How to Pitch Stories for SCA Publications
The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) call for stories is inspired by “How to Pitch Stories to Eater,” an honest and thoughtful guide for freelancers hoping to work with their publication.
The SCA is a global organization dedicated to engaging, inspiring, and expanding a sustainable global specialty coffee community through leadership in research, education, and events. To deliver this vision, the SCA produces a number of print and digital publications that report on, tell stories about, and critically examine the world of specialty coffee. We are actively seeking pitches from journalists, writers, academics, and other contributors of all backgrounds, especially those whose voices are often underrepresented in our industry. Specialty coffee offers a dynamic and powerful lens for storytelling, and we particularly enjoy hearing from writers whose interests, experiences, and areas of expertise originate outside of the specialty coffee world.
All accepted stories go through a collaborative editorial process.
What We’re Looking For
We encourage anyone interested in working with the SCA to spend some time exploring our previously published work in order to familiarize themselves with the type of stories we usually run, but we’re also open to exploring new types of insightful storytelling. Our aim is to provide thoughtful reported stories, insightful personal narratives, and plain-language coverage of coffee research that shine a light on the specialty coffee community or its work in some way.
We also recommend digging into our editorial guidelines and our style guide—they provide important insight into how we evaluate pitches when they arrive to editor@sca.coffee.
How to Pitch Stories
First and foremost, we really do want you to pitch us a story rather than submit a finished piece—a collaborative approach is very important to us.
When you do pitch, please send a clear, concise summary of the topic you’d like to write about, the point of view from which you’d address it, and your main point/argument. It’s also helpful to include a basic outline of the piece (the anticipated story structure). When you pitch, we recommend that you share it in the same writing style and tone you’d use for your piece—it helps us to better understand your voice and perspective.
Please also include a short explanation of who you are and why you’re qualified to cover this story. If you’ve written other features or have been published before, please send us some links! But if you haven’t, that’s ok, too: It’s not a prerequisite.
Depending on the length, depth, and topic of your proposed story, it may fall into one of a few publications and feature types. If you think your piece would work for one or more of these (and it’s ok if it doesn’t!), please let us know when you submit your pitch to editor@sca.coffee.