How to Pitch Great Lakes Now
There are three ways to write for Great Lakes Now: our show segments, podcasts and online magazine. All pitches go through the pitch portal here.
What is a Great Lakes Now story?
Our audience is located all around the basin, from Minnesota to New York and Ontario, Canada. A question to ask yourself is: why would someone who loves the Great Lakes want to read this story?
All of our stories should either take place in the Great Lakes basin or be relevant to the Great Lakes in some way (see our story about research being done in Lake Victoria, in East Africa).
Before you pitch, please check if we already published a similar story on the website or featured it on the show or podcast. If we have, then we might be interested if there is a new angle or if a significant amount of time has passed.
We do not publish op-eds OR articles by politicians, nonprofits or lawyers with a bias toward their work.
Detroit PBS has a policy around AI that boils down to human in, human out. That means, all writing should be original with no use of AI.
To get an idea of our content pillars, check out our homepage.
- Water quality (think…PFAS, chemical spills, lead pipes)
- Wildlife and nature (restoration projects, trees, birds and fish)
- Energy (pipelines and solar)
- Industry (data centers, shipping and agriculture)
- Politics (bills, lawsuits and transit)
- Recreation (boating, food, fishing, camping and foraging)
- Culture (history, art, jobs, sports and shipwrecks)
- Climate (migration, floods, wildfires and solutions)
What makes a good Great Lakes Now web pitch?
An ideal pitch is 1-3 months ahead of when it’s filed. It is approximately 5 sentences, with enough information to give the editor or producer a sense of why this story, why now, who will be interviewed, word count and if original photos are part of it.
If there is interest in the pitch, we will ask for more details then discuss timeline, word count and price. Our budget for web stories ranges from $400-$600 per story, with $20 per published photo.
Web feature
We publish 1-3 original features per month. Approximately 800-2,000 words. A typical feature has a minimum of three interviews.
What makes a good Great Lakes Now show or podcast pitch?
Show segment
TKTK
Podcast episode
For the podcast, we typically interview one expert on a topic that our audience is interested in. There is a 5 minute clip added to the show, and then the full interview is uploaded to YouTube and Spotify. Pre-production requires writing an intro for the host with roughly 5-8 questions for a 20 minute interview, and an outro. After the interview, we’ll need an edited, condensed script for the show and long-form portion of the interview.
