait for a editors to return calls I’m embarking on a new strategy that’s much more satisfying than last weeks exercise in cold calling. With under a month to go till the finish line, I’m making the next 7 days National recycling week. Sure, the official week is in November, but I’ve always been a firm believer that every week should be environmentally conscious, so why not approach pitching in the same way? Ignored by Body and Soul? Rehash the story for Women’s Health. Slighted by HR Leader? See if BRW will give it a whirl. Snubbed by Bacon Busters? Well, there’s not really anywhere else that story could go. But in a similar vein, Beer and Brewer magazine pay their contributors in brewing kits, and I’ve always wanted to dabble in the dark arts of hops and barley. I wonder if there’s a market for recycled beer?

Day #60 That rather terrifying invention… the telephone

What I’ve learnt about the world of pitching thus far:

1. Editors are not very good at responding to their emails
2. Editors are, however, much more likely to respond to an email if the job is unpaid or virtually unpaid ($20 an article does not a sustainable journalism career make)*
3. Editors do not seem to respond to flattery, even if you’ve personalised a reference a specific section in their last issue and spread compliments like condiments
4. Just because an editor responds once with interest, does not mean they’ll ever respond again
5. Just because I think an idea is ground-breakingly brilliant**, does not mean it warrants a reply, no matter how many times an hour I refresh my inbox or check my junk mail folder to ensure no offers of triple page spreads have slipped through to the keeper
6. There’s no point posing as an established journalist since the invention of Google. All can be revealed in under 10 seconds. And usually is.

There is a small chance that my over-reliance on the electronic medium may have some small part to play in this editorial silence. Wrong addresses, wrong people to speak to in the first place & getting lost in the paper trail could all be plausible explanations. Truth be told, I haven’t actually chased up a single of the 60 pitches sent so far. May seem like a fairly obvious oversight, but one steeped in an acute fear of picking up the phone and sounding like I’m way out of my depth. You can’t have mental blanks over email. However, you also can’t expect much cut through, and so this week, I’m giving my fear the middle finger and am going to harass publication switchboards all over the country.  Chasing up old pitches and throwing in some new ones, all squished into the 30 seconds before they hang up the phone. Very scary. But at least that’s not enough time for them to Google me before they decide….

*Amazingly speedy response from the punch this week after my pitch on offensive celebrity tweets, and ‘what the world knows about Australia from watching Neighbours’. But prefaced with the following disclaimer:

Thanks for your proposed ideas for a contribution, we’d love to read any of these once they are fully developed. If you want to get back to me with a completed piece, I can pass it onto the editors for review.  Also, unfortunately we are not able to pay our contributors at the moment, so I thought I should let you know. Looking forward to hearing from you again soon.

**Tell me I’m not alone in thinking a piece for an HR trade mag, analysing Mad Men episodes through the lens of current Australian workplace sexual harassment legislation (in light of the DJs case) is utterly compelling reading. This is not just an excuse to watch all of Season 4 in one sitting. Honest.

Day #50 – Please allow me to introduce myself…

With Operation Greek Migration officially abandoned today at 3.26pm EST, it is now time to fully devote myself to the demoralising art of desperately flogging ideas with disparately flagging enthusiasm.

To be fair, pitch fever has seen a moderate amount of published activity in the online world in the last week. A few interviews and previews for the Sydney Fringe Festival, a smattering of free tickets to review said shows, a promise of upcoming interviews with bona fide bands for Groupie mag and a weak attempt at toilet humour in Concrete Playground news. But considering any ranting twat can publish themselves online, and the entire remuneration from all this typing equates to this…

…at the official halfway point of Pitch Fever I’ve decided to change tack.

Commence Project Official Offline Publications (obviously haven’t got all the toilet humour out of my system). An article with a word count that can’t also be a football score, printed with real ink on genuine 120GSM stock, that can be paid for at a milk bar with actual money then cut out and sent to my Nanna for scrapbooking. If she dug that stuff.

According to virtually everyone who has an opinion on the matter, the main skill of the freelance feature writer is not, as you might think, to have a ground-breaking idea. Or even to write like Ross Gittens. It’s to know and understand your target publication and audience inside out. “Editors treat their publications like children, and they know them intimately” says Gina Perry, In Write to Publish. Sue White from Sydney Writer’s Centre has interviewed many editors on the topic and all of them list a lack of knowledge on their publication their greatest bugbear (and were gobsmacked at how often it happened, like pitches to in flight editors on destinations they didn’t even fly to).

Hence I declared last weekend ‘O-week’, and in the great tradition of all varsity orientations, spent the day with a beer in one hand, getting to ‘intimately’ know a whole lot of publications.

There are some excellent sites to peruse some of the 1600 titles in this country (more per capita than anywhere on the planet) including magnation and isubscribe. But to really get to befriend one, it’s ideal to have a physical copy on hand.

Step one: Spread every magazine you own (and have been pilfering and hoarding over the last month, from airport lounges to doctors surgeries) across office desk (or coffee table, as the case may be).

Step two: Pick up a magazine. Sniff it. Stroke it (Is it on glossy paper with a GSM of 40000 or does it have the texture of cheap public dunny bog roll? This will tell you exactly how much they’re charging for advertising space, and thus how much they’ll pay you). Have a leaf through, paying careful attention to the editorial content box (that little list of who’s who in the front) to gauge the ratio of staff writers to freelance writers.

Step three: Get acquainted. What’s unique about this particular read? And who reads it? What kind of sections does it have? How long are they? (count number of words in a row then multiply by number of rows). Where is it distributed – nationally or in the Inner West? What tone is it written in? If it were a person, what kind of car would it drive? And so on.

Step four: Place name of magazine in the middle of a blank page, encircle it with your favourite felt tip pen in a soothing-yet-cheerful shade, and let the ideas flow. Branch off with a new circle for each new idea, and link them where they relate.

Step five: Step back and admire work. Take right arm, cross over left shoulder, and pat self on back. Select least woeful of ideas and whip up into pitch to magazine, or if you’re a gambler, throw a few others in for good measure (it is a numbers game, afte rall). Open buttery Chardonnay to celebrate cleverness.

I’ve discovered that even though I love stroking my frosted aluminium MacBook (how can one inanimate object engender so much love?) I’m infinitely more productive with some old fashioned textas and an A3 drawing pad. Maybe it’s because I’m a visual person, or maybe it’s because I can’t compulsively switch between facebook, Twitter and Outlook to see if there’s been any action in the last, oh, 8 seconds. Either way, I had an unusually productive hour brainstorming the pitching direction for the second half. And rediscovering mind maps.

Day 50. About that many mind maps. 10 times that many ideas (most shite, but a couple of workable ones). A loungeroom that looks like its been under enemy fire, but the next few day’s pitches sorted.

Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name (Oh, yeah)….