Pitches wanted (science) | $250+ per piece

[This opportunity was posted 30+ days ago and has expired.] 

Science freelancers! We are looking for a few awesome stories to run in August and September. Want to know how to pitch?

Our coverage areas include: health and medicine, biotech, environment and climate, space, energy, and robotics.

We’re looking for stories in the 800 to 1,200-word range, focusing on current science issues or research, with a variety of expert voices and anecdotal sources.

We mostly buy stories can be turned around in a week or two. (Most breaking news is handled by our staff.) We like a current news peg — a new study, data set release, the launch of an innovative project.

We seek diversity in terms of writers, sources and story topics. Science (and science writing) includes everyone — we want our coverage to reflect that.

A pro-tip: It’s helpful to clearly explain who your sources might be, whether they’ve already agreed to interviews and to share data/study results with you. You don’t have to have completed full interviews with everybody but it’s a good idea to have a few key interviews set up, and to have done enough research and pre-interviewing that you can explain the gist of what you’ll be talking about with each person.

We look for stories that have well-rounded sourcing: For example, for a study about Disease X, we want to hear from not only the researchers, but neutral experts, competitors, doctors who treat Disease X, people who have it, and others who can speak frankly and critically.

Another tip: Make sure to check our recent work, and search our archive, to see if we’ve covered your topic recently/extensively. If you have a significant update or a new angle, tell us how this story would be different from — or advance — our coverage.

And my best advice is: If your pitch contains a rhetorical question (“Can Thing X Solve Global Problem Y?”) be sure that it also lays out the science, sources & data to help answer it. Show us that your story won’t be a wild goose chase, or a string of impossible questions.

What do we NOT buy? We do not take op-eds, essays, listicles, academic papers, “how to” guides, and we usually do not use first-person reporting. Very long in-depth features may be a better match for the magazine or Backchannel, the website’s longform section.

If you would like to pitch editors at the print magazine or another desk on the website, you can find more information here.

We tend to focus on US news — for stories outside the US, you might want to pitch to one of the international editions. They are in the UK, Italy, Japan and South Korea. You can find more information here.

Have a question? Ready to pitch? I do my best to answer promptly, but we’re a small crew, so please give me a day or two to respond.

I recommend reading a few stories to get an idea of the typical format and depth of research, and to see what we've covered recently. Thanks for sharing this, and nice to meet you all!

COMPENSATION: It can depend! Once a writer pitches a story that looks like a match, we'll promptly discuss pay, deadlines and exact word count. But safe to say we're talking in the hundreds of dollars (not the tens, not the thousands).

CONTACT INFORMATION:

[This opportunity was posted 30+ days ago and has expired.]