"Bad pitches just tell me facts. Good pitches have a sense of a story."
How to pitch The Guardian's deputy music editor, Laura Snapes
Good morning, freelancers. How lovely to be starting the week by welcoming Laura Snapes – The Guardian’s deputy music editor – to the newsletter. Read on to get your pitches singing.
Tell us more about your role at The Guardian.
As well as writing news/features/reviews/comment pieces, I work alongside music editor Ben Beaumont-Thomas to commission and edit music pieces for online and our Film & Music supplement (which publishes on Fridays) and sometimes the weekday arts pages. Any music pieces that appear at the weekend come from the Saturday team.
How many pieces do you commission? How is this split across the newspaper/website/magazine?
Film & Music usually has one music feature a week - either the cover or a smaller one inside - and we usually run at least one online piece every weekday. There's no fixed number but we are working within the constraints of a budget.
Do you have regular features that you always commission out?
Our only regular repeating features are Ranked and the Reader Interview, but 99% of the time they're done by staff for budget reasons. There are other regular music features that don't belong to us - and I appreciate this is confusing to freelancers who see everything live in the same place online. The feature How We Made is often about a song or album, but that's commissioned by the arts team; Ones to Watch is an Observer feature; Honest Playlist is a Saturday mag feature.
Do you take ideas to meetings, or are they straight off the bat?
We're pretty self-governing and generally commission on our own steam, occasionally running things up the flagpole for a sense check or to see how they're going to sit alongside other features in the mix (or checking that other sections aren't already doing something).
I'd say that we commission out more ideas that we've thought of than we accept pitches - that's not a rule but more a reflection of un/successful pitching hit rates, and us knowing what the section needs to remain current and fulfil the needs of being a newspaper music section rather than a standalone specialist music publication.
What are the pay rates? How quickly do freelancers get paid?