How to Pitch: The New York Times Magazine

Uh, it's The New York Times in magazine form. A lot of extremely serious feature reporting, and particularly into murder. Who isn't?

TONE

Uh, The New York Times as a magazine. A lot of extremely serious feature reporting, and particularly into murder. Only in their culture stories does the tone really diverge from the “paper of record” voice. See Taffy Akner conning Gwyneth into smoking a cigarette with her. But the smaller recurring columns are sometimes funny and more personal also.

NYT Mag features tend to have a specific, coherent argument or point; they’re not abstract or ambient stories. They’re often profile-based or oriented on one specific individual, brand, or business. They have semi-chronological narratives and the author often tends to stay behind the scenes, in favor of letting the reporting and subject speak for itself. Not as stiff as the New Yorker but also maybe less willing to venture into niche territory.

STRUCTURE

Weekly print magazine in the Sunday issue of NYT. Used to have a fair amount of online exclusive content but that seems to have been phased out. Primarily features — with tech, money, war, and some culture (typically reported profiles, e.g.) as major subject areas. Weekly zine has some recurring shorter columns that are easier to pitch. Also does a fair number of photo essays and special projects, but contributors are largely solicited. Columns or essays tend to be 1000-1500 words and features mostly top out at 3500 words.

COLUMNS

• First Words: Critical essays about the evolution of language and trendy words / phrases. Has a roster of columnists but also takes freelance pitches.
• Letter of Recommendation: Personal essays, sometimes lightly reported. “Celebrations of objects and experiences that have been overlooked or underappreciated.”
• New Sentences: Critical essays based around one line from a new book and or piece of music. Typically commercial fiction and non-fiction, poetry, better-known music (recently did Drake).
• Talk: Q&A page, tabloid length. Typically celebrities (politicians, actors, musicians, tech CEOs, etc.), but sometimes behind-the-scenes people — recently an ethics lawyer, an animator, geophysicist. Seems to take a lot of outside pitches, probably saves them legwork.
• Tip: How-to’s. Even the NYT has to do service journalism now! Written every week by Malia Wollan.

EDITORS

At War editor: Lauren Katzenberg
[email protected]

Edits most of the magazine cover stories about war or international politics. Comes from an on-the-ground war reporting background and seems pretty cool! Recent features: “How South Koreans are Reckoning with a Changing American Military Presence” and a kind of odd profile of a Marine who spent his whole career never seeing combat.

Deputy editor: Bill Wasik
[email protected]

Edits some political stuff for the magazine, but also into more first-person longform and culture stories. E.g. edited recent feature about poet Ilya Kaminsky going back to his birthplace in Odessa as an adult.

Features editor: Ilena Silverman
[email protected]

She’s publicly given some pitch advice! Mostly major features, e.g. she’s editing the Blood Will Tell story that Pamela Colloff is doing in conjunction with ProPublica, which seems to have been in the works for at least several years. Also edits the year-end Lives They Lived package, which is features and other writing about people who died that year.

Politics editor: Charles Homans
[email protected]

Politics stuff! He wrote about Trump’s post-inauguration rallies most recently.

Special projects: Caitlin Roper
[email protected]

Edits the NYT for Kids section, in last Sunday paper of each month. It publishes cool, weird stuff! Print only.

Culture editor: Sasha Weiss
[email protected]

Coming from New Yorker Page-Turner, now edits culture features for the magazine, including literature, dance, music, theater profiles, etc. Also edits NYT Mag’s high-profile regular contributors like Teju Cole and Colson Whitehead and whoever else.

Story / Associate editors:

Nitsuh Abebe
[email protected]

Music background, coming from Pitchfork. Edits Letter of Rec, First Words, other stories.

Michael Benoist
[email protected]

Coming from Matter, edits some politics stuff and large, ambitious stories from established writers.

Sheila Glaser
[email protected]

Edits more cultural stuff — environment, parenting.

Claire Guiterrez
[email protected]

Culture stuff — dance, classical music, literature, style.

Jazmine Hughes
[email protected]

Culture stuff — comedy, some music. Used to edit Social Capital, the celebrity social media column; contributes to editing the Talk Q&A page and now mainly works on the kids’ magazine.

Luke Mitchell
[email protected]

Came from Popular Science. Edits features about politics / environment / science, and also edited that huge package about the evolution of the Middle East from 2003 to 2016.

Dean Robinson
[email protected]

Some sports stuff. Arts, including recent street art / immigration story.

Willy Staley
[email protected]

Previously edited Letter of Recommendation; now co-edits First Words and develops feature stories.

PITCHES THAT WORKED

Submitted by: Zachary Siegel

Subject: Epidemic of Epidemics

Column: First Words

Be it actual health or social malaise, America is rife with epidemics. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines an epidemic as “an increase, often sudden, in the number of cases of a disease above what is normally expected in that population in that area.” Epidemics are born by “vectors,” infectious agents that spread through blood, sometimes air, and when exposed to humans, produce a constellation of symptoms. Common solutions involve vaccination, inoculation, quarantine, and isolation. The goal is always to stop the bad thing from spreading.But the vectors threatening the health and well-being of Americans have become abstract, and even harder to imagine than tiny serpentine viruses. The ’80s and ’90s were marked by a crack-cocaine epidemic. The latest spate of mass shootings has experts invoking an epidemic of gun violence.

Today, any “bad” thing affecting swaths of people is considered an epidemic. Since the turn of the century, there has been simultaneous suicide and opioid epidemics. Combined, the frequency of suicide and overdoses has lowered the overall life expectancy of Americans for the past two years, which hasn’t happened since 1918, when the Spanish flu infected nearly 675,000 Americans.

What’s the “vector” that caused of 46,000 suicides in 2016? Or the 64,000 drug overdose deaths? What about the mass shootings? Surely, the causes are not molecular. But to some the causes look obvious: too many guns, too much drugs. But there’s no medical technology to inoculate someone from killing themselves. Cops have tried and failed to “quarantine” and “isolate” the flow of drugs. What is a border wall if not a gigantic quarantine? Legislative efforts to prevent human exposure to bullets remains gridlocked. Rather than objects like guns and drugs, it’s human beings themselves that are causing these epidemics. We’re the virus. The sentient agents.

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Submitted by: Peter Baker

Subject: CPR training

Column: Letter of Recommendation

Pitch: I’m writing to pitch a Letter about civilian first aid / CPR training, with my own recent certification (and history of queasy certification avoidance) as the narrative spine. I realize that CPR training might sound like the type of thing that is So Obviously Good as to not require recommendation. Well, maybe. But then why don’t more of us do it? 70 percent of Americans say they wouldn’t feel confident administering CPR, either because they were never trained or their training has lapsed I avoided getting trained for years, thanks to a combination of inertia and an embarrassing propensity to faintness, one easily triggered by talk or thoughts of bodily fragility/failure/etc. In junior high, I was “that guy who passed out in first aid class.”

In college, I could get dizzy just by looking too long at print advertisements for new medications. Just last year, I passed out on an airplane. But a recent teaching gig had CPR certification as a requirement. And so, on a recent evening, I found myself arriving early to class, telling the instructor she needn’t be too alarmed if she saw me sitting on the floor. The training I attended was hilarious, thanks mostly to the grumpy “seen it all” teacher. At one point, discussing the risks of the flesh-eating MRSA virus, she rolled up a shirtsleeve to show us a missing chunk of her arm. “I know what I’m talking about here!” she barked. I toughed it out, alternating for the entire four hours between wonder at the beautiful machine of the human body and lightheaded disgust at its soft fallibility. (Plus, did you know that successful CPR often involves breaking some of the recipients’ ribs?!)

To my surprise, I left the training feeling uplifted. CPR training reframes the world as a place populated by opportunities for individuals to meaningfully help each other. Helping won’t always make a difference: the stats on how often CPR saves lives are fairly dire. But still: we are bodies in need, and we can choose to be prepared to do what we can. There’s something modestly affirming about that. In this sense––and not to make too heavy a point of it––CPR training strikes me as the inverse of the training one undergoes to receive a concealed handgun license. As sociologists have documented, these classes encourage participants to see potential threats to their own safety everywhere, a mindset that makes a very sad marriage with the landscape of American prejudice.

So there it is: a bit of memoir (“Queasy Rider”), a quick comic moment, then an opening at the end to some slightly more serious reflection on the American scene.

Published: Letter of Recommendation: CPR Training

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Submitted by: Alice Hines

Subject: AliExpress

Column: Letter of Recommendation

Pitch: The other day, I met a stranger in the New York City subway. Milena was a Brighton Beach real-estate agent in a fur headband identical to mine. She had a side-hustle selling counterfeit handbags, she told me, which she sourced on the Chinese e-commerce site Aliexpress. “Have you heard of it?” she asked. “It feels like a secret society. The masonry of shopping.” I had never thought of it this way. Aliexpress is the international arm of Alibaba, the world’s largest retailer. Four hundred and four million people from 220 countries spent $23 billion on it last year.

This is a sentence that makes me feel like I’m there now, on the 17th page of direct-from-Hangzhou cocktail shakers. While some people watch TV, count their pores, or call their grandparents, I spend evenings surfing bot-translated prose about rain galoshes. I once uploaded a selfie into the site’s reverse image search, and found my alter ego in a beige chaise lounge. In One Thousand and One Nights, when the character Ali Baba’s brother tries to raid a hidden cave of gold, he’s chopped to death by forty thieves. I stop on the 18th page of shakers, when my mind goes blissfully blank. We are taught to be mindful in our consumerism: Black Friday haul vlogs are bad, ecru apartments good. On Aliexpress, you’ll find supplies for both, and an alternate kind of awareness. Supply chains are high-gloss, branding self-effacing. On product pages, vendors display photos of their factories next to the objects they’ve produced. Weeks or months after your decisive click, you’ll recognize an Aliexpress object by its collage of postage stamps, and the whiff of chemicals that evaporates when you unwrap. Milena and I exchanged numbers.

Every so often, she texts me pictures of lipstick, bedside tables, down jackets. I reply with emojis, though I’m rarely interested in buying these things. The secret of Aliexpress is this: scroll long enough, and you’ll eventually find an object that seems different from the rest. It will feel one-in-four-hundred-million special even if it isn’t, and if you buy it, so may you.

Published: Letter of Recommendation: AliExpress

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Submitted by: Kyle Chayka

Pitched to: Willy Staley

Subject: Minimalism

Column: First Words

Pitch: First Words: The Privilege of ‘Minimalism’

James Altucher is a wealthy 48-year-old serial entrepreneur and investor, but for all his worldly successes, nothing makes Altucher happier than nothing. In a recent viral Medium post, he explained how “Minimalism Brought Me Freedom and Joy,” as the triumphant headline ran. “I have one bag of clothes, one backpack with a computer, iPad, and phone. I have zero other possessions,” he writes. Nor does he have a permanent address, goals, or a particular destination in mind. Altucher’s philosophy is all about keeping things light, not holding on, whether it’s to a house, job, or your own emotions. He offers a negative definition of minimalism, fitting for a word that most often connotes absence. “Desire, possession, and control are not minimalism,” he writes. “Minimalism is about not judging yourself or others.”

Minimalism came up again when I was speaking with Bruno Haid, the founder of Roam, an international “co-living” start-up in which members pay $2,000 a month to live in customized residences all around the world, moving freely between them. Haid was inspired by “new minimalism,” he says. “You have less and less stuff, and if you have less and less stuff you become less attached to your own space. There are better ways to go than your suburban home with your 30-year mortgage.” For all of its inherent self-effacement, extravagant performances of minimalism are everywhere. The home guru Marie Kondo continues to urge her readers to abandon their material possessions. Another two young men, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, call themselves “The Minimalists,” and produced a new self-congratulatory documentary of the same name. They define it as “a tool that can assist you in finding freedom” or “taking control of your life.”

The minimalist movement runs from the recent vogue for tiny houses, the focus of at least two reality television shows, to the decorative trend of plain white walls, which DesignSponge puts up to risk aversion and economic pressures. Yet it’s unclear what exactly minimalism means, outside of a vague sense of self-help in the face of our capitalist overindulgence, a kind of cultural and spiritual diet. It’s even less clear that this “minimalism” is very minimalist at all, in its original artistic sense, which was nothing if not sensual. In Altucher’s case, his minimalism is enabled by technological maximalism. An iPhone isn’t just a pocketable device, after all; it runs on huge server farms, international networks, and Chinese factories. This pop philosophy of austerity is also driven by already successful men who are gleefully ditching their possessions as if to disavow the advantages by which they obtained them. It takes a lot to be minimalist.

In a First Words column, I’ll track the history and contemporary valence of “minimalism” and get at the weirdness of how, in this moment when the need for diversity is more blatant than ever, we turn toward the blank whiteness of this particular word.

Note: Best advice I have is to match the very specific format that the column goes by in the pitch and the draft. “X word used to mean Y but now it means Z.”

Published: The Oppressive Gospel of Minimalism

Rate: $1.50 per word

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