Want (Your Stories) To Be In Pictures?

Everyone has done an Oscar (or Pulitzer or sports championship) speech in the shower. Don’t try to deny it. While we can’t promise you fame and adoration, we can point you to a path that might get you one step closer.

Christine McLaren was the founding editor of the excellent solutions journalism outlet Reasons to be Cheerful. Now she works with PopShift, a program of the nonprofit Pathos Labs. Through that program she has now helped to launch The IP List, a project that surfaces and promotes extraordinary journalism (often by underrepresented authors) for adaptation in the film and television market.

If you’re a journalist in the U.S. or Canada and you think a story you’ve worked on would make a good movie or episode of a television show, start by reading the nomination information package, which also contains the nomination form. You can submit up to two stories. Selected submissions will then be presented to an array of Hollywood professionals.

There are some important notes. First, The IP List takes no financial stake in any projects that result. Second, newsrooms of any size, as well as freelancers, can submit stories. Third, the project team is very interested in solutions stories! (Did you know that SJN’s Julia Hotz once wrote a solutions story that became a TV episode?) So read that form, nominate your stories and send questions to christine@pathoslabs.org. Let's bring solutions journalism to the screen.