Things That Worked: Pitches

Sample materials to simplify your life

[CW: the pitch discussed in this piece relates to sexual assault allegations.]

Welcome back for another round of ‘Things That Worked’!

When I did my last survey about what subscribers wanted to see featured next in this series, early-career CVs came in first, but pitches were not far behind. And I’m not surprised: in recent years, scholarly interest in communicating with the public has grown exponentially. Some institutions have even begun to run regular pitching workshops that train their researchers in how best to convince public-facing media to feature their work.

While I’ll save a more thorough overview of how pitches work for a separate post, I wanted to share here the pitch that resulted in this post for the Washington Post’s ‘Made by History’ blog. It’s a pitch for a piece of a very particular type: the timely op-ed (short for ‘opposite the editorial page’, but basically an opinion piece of around 800 words max).