The Food Section’s pitch line rang for the first time at 12:59 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, one minute before pitching hours were scheduled to start.
I picked up but was so excited about somebody calling that I failed to bark “Raskin” into the phone, which has always struck me as the proper newsroom greeting. Instead, I defaulted to my standard “Hi, this is Hanna”—except the person on the other end couldn’t hear me. “Hello?” she said repeatedly as the connection crackled. “Hello?”
Our first pitch call felt more like the first call, period. When I made up this way to sidestep the AI slop that’s contaminating the freelance pitching process, I hadn’t intended to give up all technological tools. I immediately started to worry that the number we’d set up for prospective TFS contributors was irreparably broken.
Fortunately, another call beeped through. As it turned out, our line was just fine, as the half dozen people who dialed it discovered.
One of those people was Rachel Greenfield, who called from the Hudson Valley to pitch a story about the subject of her forthcoming book, Rose Knox: How One Woman Mixed Kitchen and Boardroom to Remold an American Business. That’s the kind of pitch which is easy to dismiss when it arrives via online form, because Knox was born in Ohio, grew up in New York, and operated a factory in New Jersey. As TFS submission guidelines say, “In terms of topics, the only real limitation is geographical. Just about every story has a food angle, but for The Food Section’s purposes, that story must unfold” within our coverage area.
Still, TFS is an enthusiastic fan of gelatin and accomplished early 20th-century businesswomen (especially those who offered paid vacation and paid sick leave to their employees.) So, instead of just saying no—which is exactly what I said when the book’s publicist, unbeknownst to Greenfield, emailed earlier this week to pitch the biography—I asked Greenfield what she’d left on the cutting room floor. Did Knox ever receive a fan letter from a woman in Georgia whose garden parties were transformed by Knox Gelatine? Was it possible that Knox spoke at a grocers’ convention in Kentucky?
“You actually were really helpful in helping me come up with the right approach,” Greenfield said when I rang her back to ask how the call went from her perspective. (Granted, this is the perspective of someone who amounts to a job applicant, so it’s possible she brushed off my request to be brutally honest.)
“You’re not a scary person,” she continued (see previous caveat). “We had a nice conversation.”
In fact, when I reached Greenfield the second time, she was busily looking for TFS story material. “You sent me back to my archives, which I’m enjoying,” she said.
Except for one caller, who seemed disinclined to adjust his pitch about greater Atlanta’s Venezuelan restaurants, that’s how all of Tuesday’s calls went. Whether the proposed topic was sorghum or Black-owned barbecue pits, every call involved brainstorming angles and approaches—in real time. (The one question I asked each writer was some variation of, “Where do I find you?” By far, my favorite answer was, “Walking to the library.”)
As long-time reporters know, that’s the way news used to get made. Nowadays, storytelling is highly transactional: Journalists come up with pitches and find publishers to buy them. But back when full-fledged media organizations were the norm, it was standard for writers to sidle up to editors’ desks just to chat about crop prices or window dressing trends or whatever else was on their minds. Some of the best stories got their start with the phrase, “I don’t know if there’s a story here, but…”
Even more than a gruff phone greeting, that’s a newsroom tradition worth reviving.
Our pitch line opens again next Tuesday. Call us at (478)339-8833 from 1 p.m.-4 p.m. Eastern.
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