5 Pitches that Became Solutions Stories
Some are short-and-sweet, others are in-depth and detail-oriented. But all answer the golden question: ‘Why should readers care?’
For “Freelancer Fridays,” this month we’re doing a 3-part series on pitching solutions journalism stories. This is Part III. For ‘Part I: How to Prepare a Solutions Pitch — 10 Tips from Journalists in our Network’, go here. For ‘Part II: What News Outlets Seek in Solutions Pitches — 8 Tips from Editors in our Network’, go here. If you’re enjoying this series, we hope you’ll consider supporting the work we do at Solutions Journalism Network with a donation.
A recent Harvard Business Review report said writers at the New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN receive more than 38,000 emails a year — three times that of the average worker.
That kind of volume makes at all the more challenging for an editor to notice your email. In fact, it’s a mystery so profound that one mission of The Open Notebook —a nonprofit dedicated to science journalism — is to collect and publish a database of successful email pitches.
SJN hopes to build something similar, someday. But to tide you over in the meantime, here are 5 shining examples of emails that successfully turned into solutions stories, along with the reasons why (we think) they shine.
“Innovative Greenhouses Help Farmers Adapt to Climate Change,” National Geographic, Janice Cantieri
While pitching this story on an innovative greenhouse design in India, Janice’s short-but-sweet email to National Geographic highlights precisely how much less water the greenhouses use — giving the hard-to-ignore numbers editors seek. In simple, jargon-free language, Janice also shows how she’ll ‘invest time and resources into the community’ — detailing what she’ll investigate and who she’ll interview during her one-month trip to the site.
Hello! I hope everything is going well. I was writing to pitch a story idea.
I will be spending about a month in India reporting on a social enterprise that provides farmers in rural India with high-tech, low-cost greenhouses. These special greenhouses use 90 percent less water, so farmers are able to maintain their livelihoods while adapting to climate change-induced droughts. The organization was founded by a 27-year-old Indian woman and serves farmers outside of Hyderabad.
I will be heading to India next week for an initial visit and then staying for about a month over the summer. I’ll look into how the greenhouses work, if they are effective, and how the local community has been adapting to climate change.
Would this be something that you would be interested in?
Sincerely,
Janice Cantieri
Fulbright National Geographic Storytelling Fellow
“How to beat air pollution? Stop burning the fields,” The Guardian, Rishika Pardikar
Rishika’s pitch establishes relevance right away; we’re clued into the problem (i.e. the toxic waste generated by farming processes), and we’re told — via the headline — that a ‘howdunnit’ account of that problem’s solution will follow.
“In agriculture, a lot of waste is generated during farming seasons, a portion of which is used to manure the soil for the next crop and also as cattle fodder. But by and large, such residue is for disposal” says M V Ashok, former Chief General Manager of the Department of Economic Analysis and Research at the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD). He currently serves as the Tata Chair Professor at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences
The agricultural residues which are generated in the form of cereal straws and husks are usually disposed-off by way of burning in situ — commonly referred to as ‘stubbleburning’.
For farmers, stubble burning is economical since all it takes is a match-stick while other methods to ‘clear the field’ require manual or machine labour which are expensive. Additionally, the method is also quick and can easily be employed when the time gap between different crop seasons is limited.
But the practice is large contributor to the nation’s pollution problems — most visibly in Delhi. A study conducted by Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Harvard University said “On certain days, during peak fire season, air pollution in Delhi which is located downwind of the fire is about 20 times higher than the threshold for safe air as defined by WHO.”
It’s time, therefore, that innovative alternatives to this toxic practice are developed. And this is exactly what BIO-LUTIONS Eco Tech India Private Limited (‘BIO-LUTIONS’) is focused on.
BIO-LUTIONS is a Hamburg-based company which has set-up a factory in Ramanagara, about 40 km from Bangalore and has officially started operations on 23rd August, 2018. The factory is set to use about 1,500–2,000 tonnes of agricultural residue like sugarcane thrash, banana stems, wheat and rice straws, pineapple leaves, waste from Areca leaf plate factories and turns them into packing material and tableware.
The methodology adopted by BIO-LUTIONS is worthy of highlighted notice because it turns the fibres in agricultural residue into self-binding fibres in a purely mechanical manner without using chemicals and it also involves very less energy-consumption. The technology was developed in Germany and has been patented.
Would you be interested in an article regarding the above mentioned? In addition to Mr. Ashok who previously worked with NABARD, I have also interviewed persons from BIO-LUTIONS and the NGO Vikasana which sources raw materials to BIO-LUTIONS.
I’m Rishika Pardikar, a freelance journalist writing in from Bangalore, India. I have previously contributed articles to:
1. The Wire
2. The New Indian Express
3. Firstpost
Regards,
Rishika
“What is Barbershop Therapy?,” YES! Magazine, Celeste Hamilton Dennis
Not only does Celeste include why she’s the right person to tell the story, but she also offers a detailed account of why YES! Magazine is the right outlet to tell it. Beyond committing to covering limitations — key for any solutions story, Celeste conveys why her interviews — with the programs’ founder, with barbers, with community health partners, and with ‘men who’ve been positively impacted’ — will make this a story, and not just a topic.
Dear YES! Magazine editors,
As a Portland, Oregon local and nonprofit nerd, I’ve been a big fan of YES! Magazine for a while now. I saw your call for pitches for your upcoming issue focused on mental health, and am pitching a story about the The Confess Project based in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Founded in 2016 by Lorenzo Lewis, a Black professional in the mental health field for nearly a decade, The Confess Project works with majority Black men to decrease the stigma around mental health. Men, because they’re socialized to not speak about their emotions. Black men, because studies have shown they’re disproportionately affected by mental illness yet stigma and systemic barriers often prevent them from seeking treatment.
Based on an intervention model, the program consists of going into middle schools, high schools, and colleges as a way of getting appropriate health care to the people who need it. Lewis uses his own personal story to connect with audiences — a story that begins with being born to an incarcerated mother, continues with gang violence and depression as a youth, and ends with him being a social entrepreneur.
After modeling vulnerability and resiliency, Lewis encourages men to confess to their own issues as a first step of getting help. He then connects them with culturally-informed care via local mental health resources.
Beginning January this year, The Confess Project has also brought its program to barbershops in the South and is working on training barbers to become mental health advocates. They’re also working on a training program for college educators. The project has reached a couple of thousand of individuals so far, and anecdotal evidence has shown it to be largely effective.
My proposed 800-word story will explore why The Confess Project’s core message of resiliency is needed especially in Arkansas, how it’s making an impact, and why the barbershop model specifically is a solution that has potential to be replicated. I’ve interviewed Lewis, and will interview barbers, men who’ve been positively impacted, and community mental health partners in Little Rock. (As a trained solutions journalist, I will also touch upon the limitations of this response.)
I’m an active member of Portland’s Solutions Journalism chapter, a past attendee of the first ever Experience Engagement conference in Portland, and a writer in the social good space. I’ve written for Huffington Post Impact, GOOD Magazine, Idealist.org and more.
Given how this story offers a community-based solution in an area of the country where mental health is often seen as a “white issue,” I think this would be a good fit for your upcoming theme.
Thanks for the consideration!
Celeste
“Building an open, digital democracy in Taiwan,” Equal Times, Nithin Coca
Though Equal Times ultimately chose a different title, it’s likely that Nithin Coca’s subject line — which could have doubled as the headline — is what caught the editor’s eye. Far from writing the whole article in the pitch , Nithin gives an engaging summation and invites the editor to learn more.
SUBJECT: How Hackers became the State in Taiwan — and whether it will work
It was a remarkable transformation. In 2014, they were leading the audacious Sunflower Movement, a grassroots effort to stop a controversial trade deal the ruling party had proposed with China, using digital open source tools in innovative ways. The protesters occupied the Parliament for several days and ended up succeeding in their goals. Two year later, a progressive outsider, Tsai Ing-wen, was elected to the Presidency and quickly appointed one of the key players in the 2014 movement, Audrey Tang, to be her digital minister, and since then, Taiwan has been making huge strides in digital democracy and citizen empowerment.
My piece will explore this rapid evolution, the challenges of transforming a rigid bureaucracy into a nimble digital state, and how the country provides a stark contract to the shirking digital space in other parts of the world.
“Making Gum in the Mayan Rainforest,” Sierra Club, Martha Pskowski
Martha Pskowski’s pitch shows she’s clearly read up on the subject of natural chewing gum production. But she offers a unique angle when she pledges to “tell the the story of how natural chewing gum became the unlikely ingredient to re-build the troubled relationship between local communities and the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve.” And importantly, for good solutions journalism, that’s a story of something that already happened /or is happening — not a theory.
In the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve of Southern Mexico, a chiclero, or natural gum-maker, climbs up a chicozapote tree into the forest canopy, machete in hand, cutting long gashes in the trunk. Sap oozes out and is collected below, to be processed into natural chewing gum. Towering over the forest floor, chicleros risks dangerous falls to extract the gum, a tradition going back to when the Mayans ruled the Yucatan Peninsula. In its hey-day, chewing gum was the Yucatan’s most important export. Mayan cooperatives are now working alongside conservationists to revive natural gum-making in Calakmul, the second largest intact rainforest in Latin America.
After the collapse of the Yucatecan Mayans in the ninth century, the hot and dry Calakmul region, which straddles Mexico and Guatemala, was nearly de-populated. It wasn’t until the beginning of the twentieth century that intrepid Mayan descendants ventured back into Calakmul.The new settlers arrived to extract natural chewing gum, which had caught the attention of foreign palates. Production peaked during World War II at over 4,000 tons a year, when companies like Wrigley’s and Clarks bought chewing gum for U.S. troops rations.
With the war’s end and the invention of synthetic chewing gum, the chicleros faced a slow decline. Meanwhile, the Mexican government began planning a natural and archaeological reserve for Calakmul. In 1989, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve was founded, and natural resource extraction in the rainforest was banned.
Overnight, communities were banned from entering their own forest. With no way to make a living, poverty drove whole communities out of Calakmul. Many found work serving margaritas to tourists in Cancun and Playa del Carmen.
But at the start of the 21st century, cooperatives and non-profits approached environmental officials to propose a new kind of environmental protection in Calakmul: one that worked with local communities instead of against them. In 2010, a new management plan for the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve was adopted, allowing limited extractive activities such as sustainable timber harvesting and gum extraction. In the near-by city of Chetumal, the company Chicza began buying gum from the cooperatives. Chicza’s factory churns out gum packets that are sold fair-trade in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Local communities follow sustainable management plans to ensure that the chicozapote tree is not over-harvested.
I will tell the story of how natural chewing became the unlikely ingredient to re-build the troubled relationship between local communities and the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. While environmental protection and economic growth are often juxtaposed in U.S. politics, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve represents a middle path. I carried out anthropological research as a Fulbright fellow in the Calakmul area, and have studied conservation politics in Mexico since 2013. I will interview Chicza staff, the chicleros in rural communities, and Biosphere Reserve officials. There haven’t been any feature stories reported on the topic.
