How to pitch to The Conversation

Writing for The Conversation is a good way to raise your academic profile and disseminate your research to a wide, general audience, but you will miss out on opportunities to be published if you can't successfully pitch your ideas.

This course will demystify pitching and guide you through the commissioning process. It covers what you need to think about before you begin writing a pitch, how to structure your pitch, the key elements to include and what to avoid, as well as how to deal with rejection. By the end, you will have a set of tools to enable you craft a great pitch to The Conversation.

You will get more out of this course if you have taken our How to write for The Conversation course first. As well as helping you to develop the skills to write journalistically, it will help you to frame your research and generate article ideas with a general audience in mind.

Who this course is for:

Academics, PhD candidates and researchers affiliated with institutions that are members of The Conversation who would like to pitch story ideas to The Conversation. 

After completing this course you will be able to:

• Recognise how the commissioning process works

• Develop and test story ideas 

• Write a pitch

• Recognise why a pitch may be rejected and develop a strategy for dealing with rejection

This course is led by

Pauline McCallion
Senior Business Editor
Pauline has been a journalist for 18 years, mostly writing about business and finance. After covering the impact of the global financial crisis on UK consumers, she moved to the US in 2008 to write about financial regulation, risk management and energy trading. She is now based in Northern Ireland and joins The Conversation UK after a decade as a freelance writer and editor.

Holly Squire
Special Projects Editor
Holly joined The Conversation at the start of 2015 from a background in broadcast journalism and magazine publishing having previously worked at the BBC as a journalist and researcher in radio and television. Holly regularly contributes to The Conversation's podcast The Anthill.

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