Pitching, making a living and other tips

In his Tweets on his foreign correspondence experience, Dan Baum includes very specific recommendations on pitching stories (Baum, 2009). He suggests calling the switchboard at the target outlet, asking for the top editor’s assistant, telling that person that you’re planning to move the destination country and asking which editor would be most interested in news from there, then ask for that editor’s assistant. Next, find out the spelling of the editor’s name, the best day of the week and time of day to email, and the preferred length of the pitch.

Journalist Deborah Bonello advises newcomers to foreign correspondence to be prepared to pitch and get turned down often (D. Bonello, personal communication, September 17, 2009). She said the most important thing beginner journalists can do is to get online, create a space where they can show their work, and make it look good. Her Web site costs about $200 a year to run, she said.

“You have to be prepared to invest the time in yourself and develop those things, because, you know, to anyone, I’d say you’re going to at least give yourself six months to a year to get yourself up and running,” she said. She also recommends journalists meet as many people as possible once they arrive in a new country, and get in touch with nonprofits, read the newspapers, follow media coverage of the country, and “look under as many stones as possible.”

Payscale.com, a commercial Web site that gathers data on salaries, gives an annual median salary of $58,000 to $73,000 per year for foreign correspondents with 10 to 19 years of experience, but received data from only nine professionals to come up with that range. If these figures can be considered as a sort of guide to the payscale for foreign correspondents, then, naturally, starting correspondents can expect to make significantly less. But depending on where a journalist is living, considerably less could still be a good living.

Miranda Kennedy said she never bothered with pitching newspapers because the pay has long been low. While she eventually became a contract correspondent from India for the radio program “Marketplace” from American Public Media, she tried to hone in on outlets that have more money to offer, but might not be so high profile, such as a newspaper she found in the Persian Gulf that paid extremely well and preferred long pieces, and the nonprofit organization World Vision’s radio program, which also paid well. When first starting out, Kennedy also managed to get grant to train other radio journalists in South Asia for Pacifica Radio, which helped her out on the income front and helped her get acquainted with the region and its people.

She said India is an example of the kind of place where it really makes sense to go for those interested in becoming foreign correspondents. She also suggests that young journalists going abroad to report consider staying in the same place for an extended period, and living like the country’s citizens rather than sticking with other expatriates and diplomats in the nicer neighborhoods. Kennedy was originally scheduled to return to the United States after living in India for a year, but she decided to stay because she “hadn’t been able to really get a hold on the country.” She ended up living there for five years, and recently returned for five weeks as a fellow for the International Reporting Project. She’s also writing a book on the lives of six Indian women. Kennedy said young reporters particularly cannot go to someplace so different from the West understand the political and cultural intricacies without spending a great deal of time there.

And lastly, Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting recommends that those who feel passionately about becoming foreign correspondent just go rather than waiting for someone to give them a job or assignment or funding (N. Applewhite, personal communication, October 27, 2009).“This is not the kind of field where you sit around and wait for someone to believe in you,” she said. “Just spend the $1,000, make that investment. It’ll be the best investment you make.”


Works Cited

Baum, D. (2009, September 10). African bureau Tweets. Retrieved from http://www.danbaum.com/Nine_Lives/Africa_Bureau_tweets.html