Pitching Solutions Stories

Our Solutions Journalism Basic Toolkit has a section on pitching a solutions-oriented story. Top tips include: 

• Show that you have a fresh angle on the topic. (This might just be that you’re writing about an effective response to an often-covered problem.)
• Demonstrate you’ve already done substantial research and have access to appropriate and authoritative sources. 
• Since this is a solutions story, reference evidence that the response is effective, note limitations and suggest what types of insights the story might provide.
• Ensure that your story fits in the editorial mix of the publication you are pitching.
• Make it clear why the audience should care about this story.
• Instill confidence in your professionalism by writing the pitch as well as you plan to craft the story.

You can also have your students explore Luz, the Solutions Journalism Pitchbot, which was created by the Costa Rican media outlet El Colectivo 506. Luz will analyze solutions journalism pitches or help students create them.

Tip: Student newsrooms provide terrific opportunities for student journalists to learn to pitch and create a portfolio of published stories. Consider inviting the editor of your school’s student newsroom to speak to your class about how to pitch them.

When pitching professional news outlets, students face additional hurdles beyond what other journalists experience: They generally have few or no professional clips demonstrating their journalism skills, they likely lack relationships with professional editors who trust them to complete assignments well and on time, and they probably don’t know how to craft a compelling pitch that can overcome those two problems.

The good news is that they have you! Beyond coaching them on how to pitch solutions-oriented stories, you can connect them with editors and publications that might be interested in their stories. One efficient way to do this is to provide editors with a list of stories you think they might be interested in, encourage your students to tailor their stories and their pitches to those editors’ publications, and then alert those editors in advance that a student’s pitch is coming.

The best time to pre-pitch editors is when you’re confident a student’s story will be strong enough for publication and relevant to a specific publication, but before it’s too late to adjust the angle, add sources and otherwise tailor the story in response to suggestions by an editor.

How to teach this: Ask your students to find a publication that might be interested in their story idea and explain why: How does it fit into that publication’s story mix, and how do they know the story would be fresh for that publication’s audience? Then have your students write formal pitch letters to specific editors at those publications. 

Tip: Invite an editor to come to your class and listen to your students’ story pitches. Even if a story idea isn’t perfect for their publication, the editor will be able to offer actionable advice to improve stories and pitches for other outlets.