Pitch a Story

South Today is interested in strong ideas about the modern American South. If you have one, we would like to read it. This page explains what we look for and how to send it. Please read to the end, because we want to be honest about what we can promise.

How to pitch

Email your pitch to [email protected]. Put the working headline or a short description in the subject line. Keep the message short enough to read in a minute or two, and write it the way you would like the story itself to read: concrete, specific and clear.

What we want

• Stories rooted in a particular place, person, dish, sound or object, not general trend pieces.
• Food and culinary heritage with a real point of view.
• Music and culture that explains why a scene or room matters.
• Craft and design stories with sensory detail.
• Outdoor field guides for the Gulf coast, the Piedmont, the Appalachians and beyond.
• Dispatches from any of our seven city desks: Atlanta, Charleston, Austin, Nashville, New Orleans, Savannah and Appalachia.

We avoid cliche. Pitches that lean on dusty nostalgia, dialect parody or the same handful of Southern stereotypes will not fit.

What to include

• The story in two or three sentences.
• Why it matters now, and why it belongs in South Today.
• Who or what you would draw on for the reporting or research.
• A few lines about you, and links to published work if you have it.
• A rough sense of length and any images you could provide.

What to expect

We cannot guarantee a reply, and we do not promise response times. We cannot guarantee that a pitch will be commissioned, and we are not able to say yet what compensation will look like, because South Today is at launch-edition stage. If a pitch moves forward, we will talk about terms in writing before any work begins.

Please do not send finished stories unless we ask, and do not send material that belongs to someone else. Our editorial standards and community guidelines pages describe how we work and what we expect from contributors.