by Leo Wiles
17 January 2018
Last year, I did a lot of pitching. I got a few over the line, but I also saw some of my (unique) ideas later in print – written by someone else! How do I stop this happening? Do I even have a leg to stand on? Emily
If you’d written in with this question a few years back, I would have poohed-poohed the idea and taken the moral high ground for commissioning editors everywhere. (And if you don’t believe me, here’s the AUW I wrote answering another member’s question on the same topic.)
However, I’ve changed my tune a bit. Last month, I was taken aback at a recent social mixer to find that pinching freelancers’ feature and news story ideas and having staffers write them is a thing. A bit of a crappy thing, happening to seasoned and newbie freelancers alike.
When I was a commissioning editor, I’m proud to say that the majority of my 26 weekly page ideas were born in the weekly Monday morning brainstorm meeting – or from the endless hours I spent watching/listening to the news and reading every newspaper and magazine (local and overseas) that I could get my hand on. I also occasionally paid an ideas fee to a freelancer pitching an idea I liked, but didn’t want to commission that person to do.
With a 24/7 news cycle now though it would be impossible for editors to remain in front of the curve like we used to as we can all access the same information channels. And I think stealing freelancers ideas is a reflection of the times – and time-poor, potentially inexperienced key players in charge of so many pages per day that they have tapped the well dry – or simply weren’t able to cut the creative mustard in the first place.
The bad news is, that unlike new inventions, you can’t patent a pitch idea. It’s also hard to prove (even with an email trail) that the idea came uniquely from you. So unless you’re prepared to write up every idea you have ever had and try to flog the entire feature (thus proving that the idea, the potential interviewees and the stats and facts that make it newsworthy are all yours), I’d opt for plan B.
Pour a large glass of wine, blacklist the thieving contact – and start pitching anew. Because the real silver lining here is that if your idea is worth pinching, you can bet your ideas have real value.
Have you ever had a story idea pinched by an editor? What did you do?
