Real life journalism
Natasha tells a real life story
The tales of everyday people fill the pages of publications from broadsheets and Sunday supplements to women’s weeklies. Often told in the first person, and sometimes in the most clichéd prose possible, such features can prove lucrative for the journalists who write them - if only they know where to find the stories, and how to pitch them appropriately. Natasha Courtenay-Smith, founder of press and publicity agency www.talktothepress.co.uk, explains.
As a journalist who deals in real life stories, my time is spent telling the stories of ordinary people who just want the world to know about the interesting, inspiring or amusing things that have happened to them. Sometimes these people are caught up in the news events of the moment and feel they have no choice but to speak out, on other occasions, they simply want to tell the world how they lost 10 stone, or pay tribute to a lost loved one.
I’ve written about everything from plastic surgery disasters to the impact serious crimes can have on a family, and everything in between. There is no such thing as a typical day for me - one moment, I might be interviewing the man who used to cut the Beatles’ hair, and the next I could be writing about a woman who survived a tsunami. And I’m constantly on the look out for the next person with a brilliant story to tell, or thinking of what sort of story I would like to find.
Find candidates for real life stories
At the start of my journalism career over 10 years ago, I wrote about fitness and health. But when I started working at the Daily Mail in 2001, I began writing features on a far broader range of topics. I spent a lot of my time travelling around the country to interview people with incredible stories to tell. Sometimes, I would find myself standing on the front step of someone who had just suffered a terrible tragedy, which had come to the public’s attention, asking them if they wanted to do an interview for the newspaper.
Although these people often had the best stories, and often the people were more than happy to talk, it was the part of my job I disliked most. It felt intrusive and I was never comfortable with it.
In 2005, I went freelance, and continued writing features for the Daily Mail, but also started contributing stories to a range of publications. By now, I was specialising in ‘real life’ journalism, and I’d usually find case studies through charities or support groups. For instance, I would think to myself ‘Perhaps it would make an interesting piece to interview a man who has experienced breast cancer’ and I’d find him via a breast cancer charity.
Think of journalism as a business
I was constantly thinking up ideas, but every so often, I would get a call from the friends of people I had interviewed in the past. They had heard that I helped ordinary people tell their stories to a wider audience and wanted me to do the same for them. I was happy to help, and obviously, them coming to me with their own good story made my life simpler as a journalist too.
At the end of 2007, with the help of Google, I realised in fact that there were thousands of people interested in selling their stories to the media (Google figures show over 5,000 people type in the words like ‘sell my story’ or ‘talk to the press’ each month). Clearly, many of them would need advice, and as a freelance journalist, I needed their stories!
I decided to set up a website, Talk to the Press (www.talktothepress.co.uk) which would provide a way for these people to contact me with their stories. I would act as their media agent, offering advice on selling their story and securing them a deal, and also their own personal journalist, writing their story and reading it back to them to ensure they were happy with it prior to publication.
Two years on, I have two members of staff, and we have sold more than 300 stories to women’s magazines and national newspapers. We work for all the major publications, such as the Daily Mail, The Sun, The News of the World, the Sunday Mirror, Marie Claire, Glamour and across the board of women’s weeklies. I also recently won the Women in Business category of the Startups Awards, a national business award which recognises new business in the UK.
Start a bidding war
If you want to make money from real life journalism, the key is to not have loyalty to any one publication. This was my mistake as a freelance journalist - showing complete loyalty to the Daily Mail, even when they turned an idea down! Back then, I would shelve it and think up another idea - now I simply sell it to someone else.
Now, when we have a story, we put it out to all commissioning editors at the same time. Our aim is simply to get a bidding war going - to force what would otherwise be a standard offer for a story upwards but getting rival publications interested in it.
Ultimately, if you’ve been a magazine’s most loyal writer and you suddenly tell them their rival publication is interested too, they will be irritated - at first. But at the same time, commissioning editors expect to bid, and all agencies work - and boost revenue - by starting bidding wars for stories. They will know you’re simply being business-minded about things.
Once we have a deal, we then split the revenue between ourselves - and the case study - who we always pay for stories. Thanks to bidding wars, case studies of ours have come away with fees of thousands of pounds.
Get second selling
The other thing to consider is you are freelance is selling your article as many times as possible. Obviously, you can’t sell a piece to the Daily Mail one day and the Daily Mirror the next. But thinking in broader categories, you can sell it to a national newspaper, a women’s weekly magazine, a women’s monthly and also to a television programme such as GMTV or This Morning.
Our ideal route for a story to take is into a newspaper. We then use the published piece to get a bidding war going amongst the women’s magazines (surprisingly, seeing it in a newspaper only piques their interest) and a television programme. Once the piece has appeared in a women’s weekly, we take it to a glossy magazine. This way, both ourselves and the person telling the story receive multiple fees over a period of months, rather than a single one off fee.
Be flexible enough to change your style
Some agencies make their living simply selling numbers and brief synopsis of their stories to the publication that wants to run it. The publication then commissions a freelance to write the copy, or gets an in-house writer to do it.
Although that’s clearly the easiest way to make money, at present, my agency always writes the copy too. The bottom line is I consider myself a writer, not a hard-nosed business woman, and I want us to write all our articles. As such, we can be writing one day for the Daily Mail, and the next for Love it! - publications with incredibly different styles.
The key to this is simple - read whatever publication you’re writing for - properly and to mimic their style as much as possible. If they use speech within the speech (ie, ‘I couldn’t believe this drunk driver was swerving towards me. “Move out the way!” Dad screamed as the car mounted the pavement….) then file your copy with speech within the speech. Repeat what you see in the publication you’re writing for, even if you don’t think the finished article will end up a journalistic masterpiece. They are your customer.
The best part of my job is hearing the people I have interviewed saying they love the finished article. Some of the people I interview have lived through incredibly painful experiences and are glad that finally, they have been able to tell their side of the story. It’s great to know you’ve helped someone be heard.
For more about Natasha and selling stories to the press, log on to www.talktothepress.co.uk
