Breaking into Print Online: Six Publications and How to Get Your (Virtual) Foot in the Door (An Introduction)

This was supposed to be easy. To start, I was going to figure out Smithsonian magazine, and Sarah was going to tackle Outside. Our question was simple: what’s the relationship between online content and the print magazines? Who should we pitch, and should we tailor pitches for online content differently than for print?

So I headed to Smithsonian’s website, and as I was waiting for the page to load, the website’s description showed up in the gray bar above the page: “History, Travel, Arts, Science, People, Places: Smithsonian Magazine.” Great, I thought. Even broader than I realized. I recently thought that maybe one day I’d pitch them my idea for a story about the rise of blast furnace tourism in Pittsburgh’s post-industrial age, and if it wasn’t quite right for History, surely it would fit under People. Or Travel. Or Places, even. As the page loaded, essentially the same menu came up as a series of tabs under the website’s header, except this time a little more specific and sounding slightly more like a Jeopardy game: History & Archeology, People & Places, Science & Nature, Arts & Culture, Travel, Photos, Videos, Games & Puzzles, and finally, Blogs.

So I clicked on History & Archeology. More categories: Archaeology, Biography, Today in History, US History, and World History. Under People & Places, we’re given four distinct geographic regions: Africa & The Middleast, Asia Pacific, Europe, and The Americas; under Science and Nature there was Anthropology & Behavior, Dinosaurs, EcoCenter, Environment, Technology & Space, and Wildlife. Arts & Culture, Travel, and Photos each also had four to five subcategories. In Blogs, a more general category list came up: Art, History, Lifestyle, Science, and Travel and to click on any of those headings would show me the various blogs within the Smithsonian website related to that category, anywhere from one to four blogs per category.

And this whole time I was completely ignoring the other menus scattered throughout the pages—ones inviting me to see what was up at the Smithsonian Institute, or to see what was in the Air & Space Magazine (okay, I clicked on that one—let me just say, more tabs, more categories, and titles more alluring then anything I could ever write an article for, such as: “Block That Star! How can we find other Earths if their suns keep blinding us?”).

I was trying to be pragmatic. I wanted to find a section that my story would be appropriate for. I wanted to find the email or contact of the editor in charge of that section—the advice I’d always heard was appeal to editors directly. While I was having this battle, Sarah was having a similar battle with Outside Magazine. We sat at her kitchen table eating Cheezitz trying to figure out how to demystify the print/online relationship for you all, but becoming ever more mystified ourselves.

Where, oh where, to begin? What, exactly, of the content showing up was actually published in Smithsonian and Outside magazines—the ones you can still buy on a shelf and hold in your hand? And what amount of the content was for the web only? Would it be easier for me to appeal to a web content editor as opposed to a magazine editor? Would that be a way to get my foot in the door and to build a relationship with an editor, to eventually print something in the actual magazine? Or maybe the actual magazine wasn’t any better than the online content, and maybe they paid the same, too.

With a little bit of exploring, I eventually learned that the pieces listed under the tabs on the website were a mix: some were features that appear in the print magazine—in which case it would say Smithsonian Magazine under the author’s name. Some linked over to the blogs. Essentially, there were more category headings than articles, each piece being cross listed in several places on the site.

As it turns out, you can’t pitch directly to editors at Smithsonian anyway. Their magazine is 90 percent freelance based, but only two percent of pitches are accepted, and the only way to pitch for either the magazine or online content is via an online proposal form.

And, as it also turns out, Sarah and I found that there is no formula for how to navigate between any magazine and its online presence. Some magazines’ online versions show material only from editors. Some only list what’s in their magazine, selecting a few items to feature on the web. And some publications create online-only material in addition to their print material. Some magazines that come out every month, or every two months, are posting articles online daily

In this presentation Sarah and I will highlight 6 other magazines where you stand a better chance of publishing something in their online version versus their print version, and some instances where publishing on a magazine’s website will help you get your foot in the door with the editors, and can possibly lead to publishing something in print.