Give your college or university’s monthly, bimonthly or quarterly alumni book more than a passing glance, and you might be surprised by the quality of the writing and graphics that go into the average alumni publication.
Many of them are, in fact, good markets for freelancers to pitch a wide array of stories, from the obvious — a profile of an alumnus who won the Nobel Prize, formed a popular band or airlifted livestock out of a natural disaster — to the less obvious: an investigative article about the commercialization of technology that sprang from research that took place at a university, for example, or a roundup of what graduates of a given law school are doing for a living outside the legal profession.
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Alumni magazines are “another way colleges reach out during difficult times,” says Lisa Brownell, editor of CC: Magazine, the quarterly publication of Connecticut College, New London, Conn. She contends the print alumni magazine field is alive and well. “Our surveys and word-of-mouth tell us that most alumni still want a hard-copy version,” even recent graduates, a certain New York Times article notwithstanding.
“What we are trying to do is produce a magazine that comes off as much as possible with the look and feel of a popular commercial magazine,” says Jared Simpson, associate director of communications at the University of California Berkeley School of Law and editor of the school’s alumni magazine, Transcript, which is mailed twice a year to 17,000 homes. “We want stories that are topical and that will ultimately tout the school and its excellence.”
“Our competition is not Texas A&M’s magazine,” says Avrel Seale, editor of the bimonthly Alcalde at the University of Texas. “It’s Sports Illustrated and Time and Popular Mechanics. That’s who we are competing with for people’s attention.” Indeed, Seale views Alcalde as “a general interest magazine that happens to be located at UT.”
As with any other magazine you might wish to write for, it’s important to tailor your pitch to the publication. In part, that means getting your hands on a bunch of back issues and perusing them to get a flavor for the voice of the publication and the kinds of stories it runs. Even though alumni magazines are not on the newsstand, this isn’t as hard as it sounds. Ask your friends for back issues of their schools’ magazines you can pore over, reading mastheads (to get a sense of how many stories in a given issue are written in-house or by freelancers) and assessing whether the publication tends to assign short, front-of-book pieces or longer, more scholarly articles to non-staff writers. And, do your research as best you can to avoid duplication: “We get a lot of pitches on people who we have already [covered] or stories we have already done,” says Scott Hauser, editor of the University of Rochester’s Rochester Review since 2001.
When it comes to writing for alumni magazines, most of the old saws apply: define clearly and up front why your idea works for the magazine now, proofread your pitch before sending, and don’t misspell the editor’s name. But there are some subtle differences of which you’ll want to take heed as you crack this potential market.
Start with your own school. The editors interviewed for this piece agreed that a solid pitch from an alumnus of their school would have an edge over an equally good pitch from someone who had not attended the school. Brownell likes a mix of alums and non-alums in each issue’s contributors’ column. (Bonus: you probably have at least a couple of these lying around your house.)
Get familiar with the mag. Simpson says he has never been pitched, “but I certainly wouldn’t close the door on one.” Just the same, a pitch that worked “would have to be from someone who really understands what the magazine is about.”
Simpson notes he has to fill a front-of-book section in each issue of Transcript with 100- to 450-words newsy items; he also has room for 3,000-word packages completed with multiple sidebars. He recently ran a piece about the ethics of stem cell research and another about an alumnus’ father who started a fund to help pay for Latino students’ law school expenses. “I also like stories that are fun, a little on the quirky side,” he says.
Other editors are used to fielding a steady stream of pitches. Hauser, for one, receives pitches on a regular basis, and estimates that a quarter of them turn into actual stories.
Seale, too, gets multiple pitches a week. “Almost all of my freelancers I hire based upon a specific pitch,” he says. Profiles of notable alums who live far from Austin are a case in point; from Seale’s point of view, it makes more sense to bring in a freelancer who also happens to live in Seattle to bang out an 800-word piece about an alumna doing fascinating post-graduate stuff in the Pacific Northwest.
Have an actual idea. Don’t just grub for an assignment — “Got anything you need tackled?” — because you happen to have gone to the school you’re approaching. And go easy on the PR, too: “It’s really easy to spot someone who is trying to promote their company,” says Seale. “When that happens, I say ‘thanks very much’ and route them to the class notes section” — the portion in the back of most alumni magazines where classmates write in news of weddings, births, companies launched, etc.
Play to your strengths. If you write about health for other clients, say so when you pitch a health-related story to a medical school’s alumni publication. “I am always looking for a good science writer who can talk to our researchers and clinicians about what they do and then translate that into good lay journalism,” says Hauser.
Tell ’em you’ll shoot it yourself. Not all alumni magazines have the budget to hire a photographer to take every profilee’s picture. Plus, as digital camera technology has improved, the images even an amateur can generate have improved substantially even over the last couple of years. “The ideal writer would be someone who says, ‘I will also take the photo, and it will be a good one,'” says Brownell. “In my experience, the two are mutually exclusive.”
Suggest hooks to new media. Brownell appreciates it when a writer pitches a story with built-in components that will work on the magazine’s Web site. “We’re definitely trying to get more out of our freelance budget, so writers should be open to things other than a straight profile,” she says. For example, a recent profile of a tuba-playing professor in CC: Magazine included a clip of him playing the tuba that was made available as a complementary online exclusive.
Don’t get bent about sources reading your piece first. It’s not something asked by every alumni magazine editor, but it shouldn’t surprise you if it’s something yours wants. Most of these publications, after all, must straddle a line between solid journalism and the marketing of the college or university that publishes them.
“By and large, most of the people [we feature] see the story in some form before it appears,” says Hauser. Still, it’s one thing for the subject to suggest a fix for a factual error you inadvertently introduced; it’s another thing when they want to rewrite the piece from scratch. Talk with your editor if you’re getting what you believe are inordinate demands from the source for content changes.
Get in the habit of asking subjects of any story you are writing where they went to college. You may be able to spin a second profile for an alumni magazine out of an assignment you already have for another publication.
Pay rate: Varies. Some magazines offer a flat fee of $100 regardless of article length; others pay by the word, from $0.50 to $1.25.
Amy Rogers Nazarov is a D.C.-based freelancer covering food, museums, technology and other topics. View her clips from Cooking Light, Adoptive
Families and other publications at WordKitchen.net.
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