Update: Get paid what you're worth
And fantastic story pitching insights from bestselling authors Michael Lewis and Susan Orlean.
Hi storytellers — I made a mistake in this issue of the newsletter and want to correct it. AIR - The Association of Independents in Radio recently released its updated 2025 rate guide for freelancers, which is an insanely valuable tool for getting paid what you’re worth. I mistakenly said the guide is behind a paywall for AIR members only. It’s not. It is available to the public. Read on for more information.
Sound Judgment Kudos
My first Sound Judgment Kudo goes to Erin McGregor, Mia Lobel, Will Coley, Rob Byers and the AIR staff and board for their hard work updating the 2025 AIR Rate Guide, released February 19. Last updated in 2021, the guide is a data-driven resource for freelancers and hiring managers alike. Find fresh data on industry pay featuring the latest freelance rates for producers, showrunners, sound designers, fact-checkers, and researchers. The guide also includes a reimagined reference tool designed to help freelancers and hiring organizations align on experience levels and roles.
The new guide is drawn from extensive survey data and interviews with freelancers and industry employers. It reveals what professionals are actually paid.
My second Sound Judgment Kudo goes to journalist Wudan Yan for building just what’s needed now, a professional fact-checking agency. The agency, Factual, launched in October 2024. It’s already so busy that Yan is on the hunt for more professional, experienced fact checkers. She is meticulous about the quality of Factual’s work. Thus, “It's about as challenging to get accepted into Factual as it is to get into, like, a University of California school as an out-of-state student,” she says. See if you can pass her rigorous standards! Apply to become a Factual fact checker here.
Our third Sound Judgment Kudo goes to the Knight Foundation for increasing its support for nonprofit local news organizations. In 2019, it invested $20 million into the then-new American Journalism Project (AJP), which provides venture philanthropy for nonprofit local news, Nieman Lab reports. Now, Knight is investing another $25 million. Along with providing growth capital and operational support to some 60 journalism organizations, AJP will launch the Knight Resiliency Lab. The Lab is intended to “strengthen the financial and operational resilience of nonprofit newsrooms,” according to the AJP announcement.
Pitch better, Part 1: Insights from Michael Lewis, Susan Orlean, and a naked documentarian
Will Coley sits in the front row, waiting for the headliner to appear. It is a weekend in New York City. The show is sold out. There’s nothing unusual going on — just a couple of friends going to a comedy club for the evening.
Except that Will is naked.
That is how the Articles of Interest episode, “Nudity,” begins. His friend is Avery Trufelman, host of of the podcast, and this is their story.
How it went from a little idea in his head to where it wound up — the two desperately trying not to allow even their knees to touch now that there’s no denim protecting them — can help us understand the mysteries of story pitching.
Welcome to Part 1 of the Sound Judgment “Pitch Better” series.
I love the art of the pitch.
But we can’t talk about pitching without starting with story mining, because all great pitches come from that moment of curiosity, that sudden sense that says, “Wow. Maybe this is a story.”
It’s an age-old question: Where do ideas come from? No matter how long we’ve been journalists, authors, or other creators, some of us always ask: “Where did you get that idea?” And more broadly, “Where do you get your ideas?”
I am thinking about these questions as I run around the track at our local Y and listen to Guy Raz (The Great Creators) interview bestselling author Michael Lewis. Lewis has written more than 20 books, including The Big Short, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side. He’s known for painting vivid portraits of iconic characters and pulling readers along on an unexpected journey with them.
Raz wants to know how Lewis finds his characters. He asks, “How many [characters] do you fall in love with…and not end up producing a book around?”
I lose count of my laps around the track as I listen to Lewis’ answer. He says,
“[Meeting characters] happens. What happens more often is…I’m surfing the world for ideas all the time. I mean, every moment of my existence. I'm walking around, meeting people and I'm not thinking, “Oh, I'm looking for a book.” It's more that I listen! So over and over, I meet people, I think, “Oh, that could be interesting.”
He’s surfing the world for ideas all the time. Every moment of his existence.
In my opinion, it’s what we should be doing. In Lewis’ process, new ideas aren’t so much generated as they are discovered.
You don’t want to skip listening to this audio clip from The Great Creators.
And then there is equally prolific author (The Orchid Thief, The Library Book) and New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean, discussing travel and how she finds stories with Atlas Obscura’s Dylan Thuras. Orlean’s process is even more overtly one of discovery — because it starts with getting lost. On purpose.
“I feel like I can't see things if I'm prepared, because if I'm prepared, then what I'm looking for is just, it's a confirmation bias. I'm just looking for the things that I was told I should look for,” she says. “I would rather waste a certain amount of time missing the highlights in exchange for just truly being somewhere new and being surprised by it and being a little lost.”
She describes reporting a feature about Midland, Texas. Running for president, George W. Bush had said, “if you want to know who I am, you need to know Midland, because I am Midland, Texas.” So Orlean told her New Yorker editors, “I want to go to Midland.”
But she didn’t prepare for her trip. In fact, she tells Thuras, she avoided preparing. Here’s why:
“I felt like I need to be like the person landing behind the enemy lines in the middle of the war, and I've got to find the hostels and the friendlies and claw my way to your understanding. And I had a fantastic trip.
In the beginning, I thought, What the hell am I doing? And I just found a coffee shop, and it turned out to be a cool coffee shop. And at some point a guy was sitting there, and we started chatting, and he said to me, ‘Oh, well, I'll show you Midland. I've lived here my whole life, and I kind of know the way it works.’ And off we went. And then I stopped in a realtor's open house and started chatting with the realtor to say, ‘What's selling? What's not selling? What are people looking for in Midland, Texas?’ So I had to really see it and really be there and not say, ‘Oh, well, I think you're supposed to go to the Midland Museum and the Midland blah blah.’ My purpose was to try to describe the character of the city.”
Listen to this Atlas Obscura clip.
(By the way, Dylan Thuras is brilliant in his own right. For my take on how hostiness has helped Atlas Obscura stand the test of time, see “How to turn a stranger into a fan.” Scroll down to the “Try this in your studio” column.)
There is a lot of nuance about the story mining process, and about creativity itself, in the tale Susan Orlean recounts.
Get lost on purpose, often.
When we wander regularly, as Susan Orlean suggests, we increase our opportunities to discover the unknown and to see the known with new eyes. (And we don’t actually have to fly anywhere to do it. For more on how, learn Julia Cameron’s conception of “the artist date” in her classic book, The Artist’s Way.)You interpret the world differently than anyone else.
If you simply look for stories where others point you, all you’ll find is confirmation bias. You won’t find any surprises. You certainly won’t see and interpret anything through your own unique perspective. Don’t allow others to dictate your findings by going only where you’re pointed. Trust your own curiosity to take you to new places and ideas.
Remote work helps us finish jobs. But it’s not where we should start.
Our reliance on screens isn’t just isolating us, it’s damaging our creative abilities to discover untold stories. To mine for new and noteworthy stories, we have to be on the ground, acting as open-minded witnesses to what’s happening in the world. We need to get in the habit of asking strangers to tell us about their lives.
Be wide-eyed in the world
I think of what both Lewis and Orlean practice as story mining by walking around.
Despite what Lewis says, it’s not exactly accidental: Consistently finding new and interesting story ideas is the payoff for living a life led by constant curiosity.
Great story ideas are not one-offs. We can get better and better at finding and pitching stories when we do a few things:
a) Expand our field of inquiry
b) Become more inventive about how we frame stories (often by collaborating), and
c) Trust your own taste. Trust that what you’re interested in is worthy of exploration.
How to expand your field of inquiry
To get one fantastic story idea, we must look for them, as Michael Lewis says, all the time. It should be second nature.
Apart from seeking out more person-to-person contacts, how else can you intentionally expand your field of inquiry?
Even if you work on your own, assign yourself a beat or two. Choose subjects you’re passionate about. Create Google news alerts on these subjects, keeping them narrow enough to return usable results.
From the results, create a source list. Do what new reporters do in their first weeks: Call people before you’re seeking a quote and simply ask them what they’re working on. What’s interesting or challenging to them right now? Who else should you speak with? When you find a friendly or particularly interesting source, call them regularly just to check in (put reminders on your calendar). Not only will you develop relationships this way, you’re almost certain to discover interesting stories to pursue. Later, they’re likely to call you with story tips.
We can also expand our fields of inquiry by consuming information that we normally don’t — newsletters, scientific reports, government documents, lawsuits, tiny local, ethnic, or religious newspapers — through which we’ll learn what’s going on on the ground before others have discovered it. One small statistic buried in a routine government report can be the germ of a feature story or a whole podcast series. (See “Learn from the best” below for still-accessible treasure troves of data.)
If you, like me, think local news is crucial and generally needs improvement (I acknowledge the enormous resource challenges), get out into your community when you’re not on deadline. Get to know people. Learn what’s on their minds. Ask for the stories that shaped their world views. Ask what happened.
My father was a photographer before photography was digital. He frequently said you needed to shoot 36 photos — the number of frames on a roll of film — to get one good one. And if you got one good one, that was a win.
This is, in fact, what Michael Lewis is doing.
Try a new frame, or learning from exposure
But expanding our fields of inquiry and purposely getting lost within them, as Susan Orlean might say, is just the first step.
The second is to reexamine the frame through which we’re seeing a potential story. Sometimes all it takes to turn a mediocre idea into a great one, and a rejection into an acceptance, is to change the frame.
Which brings me back to audio journalist Will Coley.
Let’s find out why he’s sitting in the front row of a packed comedy club with no clothes on, embarrassed but deliberately NOT squirming.
Will is a curious, inventive and skilled journalist. His work has appeared on NPR News, 99% Invisible, and the BBC World Service, among others. He’s an experienced story miner who takes his own personal interests seriously.
So when he got interested in the concept of social nudity, he came by it naturally — he had taken a naked yoga class and knew there was quite a bit of interest in it. Wondering more broadly what it is that prompts people to engage in non-sexual, community-oriented “social nudity” — naked yoga, nude beaches, naked Broadway theater and Korean spas, for instance — he conceived of a series of vignettes, episodes that would hop-skotch from one kind of activity to another. The stories would pop: Imagine the scene in which Will interviews people who walk down the streets of New York with nothing on but body paint for the city’s “Naked Body Painting Day.”
He pitched his project to Transom, Radiolab, and a few others.
It was enticing, right?
Wrong.
It was missing a key element.
Editors kept telling Will, “‘Well, you know, what do we learn? What is the surprise coming out of this?’” he says. “It was suggested to me at some point that I should find someone who experienced [social nudity] for the first time. And I was like, ‘How am I going to do that?’”
He almost gave up. But then he turned the idea sideways. One day it occurred to him that Articles of Interest, a popular podcast about clothes, might be interested in a story about why we even wear them in the first place. He crafted a pitch and sent it to host and producer Avery Trufelman.
The good news? She wrote back immediately. The bad news? Like the other editors, she wasn’t interested in his pitch — not exactly. But she would be interested in a piece about the history of nudity. Would he be up for that?
Absolutely.
Then she proposed a visit to a naked comedy show. Sure, he said. I’m game.
“But I did not read the fine print,” he says. “I thought, okay, the comedians are gonna be naked. This will be interesting. But then we get there, and I find out the first two rows of the audiences are to be naked.”
Avery had purchased tickets in the second row.
Listen to a clip from Will Coley’s hilarious and insightful Articles of Interest story, “Nudity.”
Later, Will would realize that he’d stumbled on the surprise the story needed. He had, in fact, acted on the advice he’d been given: Find someone experiencing social nudity for the first time.
“I just didn't think it was going to be me,” he says.
Will’s lesson: If you know in your gut there’s a story there, don’t abandon a rejected pitch.
Change the frame. Find the surprise. Sell the story.
Try this in your studio: Tell the story through someone else’s eyes
If you’re interested in a topic but can’t find a fresh angle, you may find it helpful to brainstorm on perspective taking. Who is affected by the issue or question you’re investigating? The experiences, stories and surprises differ, often dramatically, depending on who is telling the story. Here’s a mindmap (scroll down to “Try This in Your Studio”) that will help you find many more doorways into your story than you might have imagined. Try it with almost any story idea and see what happens.
🏆 Learn from the best
Attend: The IIJ 2025 Freelance Journalism Conference Thursday (today) and Friday, February 28 and 29, online. The best deal in town: At only $79, this online conference is aptly named for the uncertain times we’re in: “Beyond Surviving: a Conference Taking Big Swings and Building Resilience in Tough Times.” Journalist Celeste Headlee keynotes. Highlights of the Institute for Independent Journalists’ conference include insights into pitching from editors at numerous national magazines and other outlets, insider tips on winning fellowships and grants, and a session on how to thrive in today’s audio marketplace.
Seek and you shall find: The missing data: Federal sources of information are under siege, with data disappearing off of federal websites and organizations. Scientific and watchdog groups have been scrambling to preserve huge federal datasets. The Journalist’s Resource has compiled an invaluable running list of non-government websites that are maintaining health data (and a great deal of other data as well). Alice Freelacker, writing in The Open Notebook, notes “journalists aren’t widely utilizing the vast troves of freely accessible data that researchers and organizations share online.” Her useful instructions for finding “open data” to support science reporting are equally applicable to reporters covering other beats. And learn from the Freedom of the Press Foundation how you can help preserve valuable government data.
Know of other important datasets reporters can access? Please share them in the comments!
My personal Sound Judgment
I’m thrilled to be holding a workshop for UC Berkeley journalism fellows this week on “How to interview reluctant sources,” drawn from my two-part Sound Judgment series on the same topic. Want to hold a Sound Judgment workshop for your students or your team? Reach out.
As always, it is a joy to be with you.
Elaine
Epilogue
“The only true voyage of discovery … would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds.”
— Marcel Proust