SO YOU WANT TO WRITE FOR THE SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
Welcome!
The South Side Weekly is a nonprofit newsroom that covers arts, culture, and politics on the South Side of Chicago, with a circulation of around 10,000 print copies. We publish coverage of local artists and arts events, as well as reporting in the public interest on subjects such as education, development, policing, and food; we also publish personal essays, poetry, and visual art.
Originally started as an alternative student newspaper at the University of Chicago, the Weekly became independent of the University in 2013. Our office is now located at the Experimental Station, in the Woodlawn neighborhood.
The Weekly is written, produced, and edited by a staff of almost all volunteers. We seek and publish contributions from writers and artists across the city.
1. Learn how to craft your own pitch
There’s no one formula for a good Weekly pitch, but in general, you can consider the following “checklist” when coming up with a pitch.
Is your pitch...
Relevant? Since we are the South Side Weekly, your pitch should be somehow about or related to life on the South Side of Chicago, which we roughly define as south of Roosevelt Rd. (Talk to us if you are unsure about boundaries—we do occasionally cover the West Side and some things elsewhere in the city or state, if they are relevant to a South Side audience.) This includes stories about people who are from or who live on the South Side (for example, covering work by a musician or author from the South Side). This often means looking for local stories that aren’t covered by other publications. It’s also possible to take national, state, or citywide news and find an angle that’s relevant to the South Side. For example, a story about how the Trump presidency is affecting South Side immigrants, or how a state education bill will affect South Side schools or students.
Newsworthy? In general, there should be a reason that you are pitching this story now. If there’s a news item that happened a year ago, we shouldn’t cover it unless there has been more related news recently. Just because something exists doesn’t always mean that you should write a story about it, unless there’s something newsworthy to cover. However, it’s usually easy to find a newsworthy angle. For example, if you find out about a cool arts center that’s been around for a while, you shouldn’t just pitch a story about the center itself. But you can call them up and find out about what new exhibits or programs they have going on, and frame the story around that.
Unique? The pitch shouldn’t be a repeat of a story that another publication has already covered in-depth. If another publication has already written about it, your pitch should find a unique way to approach the topic that adds to what have already been done and asks different questions than the original article. For example, if a daily news outlet, like the Sun-Times, Tribune, or Block Club, publishes a quick news update on planned changes to a bus line, you could pitch a story about how it will affect residents in a certain neighborhood. If another publication briefly mentions an artist’s work in an article, you could pitch an in-depth interview with the artist. In addition, your pitch shouldn’t be something the Weekly has already covered in the same way. You can search through our website to see if there have already been articles about the topic.
We try to have a pitch meeting once a month on a Monday night to discuss and workshop pitch ideas. (Currently held via Zoom.) Pitches should be newsworthy and relevant to the South Side, and there should be an opportunity for the Weekly to take a fresh angle that hasn’t been written about by other publications. As we are a biweekly paper, we are less interested in “breaking news” and more interested in second-day analysis and longform features.
2. Submit a new pitch
A good pitch should set up an issue or other story idea, explain why it’s compelling to cover, provide basic information about the background of the issue, and suggest some reporting avenues of inquiry and research. It shouldn’t be overly complicated or long, and should leave the writer and editor who are eventually assigned to the story room to be creative in how they go about tackling the pitch. Some background research or knowledge will likely be required to write the pitch, but it shouldn’t be so involved that you feel you can write the story with the information you’ve obtained for it—there should still be a lot to report out that we learn in the process
FOR EXAMPLE:
A handful of prominent Black politicians and activists are pushing for local reparations conversations and ordinances. Chicago has a rich history here—there’s the Burge reparations project and Chicago City Council was one of the first legislative bodies to pass an ordinance around this, in 2000—and it seems like momentum is picking up. 6th Ward Alderman Roderick Sawyer, head of the City Council’s Committee on Health and Human Relations, is holding a hearing in coming weeks about reparations and has a bill to create a commission to study the issue, and former mayoral and current Senate candidate Willie Wilson has been pushing that bill as well. West Side state rep and former mayoral candidate La Shawn Ford has also recently been pushing the legislature on this. Profile all of these efforts (and others not discussed in this pitch), attend public hearings on the topic, interview those involved, and tell us exactly where these efforts are going.
If you’d like to see a story written, but aren’t interested in writing it yourself, you can use the submit a pitch form and select “I would like someone else to write this" story. from the dropdown menu.
3. Ten Rules of South Side Weekly Reporting
Identify yourself as a journalist.
Get the facts: who, what, when, where
...why, how, or what about it?
Speak with sources who have diverse perspectives on an issue
Record audio, keep notes, and take lots of pictures
Ask questions that are stupid, smart, & challenging
Follow the money
Use documents of all kinds
As you begin to write, re-report for accuracy, precision, and context.
Once you have done your groundwork, embrace the fact that you are writing a story and report accordingly.
4. Ten Rules of South Side Weekly Writing
Identify yourself as a journalist.
Get the facts: who, what, when, where
...why, how, or what about it?
Speak with sources who have diverse perspectives on an issue
Record audio, keep notes, and take lots of pictures
Ask questions that are stupid, smart, & challenging
Follow the money
Use documents of all kinds
As you begin to write, re-report for accuracy, precision, and context.
Once you have done your groundwork, embrace the fact that you are writing a story and report accordingly.
5. Join the Weekly’s Slack channel
The Weekly’s editing process takes place via Slack and Google Drive. We use the #production-night channel for all communication around edits. If you have not been added already, you can set up an account and join our channel with this link.
Below is a screenshot of a typical Slack exchange:
When a story is ready for seconds or thirds edits, the primary editor with send a message to the channel by using “@channel” and pasting the Google Drive link to the story. Whoever is available and interested will claim the assignment by responding in the thread.
For more information about how to use Slack, review our Slack guide.