Erika Hayasaki was an award-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times when she left the relative security of the newsroom for the feast-or-famine world of freelancing. She has since made her way into some of the nation’s top … Read more
EDITOR’S NOTE: Erika Hayasaki’s conversation with Storyboard contributor Katia Savchuk explores what it took to earn a regular byline in magazines. She also shared the two separate pitches she wrote to land “End Pain Forever” as a cover piece in Wired. Read more
Sex robots, violence in Mosul and the plan for Queen Elizabeth’s inevitable death. Those were among the subjects of the best stories last year on The Guardian’s eclectic longform site, The Long Read. “We don’t have a simple formula,” … Read more
Mother Jones is known for its hard-hitting investigations, like Shane Bauer’s 35,000-word undercover account of working as a private prison guard in Louisiana, which won a National Magazine Award for reporting last year. The Pitch In an occasional series, … Read more
I watched the movie “Network” again the other day and was unnerved by how accurately screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky predicted today’s media and political environment. The line between news and scripted stories blurs, and truth is an old-fashioned concept. Middle-aged journalists … Read more
Jennifer Sahn, executive editor of Pacific Standard, understands why writers sometimes feel frustrated when editors take weeks to respond to their pitches or don’t write back at all. But she wants writers to see the other side, too. The … Read more
In just over three years of existence, The California Sunday Magazine has emerged as one of the best magazines in the country. The San Francisco-based publication has been a finalist for 10 National Magazine Awards (including for General Excellence, Reporting … Read more
Recession, shuttered publications, the rise of online media — Paul Tullis has weathered it all as a freelancer for the better part of 24 years. What hasn’t changed: Story idea is king. What has, in Tullis’ view, is the level … Read more
As a senior editor commissioning science features for Smithsonian Magazine, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz gets tons of freelance queries. Yet few cold pitches result in an article. Why not? The Pitch In an occasional series, Storyboard examines the elusive art of … Read more
Magazine pitches are an elusive species. You hear talk of them at journalism conferences and in freelancer forums. You see evidence of their existence in the stories they beget. But it’s rare to catch a glimpse of a specimen in … Read more
