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Today, I’m refining a pitch to a magazine that could, under many circumstances, be rejected.
It’s a controversial topic.
A political hot potato, you might say.
Yet I’m pretty confident I’m going to get this article idea accepted. That’s because I’m dealing with the elephant in the room in the first paragraph. Yes, this is the topic. No, I’m not going the direction you might think, but in this other direction.
Because I write for a conservative industry, I’ve learned to straddle the line between my own beliefs and those of my audience without my biases being the focus of the piece.
They’re in there, but that’s because the piece has to be balanced. Remember balanced reporting? You know, when you take a topic and actually keep your own damned opinion out of it? Good luck finding that anywhere these days.
Ah, but there are plenty of publications that want just that type of reporting. They know who their readers are. They know what attitudes will fly with them. They know where to insert the stop sign.
That’s where we need to be in our freelance writing. Unless we have a client paying us to rattle sabers, we need to make sure all of their intended audience members are represented.
We writers are often asked to handle controversial topics, or sometimes the ideas just present themselves and we can’t think of anything else until we get someone to let us write it.
Here’s how I’ve learned to approach the delicate topics:
Dispel your devil in the details.
When I proposed a story on gender wage gap, I had to write it for the male executive (the main audience). Yes, the same audience whose members could well be guilty of underpaying their female employees. So how do you propose a story like that?
You make it about how it’s going to cost them. That’s how I did it. What kinds of risks does this type of discrimination pose a company? How can companies fix it? That was the winning formula. (Bragging break: The article won an honorable mention at the Folio awards ceremony that year.)
Argue the opposition’s points.
When I wrote an article on tariffs and trade war, there were a few moments where I’d thought I was throwing myself into a minefield of my own making. The same thing with immigration. Why was I trying to write about the hot-button stuff and make any kind of sense to people who had their own set-in-stone ideas?
With that backdrop, I found three experts, all of whom had firsthand experience in both areas, and who had real-world examples of the impact of these policies on US businesses (the main audience). The questions were simple: How were these policies hurting? Where were they a good idea? Every issue has two sides. It’s up to us to present them both fairly.
Use plenty of statistics.
Forget the “fake news” BS that’s been the dog whistle for the last few years. Facts still matter. Let me say that again: Facts. Still. Matter. When I take on something that’s bound to get argument, I find the most credible sources I can, and I make sure I have plenty of facts to back up every point. Another thing I do — I don’t take it for granted that my source is correct, so I double-check each fact against another study or source wherever possible. I make sure my points are all validated and as airtight as possible.
Verify, verify, verify.
What I won’t do is use material that has no traceable source. If I can’t find the original source, I don’t use it. Period. I had a case in which a client was stating a really great statistic and attributing it to Source A. I searched Source A’s website, contacted their marketing people, only to find out they had no idea where that statistic had come from, but they were certain it wasn’t theirs. I never found that statistic, but I did find plenty of other verifiable info that made a bigger impact.
Writers, what was the last controversial topic you handled?
How did you pitch it?
What advice would you give to writers wanting to cover hot-button topics?