Video Game Journalism: What’s a pitch?

If you’re new to video game journalism you might hear the word “pitch” being thrown around a lot. It’s okay to be confused by the word. We all are at first. Today we’ll be going over what a pitch is and why you should do them before writing a story.

What is a pitch?

In this concept, a pitch refers to a story pitch or story idea. A pitch is the description of a potential story which is delivered to an editor. They essentially explain why this story is a good idea and why it matters. You need to essentially convince an editor to choose your story over the other stories that have been pitched to them. Now here comes the tricky part.

You need to explain all this in around 4/5 lines of text. An editor doesn’t have all day to sit around and read your proposal. They’ll be extremely busy with meetings and their own work all day. As a result, they don’t have much time to dedicate towards checking out proposals from freelance journalists.

This doesn’t mean that you’ll be ignored however. There’s a good chance that the editor you’ve contact will see your proposal and read it. They just might not have the time to respond and tell you that they’re not interested or that someone in-house is doing a similar article. This is the trouble with being an external force, you don’t know what’s going on in-house but that doesn’t mean you should just give up. Plenty of websites and magazines will take on freelance articles to help fill their website or magazine with content.

Pitching articles is tricky business and we’ll be looking at it more in-depth later this week. We’ll be going over how to successfully write a pitch email to a video game website or magazine.

This post was provided by Clare from Lunawolf Gaming