How to Pitch The Cut. Advice, Ideas and Examples for Writing Essays and Articles from My NYU Editor-on-Call Event

If you want to get published there, make sure you read this for optimum intel

Read this and then submit away. Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Welcome to all my new subscribers. So great to have you here.

The other day I put a post on my Facebook page about my high school yearbook quote, and asked what other people had put for their quotes.

Mine was:

“Riders to the stars. We are sailing we are soaring. And all we can do it try.”

That was from the eponymously named song by Barry Manilow. What’s yours? Let me know in the comments.

I have to say, my yearbook quote has been the tenet by which I have lived my life and how I also inspire my students and the readers of Writing That Gets Noticed. Now, also an audiobook (the story about how that came to be is here).

“All we can do is try.”

And that is also true, when you are pitching an editor. But with editors as well as in life, information equals power. So, it makes sense to gather as much information as you can. In my free ongoing Editor-on-Call series for NYU, I speak candidly with editors of publications to get the special sauce on what they are looking for in a one hour webinar.

My recent guest was Jen Ortiz, the Deputy Editor of the Cut, and she also spoke to my class at NYU for the High School Academy journalism course I teach. Here is a synopsis of some of the most salient points from our conversation about how to break through and make The Cut.

Then, after the paywall, there is an opportunity to have a pitch or first part of an essay edited by me, and some bonus clips from my most informative guests from Freelance Writing Direct, including my recent episode with Jeannine Ouellette of Writing In The Dark, who in episode #103 Launching into New Dimensions with Embodied Writing, spoke about writing about difficult subjects, embodied writing, the adult vs. the child narrator, building doorways into your writing and more.

Back to The Cut.

The publication’s mission

The audience skews women and fems, but does not skew towards a specific age group. Some of those stories are particular to Internet culture (aka what people are talking about on TikTok), and TikTok now is more mainstream, so it includes a lot of different age groups. The key is for the content to provide conversation starters for as many people as they can

The categories for coverage

The verticals are Style, Power, Culture and Self. The goal for each is to lead and start new obsessive conversations on the tip of something happening in the culture and the tone is conversational (think water cooler).

Jen’s Role as Deputy Editor

She works across all the pub’s verticals, working with all the senior editors who lead the sections. She also assigns and edits and looks at pitches regularly, and works on strategy, whether traffic, SEO or special projects and events, and interacts closely with the executive editor and editor-in-chief.

Estelle’s Edge: It’s worth it to go to the site, go in the search box, Google, search to see what has been covered and how it's been covered, so that when you pitch you're not duplicating something that is very similar.

What stories work best?

Anything that is happening now in the culture that you can equate to a feature, long reported essay, or personal essay may work well. She also said they do trend pieces that explain why a trend is interesting and why are people doing it, watching it, making it happen. How does it add to or start a conversation? Friendship is always interesting to the reader and so is navigating family relationships, and romantic relationships, as is body modification and plastic surgery. The writer needs to keep in mind the stories that work best are really the stories where the writer has something to say. It is not necessary to have a news peg, but a point of view is essential.

And for personal essays, Jen suggested it cover two parts: what happened to you, and what was the lesson learned, or the transformation that took place because of it. That’s what will hold a reader’s attention.

For a reported story, Jen suggests doing preliminary reporting, to show the kinds of reporting chops the writer is bringing to the story. Access to experts or people to talk to is important, particularly if the piece is reported.

Estelle’s Edge: I call it the credibility factor. You are selling the editor on you, especially if you haven't worked with them before. So showing you know several viable experts for your story, and have spoken with them, ups your credibility in the editor’s eyes.

How to pitch The Cut

Jen says to provide them with everything that they need, or that you need to sell the story. So if you've done preliminary reporting, show that, especially if you're pitching something that is naming or or nodding at a trend in some way, to confirm that your your hunch is not just a hunch but that there might be a subculture forming there. She also says to pitch perhaps two ideas, tops.

You should be pitching in the voice that you want to write in for The Cut.

Estelle’s Edge: One of the things that I say in WRITING THAT GET NOTICED (now also an audiobook) is if the editor doesn’t know you or your voice to write to the reader in your pitch. You can give a little bit of the pitch, and then you can maybe engage, even give the 1st part or the 1st paragraph, just so they could see your voice and get excited by it.

Must Read

Here is Living With My Husband’s Dead Wife, a piece I really enjoyed reading on The Cut by Amy Paturel and here is a compelling and vulnerable new one by Tara Ellison My Mother’s Envy Toward Me Has Survived Her Dementia.

Pieces that Jen said were super successful are My Mom Has No Friends, Monjouro and Me, and the followup: So Was Body Positivity ‘All a Big Lie’? , A World Without Men (The Women of South Korea’s 4B Movement), and Body Horror (on TikTok Plastic Surgeon Dr. Roxy).

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Pitch email and a pitching document

Pitch email is cutsubmissions@nymag.com and this is the link to the pitch document with rates and all other important information.

Let me know if you have success.

On the Horizon

Don’t miss this webinar I’m doing for CRAFTS TALKS.

In this session, Estelle Erasmus, a former magazine editor-in-chief of five national consumer publications, who wrote newsstand cover lines for a living, will teach you the mechanics of constructing titles that embody the spirit and tone of your piece. Using examples from herself and her students, she will workshop titles, from initial idea to polished attention-getter, and explain how they work and why. She will also offer a proven 10-step method to maximize active verbs, display unusual words, alliteration, evoke emotion, and excavate from your essays and articles exactly what will make your title sing — and give editors that “read me!” zing. 

Sign up here. And for even more information and advice check out my latest piece in Brevity A Good Title Is Vital: Getting the Hang of Writing Headlines

I hope you got your ticket to the ASJA conference. It has over 100 fabulous speakers, and I will be the closing session of the ASJA virtual conference on September 26th with a fireside chat with my good friend and renowned memoirist Abigail Thomas. Read 8 Things You Didn’t Know about Abigail Thomas and Estelle Erasmus where we talk tarot, smells, seeing sea turtles hatch, drinking Rosé at 7 am, going through the slush pile at Viking Publishing and more and sign up for the conference. There is still time.

I’m on Leaving Your Mark, Aliza Licht’s fabulous podcast talking about getting your writing noticed, finding your voice, pitching editors and more. Listen here and find takeaways on her LinkedIn page.

SPECIAL BONUS CLIP (A Preview of What you Can get as a Paid Subscriber)

My paid subscribers get special bonus clips from my podcast. For example, this is one from my episode with Jane Friedman which is new on the podcast. Paid subscribers get these clips regularly from my episodes.

And there’s more…