Silly Season

This has been said before (not least by me) – when there is a ginormous news story going on (Covid followed by Ukraine followed by Jubilee now followed by Tory party leadership), it can be hard both to pitch other stories and to run them.

But it really is important to keep in close contact with journalists right now: there are a lot of issues that I’d call “real world” which people want to read about. On Friday when we were discussing the rising temperatures I got a piece underway for the start of this week on everything to do with sunscreen, and I’ve got a lot of food content coming up with taps into both the heatwave and the cost of living crisis.

We are heading into what is traditionally known as the “silly season” in newspapers – when there isn’t a huge amount of substantial news or even events/subjects to run features about. But this year it doesn’t feel like the news cycle will slow down; in fact for those of us who don’t have school-age children and will be manning the desks over July and August, it’s going to be hectic

So my colleagues and I – and I would hazard a guess that it’s the same for all other short-lead-time titles – want really thought-through pitches to work with. What we don’t want right now are those “What are you working on? Is there anything we can help you with?” emails. It’s just not helpful when we’re madly trying to come up with features to balance the political, environmental and economic chaos out there. Focus, people!