Career Clinic: How To Pitch A Story Or Your CV To Stellar

We understand why you’d want to work with us: we’re amazing. Okay, all joking aside, on a weekly basis, we get a lot of emails requesting an internship, pitching features or looking for a job. The first thing to note is that we’ve very few openings for most of those things, so your pitch needs to be finely honed to make it past the second stage: being considered if and when we do.

Most of the pitches we receive don’t pass muster for various reasons – they’re vague, poorly spelled, or they’re making it difficult for us to understand what the heck the person is actually asking.

So, here’s our cheat sheet for how to get our attention – and keep it.

Request an internship

Please note we rarely have openings for interns, but we occasionally make space if someone really shines.

DO

• Attach your CV (please leave out school results, your school part time job etc), making it clear what your areas of interest and specialism are.
• If you’re in college now, tell us when you’re going to be free or when you graduate. Ideally it’s best if you’re free at the time you apply.
• What’s your area: Digital marketing? PR? Journalism? Graphic design? Make it super-clear.
• Aim to offer something different on your application so you stand out. EVERYONE loves fashion and beauty; do you want to write features, for example? That’d be more likely to get our interest.
• Attach two writing samples, showing you’re up-to-date with current trends and that we could trust you with editorial tasks.
• Got a blog? Tell us about it! It’s the best shopfront you have to let us know what you can do.
• Spell everything amazingly well.

DON’T

• We constantly get emails that say, “I’d love to intern for you, I love fashion and beauty, if you’re interested, please email me back for my CV.” No. No. Nope. We’re never going to do that – we’re busy and you have our attention now, because we’re reading your email – and you’ve missed your chance. Attach your CV!
• Get the name of the magazine right. It’s very common for people to email a tonne of magazines at the same time looking for an internship and use a form email… and forget to change the name of the publication. If you’re that careless, we don’t want you.

Pitch a feature

We often look for new freelance writers for the magazine; ideally you’d have some experience pitching and writing freelance features to magazines or newspapers.

DO

• Take some time to know the magazine and the sort of content we publish. STELLAR is very much about positivity, support and being woman-friendly, so we’re unlikely to accept a pitch slagging off the cellulite of the stars, for example.
• Be super up-to-the-minute. We don’t like recycled ideas; anything that’s been done to death.
• Give us clever angles on current topics. The STELLAR girl is smart, and our content reflects that.
• Pitch us ideas around health and wellbeing, social media/online/tech trends/positivity/fitness/sex and relationships/pop culture/friendships/career/money – or an intersection of any of them.
• A story pitch should be the headline and a couple of sentences about what the story would be. For example: “When she becomes a frenemy. This will be about when your friend becomes your foe. I’ll talk to girls who’ve had this happen to them, and a psychologist who’ll explain why it does.” That’s something we can immediately see will work/not work for us.

DON’T

• We’re sorry, but your pitch for a first-person Sex And The City dating column in which you tell us what it’s *really* like for a single girl out there is actually the third one we’ve had this week.
• We don’t commission fashion and beauty features or shoots as our in-house team handles these.
• Right now, we’re not looking for first-person pitches.

Apply for a job

Want to work here? Again, jobs come up occasionally and they’ll be advertised on our website, but we do keep CVs on file if yours is particularly impressive.

DO

• Are you applying for various jobs across different sectors of the media? Tailor your CV to fit. It takes a bit more time but it can really help, because the stuff that’s relevant to STELLAR will really stand out.
• Write us a cover letter explaining why you want to work with us and what you’d bring to the team.
• Attach some samples of your work, relevant to the role you want to fill.

DON’T

• Like the intern section, don’t make us work for it: always attach your CV. Getting a job in the media is a tough gig these days, so give us everything we need in one email.

Tags:

• career
• CV
• journalism
• magazines
• skills
• STELLAR magazine