How to pitch finance stories to women’s magazines with Laura Whateley

Alessia Horwich (00:07):

Welcome to On the Rocks, a podcast from Rox Hill Media that asks some of the best journalists in the UK for their solutions to the kind of dilemmas that confront PRS daily. We know that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way of communicating with journalists, so we’re going direct to the writers in the newsroom to hear how they like to work with PRS and how to stand out in their inboxes. My name is Alessia Horwich. I’m a former Sunday Times journalist, now the brand director at Rox Hill. Today, we’re going to be talking about how to pitch finance ideas to women’s magazines with freelance financial journalist Laura Whateley. I liked starting at the beginning, talking about you, and do you want to tell me about how you got into journalism, and was it a luck thing, or did you just work really studiously, or how did it work?

Laura Whateley (00:52):

I think I liked writing at school, so it felt like, oh, I like writing. Let’s be a journalist. When I was at university, I was on the student paper, I was the lifestyle editor, fashion editor of my student paper, and someone told me then, oh, you need to do postgraduate journalism course, which seemed to be the avenue into journalism at the time. I did that and at City, and then got work experience like everybody does at different publications, and one of them was the Times on the lifestyle beauty section at the time, actually, and then that’s where I heard about a vacancy on the money desk for editorial assistance. So, really junior and I applied for the job and got it. So I had a very traditional way into journalism. I think it was probably more true of the late noughties than it would be now.

Alessia Horwich (01:43):

Was personal finance always the dream?

Laura Whateley (01:47):

I’m afraid not. No. Definitely not, and I’ve written about this before that when I started the job. I was googling how do mortgages work on Wikipedia kind of just before I started, I should a bit ashamed to admit that. But actually, I started just as a financial crisis happened, and I was always quite interested in social affairs and what I would call “the softer side of politics”, so not what’s happening in Whitehall, but how it affects real people’s lives. And I actually realised so much personal finance does. It’s fundamental to everything. So, although I don’t have a strong passion for the best savings accounts, I guess I do care about what it means for people, so that how I have stuck with it for so long.

Alessia Horwich (02:28):

And you have been doing it for a while. I mean it must provide interesting narratives and exciting things to write about because otherwise you wouldn’t be here still.

Laura Whateley (02:36):

Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s changed quite a lot since I started. So I started in 2008, it’s a long time ago. I think the coverage of money, inevitably it’s linked to what’s happening in the world, isn’t it? And we’ve seen that financial crisis, COVID, cost of living crisis, so linked to what’s happening in the economy. So yeah, I don’t think, although there are always evergreen fundamentals can get a bit boring to be constantly trying to find new angles on, there are always ways in which it’s affecting people’s lives. So yeah, I think there are new stories to be found.

Alessia Horwich (03:09): :

Yeah, it is quite an exciting time to have been working across. I was just thinking, the 20 years before that, would it have changed in the same way? Because personal finance has been for white middle-aged men for a very long time, and then naturally around when you started, that does mark a change and we are seeing, I mean we’re talking today about pitching money ideas to women’s magazines, which potentially 20 years ago wasn’t so much of a thing, but it’s very much a thing now. Are there things that you’ve particularly noticed a shift, maybe perhaps more in the last five years or something, since COVID, towards women being more involved in money content?

Laura Whateley (03:47):

Yes, I have. It was really interesting because when I did an event for Roxhill when we talked, when Joanne from Good Housekeeping, she said, “oh, we’ve been covering money forever”. And I was doing a non-work event where I was making collages out of scrapbooks of all magazines for ideas generating exercise, and one of them was 1991 Cosmo, which was such a good read and it had money content in there. One of it was like, is the housewife dead? It was quite funny and awful to read. I was six at that point, so I was like, wow. So I guess there has been always money for women in magazines forever, but certainly I think since I started, yes, it was like men who play golf in Surrey, what the best investments, wine club type of stuff. I didn’t feel like it was for me at all. I didn’t grow up thinking money was a conversation that was aimed at me. That’s partly why I found money quite an interesting one to write about because I, like, insert myself in conversations that I don’t think I know enough about or should be for me because I feel a bit indignant. Why is this world for men and not for people who look like me or live a life like me? So yeah, I think the content’s changed a lot. COVID was a big turning point. So I saw, I wrote quite a lot of things. I wrote pieces for Refinery 29, Stylists, Grazia about how to manage finances during COVID, and I think actually that sparked more money content that has remained in some of those places.

Alessia Horwich (05:16): :

Do you think there’s other reasons? I mean, for example, there’s this sort of big boom of the baby boomers who have more cash to manage, and women are more involved in that role, potentially at the moment, like holidays, helping their children get on the property ladder, that kind of stuff. Are you talking to those people?

Laura Whateley (05:32):

Yeah, I think it’s an interesting, there’s going to be this huge shift in people who are managing money. So many more will be older women because if you look at the great wealth transfer that’s going to happen, so the boom is going to pass money on, a lot of those people will be older women who’ve lost their husband, and maybe their husband’s the one that always managed the money, so there is going to be this big readership I think and group of people who need more with their finances or who are engaging with it, maybe even for the first time. But also, there’s just a massive younger generation of women who are obviously earning as much if not more than their male counterparts. It’s taken long enough, but in the last few years, there’s been many more conversations about having things like childcare. It’s not a women’s issue, it should be a family issue or some of the conversations about things like pensions and investment. There’s a big why has this not been something that all of us have talked about? And something I’m very interested in is relationships and how we manage money together. So how we talk about money with our partners, male or female, how we share together, and the fact that things like prenups and contracts when you’re moving in together and questions about cohabitation and who earns and who looks after the kids are really happening more and more and there hasn’t actually been enough coverage of it in the past, I don’t think.

Alessia Horwich (06:53): :

So if you are writing stories for these new audiences, new-ish audiences, how are the stories, and these are kind of articles that are appearing more in glossy mags potentially than in the traditional press. How are you changing your pitches for these stories? What are you thinking about when you are coming up with your ideas that you would be thinking differently about for the nationals?

Laura Whateley (07:16): :

So I suppose if I was pitching a money story to a personal finance section, it could be more niche and more news focused in the sense that if there was, you wouldn’t write a feature for a glossy on what is a help to buy ISA, for example, but there’s a new way of investing that everyone’s talking about, but you might for a money section, I think because people are going there to read about money, but also there’s just more pages focused specifically on personal finance. So I think you can be a bit more niche or you can be a bit more kind of nerdy on money stuff. Whereas I think with a glossy, even if it is a money page of a glossy, I think you want to zoom out a bit. I think you want it to be a bit broader. So it wouldn’t be just on help buy ISA, that’s not to say something like that couldn’t appear, but I guess it would be a much like I said, zoomed out piece, looking at ways to save more and actually some of that stuff might be topics that have been written about a lot before in personal finance pages but haven’t appeared so much in a women’s magazine. You might think, oh, that’s done to death. But lots of people still don’t engage with personal finance and understand how to invest for example, or the best ways to save or the best ways to budget. I think it’s about trying to find a bit more of a wellness lifestyle angle to it.

Alessia Horwich (08:38):

Okay, so broader and then yes, this wellness lifestyle angle, is that something that’s more an emotional read, something that’s connected to real people and real stories?

Laura Whateley (08:47):

Yeah, I think an emotional angle and a kind of problem solving angle. So helping people feel better about something in their life. So whether it’s how to discuss money with someone, whether it’s how to save more, spend less, those kind of things that can bring out tricky emotions definitely is something that’s really popular. Whenever I’ve done a piece for a non-money section, I think there always has to be an emotional angle, a psychological angle when you look at some of the experts to quote, I think people who are psychologists, coaches, behavioural economists, behavioural scientists, I think they’re really popular rather than just hard finance experts. That’s not to say you can’t quote somebody who works in finance obviously, but I tend to try and look for people maybe who would take a sort of a more emotional, broader take rather than just pure numbers on money. Because ultimately money is a emotional topic, isn’t it? It’s is a thread of every other aspect of our lifestyle and health and wellbeing, and I think that’s something that women’s magazines or glossies are recognising and why they’re covering it more.

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Alessia Horwich (11:02):

What’s the sort of difference between those two things that you’ve just said a hard, if you were going to get a quote about a savings product or something from a finance person versus this behavioural scientist or something, what would be the two things that they would say that would be different? Can you think of an example?

Laura Whateley (11:18):

They might actually say something very similar, but I think sometimes it’s, as a reader, if you think, oh, this is coming and it sounds a bit silly really, isn’t it? But if it’s coming from a finance person, maybe this isn’t for me. I think there is still a lot of people I talk to say like, “oh, I’m not very good with money or money isn’t a subject that I understand. I don’t understand finance”. So if it’s a sort of Head of Investment somewhere versus oh, this is actually what a money coach or a psychologist is saying, even if they’re saying the same thing, I do think it can sometimes land differently.

Alessia Horwich (11:51):

It just resonates more with the audience.

Laura Whateley (11:52):

Yeah, maybe.

Alessia Horwich (11:53):

How important is it for the PRs who are pitching ideas to think about the audiences that they’re trying to speak to?

Laura Whateley (12:00):

Very, I think this with case studies as well. I think make them people who you would think would read the magazine or read the publication and also as a PR, which, sorry, some of this stuff is probably so obvious, but would you read this yourself? Would you want to read this? Is this interesting? Because ultimately, I obviously think that with everything that I try and write make it interesting, but particularly if it’s a lifestyle magazine and it’s for people who might not be interested in finance, how can I make this as relevant to the kind of reader’s life and who that reader might be.

Alessia Horwich (12:34):

In these pictures and in these pieces? What is the balance between storytelling and then actual facts and actual useful advice?

Laura Whateley (12:42):

I think there needs to be both actually. Something that I think is interesting about the pieces that I’ve written, not just for kind of glossies, but also for things like I’ve written quite a bit for The Guardian Lifestyle Weekend Magazine, and often rather than a big write through feature you might have in a money section, quite often they are pieces that are broken up into different sections. So it might be top 10 something or like 25 tips on how to save more. Or a piece that I wrote most recently for Grazia was “ways to get richer”. So there were lots of separate sections. So within that I try to add colour obviously and interesting anecdotes or little interviews, but there always needs to be some facts. There always needs to be some stats, there always needs to be a bit of an explainer and actually wherever I’m writing a money piece for, even if it’s for a personal finance section, I try not to assume that people know anything. And I guess that’s the challenge and the art sometimes of a personal finance article is how to make it relevant to as many people as possible because all have different levels of knowledge about money, but always trying to not assume that people understand, you know, how an investment fund works or all of the kind of jargon words. So yeah, I think there always needs to be a bit of an explainer and in some features it will be just like a pullout box to try and explain the nuts and bolts of something.

Alessia Horwich (14:06):

I mean, do you think, is jargon a massive turnoff when PRs are pitching?

Laura Whateley (14:11)

Not necessarily for me because I probably understand what it means, but certainly for a reader. It doesn’t mean that the PRs have to do all the work though. So you can just present a story and it’s up for the journalist to sort of make it into an interesting feature that the reader could understand.

Alessia Horwich (14:26):

Yeah, my brain’s sort of whirring away thinking, what’s better to do if you’re pitching a finance idea to a commissioning editor on a women’s magazine? I mean, it’s probably the sensible thing is to find a journalist, like you, and work on something together so that you can do all of that translation for the PR, rather than pitching to say the Lifestyle Commissioning Editor at The Guardian who might be a bit like, “oh, what is this jargon?” Or “what does this mean?” Or “is this really significant for me?” Because they don’t specialise.

Laura Whateley (14:51):

Yeah, I do think freelance journalists in the money space are probably a really good first port of call because yes, they might have written many more money articles, so can kind of think of a way to make it a bit more sexy for more of a lifestyle publication. That’s not to say, I guess you’d have to do a bit more work to think about how to get rid of the jargon and present it to somebody who maybe doesn’t normally write about pensions. I think there is a way of doing that, but maybe a journalist in between could do that for you.

Alessia Horwich (15:23):

When you say do a bit more work, what do you think the things that you really need to tick off before, if you weren’t going to get your help, enlist you to help you pitch it through or whatever, what are the kind of bases that you really need to hit with your pitch before you go to someone like Refinery 29, maybe, because they’re doing a lot of money content, but yeah, what do you need to cover off in your pitch?

Laura Whateley (15:42):

Every editor would say to me “it needs to have a news angle”, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be current affairs. I think maybe with more lifestyle publications it would be more like zeitgeisty for one of a better word, something that people are talking about online a lot. So I don’t know, something like Lifestyle Creep, like, oh, everybody’s talking about Lifestyle Creep, what is it? Why does it matter? Whatever you’re maybe product or service or spokesman or piece of research how it can back up your theory about why Lifestyle Creep is an important thing to write about. But I do think plugging into something that editor will have heard of or will certainly be interested in or maybe hasn’t heard of but feels they should have heard of, that’s certainly something that grabs my attention if I’m like, “oh, I really should know about that, thanks for introducing me to it”.

Interesting spokespeople, and maybe if it can be not just, that’s not to say you don’t want finance experts, of course you do, but I think somebody who, again, might feel quite accessible to the particular readership.

Alessia Horwich (16:49)

and then a case study that chimes in with the audience of the publication?

Laura Whateley (16:53)

Yeah, I don’t think you always have to have case studies. I guess it depends. It’s the thing I like about case studies actually, and I found myself doing recently is quoting a case study a bit in the copy without, actually, it’s not a necessarily a separate box or so obviously sometimes you want a case study led article and you want several interesting case studies. And then there was a really good feature a while ago in Red, and it was all about different money secrets and it had loads of different stories from different aspects of people’s lives and money secrets they’d kept or dilemmas they’d had, I thought it was so good. But sometimes just weaving a little few lines from a case study’s experience just helps to add a bit of colour. I did that in the Grazia piece recently, so it was someone who was investing through a new platform and it was a nice little quote about how women often feel imposter syndrome, but they shouldn’t about investing and this is why. It was just a nice way of saying it rather than it being an expert saying it.

Again, it’s a bit like sometimes two spokespeople can say the same thing and it lands differently. And I just thought it was quite nice coming from a woman in her thirties who was investing and didn’t think she could, versus perhaps the person who runs the platform, you know. So I think sometimes case studies can do that work for you and then you think, “oh, okay, I’ll interview the CEO too or that”. So I think that’s quite a good way in sometimes.

Alessia Horwich (18:19):

Does a case study ever really get it over the line for you?

Laura Whateley (18:21):

I think if it’s a really important kind of campaign, any type issue, so I’ve written quite a bit about financial abuse, something like that is absolutely vital to the article. So yes, if it’s vital, I would say it would.

Alessia Horwich (18:34):

It’s interesting that you’re talking about a serious campaign because I was wondering if there are any sort of topics that are really off limits that you think this wouldn’t get picked up by women’s magazines around finance, and if there’s any that you think are actually underrepresented and should you want to hear more about?

Laura Whateley (18:49):

I think it does have to be a bit accessible. So I think if it’s just for people who are vastly wealthy and it’s a slightly complicated way of tax avoidance, for example, or a really naughty tax issue that wouldn’t affect very many people, I think it wouldn’t be picked up. And I think things that are pegged on ISA season or those kinds of things that are very money when you work in money, you hit all the time, but I just don’t think a reader of a women’s magazine that would mean anything to them or an editor would think, oh, we must run this because people need to top up their ISAs. I think it would need to be pitched in a different way. So for example, both Grazia actually and The Guardian piece recently said, “oh, can we do something linked to awful April?” So bill rises is slightly different, right? Yeah. So that’s different.

Alessia Horwich (19:46):

I mean it’s still new financial year, isn’t it?

Laura Whateley (19:48):

Yeah exactly.

Alessia Horwich (19:49):

It’s still the same basis.

Laura Whateley (19:51):

So it’s not that, that’s not relevant, I guess it’s just finding the right wording for it.

Alessia Horwich (19:53):

Yeah, I mean that’s a really demonstrative of a different way of approaching the same thing that’s a bit more fun and a bit more, I mean, we’ve both just laughed about it, haven’t we?

Laura Whateley (20:01):

What is that actually mean? Whereas obviously I’ve written for ISA supplements and the editor’s like, “oh yeah, yeah, great. We need as many ISA articles as possible”. So it is a very different audience in that sense. But in terms of things I’d like to read about, like I said, I’m really interested in relationships and I think it’s really been under covered because I think a lot of money stuff is from quite an individual perspective to how can I sort out my finances or how can I manage my money? And, like you mentioned earlier, there’s going to be this huge transfer of wealth between generations. People can’t really afford to buy property on their own, people can’t really afford to have children on their own, and one income. There is so many more ways in which we need to think about how to blend money with other people and manage feelings about other people having more or less money than us – friends, family members, colleagues – so that’s a topic I think we are reading about, but I’m very interested in.

And I think the other one is, and this is a very old challenge for glossy magazines that rely on beautiful fashion and beautiful beauty content and things that cost a lot of money, but people don’t have a lot of money, the vast majority, and the cost of living is very high. So how can we manage those two things of people can aspire to certain lifestyles, to certain beauty products or ways of going out or holidays, things that have traditionally people want to read about, want to do, think about the reality of their income. So I think more articles about that.

Alessia Horwich (21:46):

In terms of influencers, do you think it’s a good idea for money PRs to be looking at influencers that they could work with to pitch to women’s magazines?

Laura Whateley (21:54):

Yeah, I do. There’s obviously lots of negativity around financial influencers and there’s lots to be avoided, but I do think the reality is people are seeking advice about the way they live from people online a lot more. I do in all sorts of different areas, and I think that’s true of money. There’s lots of people communicating really well about money on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube Substack. I think these are new places to learn. So definitely, and I think people feel understood and I think that’s very important, compared to maybe some of the more traditional outlets for personal finance journalism that we were talking when I first started felt like it was for a particular type of person. Luckily that’s changed, but I think certainly social media allows people to find their tribe and that matters with money too.

Alessia Horwich (22:50):

I mean, do you think ultimately it’s about humanising these issues? These are not for some other person away from you? It affects all of us.

Laura Whateley (22:57):

Yeah, definitely. People think pensions. I mean, this is changing of course, but people don’t understand them. Don’t engage with them, feel like it’s not for them because maybe it hasn’t ever really been pitched that way. Everybody needs to engage with these things. So yes, it’s finding ways to make people realise that and feel like, “oh, this isn’t actually as complicated as they thought it was”. So it does require some creativity.

Alessia Horwich (23:24):

You can bring it though, surely.

Laura Whateley (23:26):

I’m trying. Definitely.

Alessia Horwich (23:27):

Laura, thanks so much.

Laura Whateley (23:30):

Thank you for having me.