In an interview with Mediabistro, Pacific Standard editor Maria Streshinsky tells people interested in writing for her that “Your [pitch] lede should be as good as your story lede.”
I’m working on a bunch of pitches right now, so that caught my attention. In particular, over the past six weeks, I’ve been chasing the perfect pitch lede for a story that I really, really want to write. But the story hasn’t gone where I’d like it to, and last week, realizing that soon enough I’ll run out of money, I began to wonder whether holding out for the perfect pitch was an unreasonably high bar for all stories, even if it could be right for this one story. In other words, I began to doubt whether writing a great lede to a pitch is always or even often worth the effort.
Say, for example, that you want to write features. Really good features, and really good feature pitches, open with something remarkable—either a remarkable story, or a remarkable collection of information—that captures a reader’s attention. In my experience, it’s not easy to find remarkable things to write about, and doing so usually requires a very strong understanding of your subject. But maybe you love reporting, and you’re willing to invest lots of time interviewing people and researching stories before you get assignments. If you’re really good, you might have a feature idea pan out once a month, or 12 times each year. (I’m sure some people can do this more frequently; I can’t.) At the end of the year, then, you’ll have written 12 bang-up pitch ledes, and you’re guaranteed to have pleased many of the editors you’ve written to.
But if you’re pitching stories cold—and this is where Streshinsky’s advice is most valuable—you’ve probably begun to notice that you have a high failure rate. Jack Hitt would tell you that this rate might be above 90 percent. In my experience, on cold pitches, it’s 100 percent, and more like 60 or 70 percent with editors I’ve already worked for. (Though to be fair, some of my ideas are just awful, like the story about ski-area grooming operators I pitched to The Boston Globe Magazine. But some are okay. For years I pitched a story about beach erosion with no success. This week, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker both ran beach erosion stories.) Possibly, many of my pitch ledes were themselves not very good, but it’s also possible that a certain number were discarded for reasons entirely beyond my control. In fact I think that’s likely.
In which case, if you follow Streshinsky’s advice literally you could easily spend a year on 12 ideas, do a great job, and end up with one or two or zero stories to show for your work. There’s value in reporting and pitching a story even if it never gets assigned, because you’ll learn to be more judicious in choosing and reporting ideas, and you’ll learn to think about how to structure your story once it does get assigned. But one feature story a year is not a viable way to make a living as a journalist. And if you’ve got a ten percent chance of getting an assignment, I would even argue that it’s disrespectful to the people you’ll interview and pester along the way.
To the extent that Streshinsky means, do your homework, do some reporting, and write a pitch that’s as good as possible, one that maybe grabs your editor in the same way you hope to grab a reader, it’s good advice. You should do that. But if you pitch a story and use a lede that’s actually as compelling as the one in the final product, I would think you’ve either gotten a bit lucky or you’ve done an amount of work that’s not sustainable in the long run.