Pitching us is simple! There’s one crucial factor we think about when considering pitches: publishing work which is engrossing, exciting and fun to read — even if the topic is serious. 

A great read can take many different forms: it could tell a gripping narrative. Your proposed piece might make a compelling argument which hasn’t been put forward before. It might be an exciting investigation highlighting possible wrongdoing, incompetence, negligence, abuse of power or something more sinister. You might set out to clear up widespread confusion on a topic most people in your city don’t understand or interrogate a cliche about your area that’s more complicated than it first appears and set the record straight. 

It could spotlight a side of a hotly-discussed topic underreported by other publications. Perhaps you want to get really granular about a viral trend centred on the city or pitch us some great first-person gonzo style reporting. You might simply be very funny about a trend or problem in your city — in which case, step this way, please.

Often we get pitched articles about topics – please instead tell us what it is you want to say about them. For example, pitching us an essay about the Trafford Centre doesn’t make our pulses race. But we’d be delighted to get a pitch which outlines the writer’s opinions on the Trafford Centre, what questions the essay will pose and give us a sense of what the answers might be.

For example: I’d like to argue that the Trafford Centre is the only exciting building that has been designed in Manchester since the 1996 IRA bombing. Manchester has seen plenty of new buildings and growth since the bombing — but architecture critics like X and Y have complained about the dominance of bland and derivative designs and the way the city increasingly looks to N. America in terms of its anonymous skyscrapers. The chairman of the Peel Group, who are behind the Trafford Centre, John Whittaker, deliberately chose a maximalist, OTT style to avoid the shopping centre looking dated too quickly.

In this piece, I’d like to argue that this deliberately unserious style – gold leaf! paintings! fountains with dolphins! – has the fun and personality so much of Manchester architecture is lacking. I’d also like to interview workers and regular shoppers within the Trafford Centre to evaluate the effect the building has on their mood — do they enjoy its maximalism? Or do they find it suffocating? 

Similarly, a proposed story or narrative will always trump a topic. So an essay about skyscrapers in Manchester sounds a bit quiet. But a pitch on a group of architects’ attempt to fight the increasing skyscaperisation of Manchester via the courts sounds fascinating. 

 When pitching us, please consider the following questions:

• What would your reporting entail? Who would you speak to for the piece? Most freelancers tell us they’re going to speak to experts on the topic. We’re much more eager to commission work where you speak to people who are affected by the subject (rather than detached experts). So if you’re writing about a bust-up in the influencer world in your city, we’d want you to have access to interviews on both sides of the dispute. Or if you’re writing about policing in Sheffield, we’d expect interviews (even off the record) with police.
• Could your idea feasibly run in a national or international publication? If the answer is yes, this might not be for us. We always want work with a specifically local angle. A piece about the rise in popularity in sourdough pizza restaurants in Manchester would be a better fit for a national — it isn’t specific to the city, since you could argue this applies to plenty of UK cities. But a piece about a particularly thin sourdough pizza crust native to the city made possible by the softness of Mancunian water has a local angle. As does a pitch about a Prestwich pizza restaurant poaching another restaurant’s pizza chef to steal his recipe for sauce and the repercussions throughout Manchester’s pizza scene.
• For non-narrative pieces, please consider: What’s your argument? In your pitch, you should outline your opinions on the topic, what questions the essay will pose and give us a sense of what the answers may be. What’s the context? What have other people argued or reported on the topic? What will your piece bring to the topic which is new?
• Why would the average reader be interested in this? Why is this a compelling topic?

As with any publication, the best way to get a sense of how to land a successful pitch is to read us extensively! Please only pitch us once you’ve read multiple Mill Media articles.

What we pay: We agree a fee with writers when we make a commission and our fees vary greatly depending on the type of story and the location of the writer (it’s more expensive to live as a writer in London than it is in Sheffield etc, and our fees reflect that). For most of our publications, we pay around £200 for a quick-hit and approximately £300 for something more reported and we also have the budget to pay significantly more for highly investigative stories that take months of work. 

We also cover reporting expenses if they are agreed in advance with the commissioning editor. And we will pay an appropriate ‘kill fee’ if the story doesn’t work out.

How to reach us: Please send your pitches to the editor of the title that you are pitching (these are all on the individual websites).