Want to write, produce or shoot for us? Here’s how to pitch

We appreciate that pitching is difficult, so here are some tips from us to make sure your pitch for content gets our attention.

Source: Getty Images

Hello,

Thanks for thinking of SBS Food to publish your work!

Food is not just fuel. It’s love, family, home, emotion, tradition, health, sickness, ethics and money. It’s big business and small satisfactions. If you love creating content based on food and everything it touches on, just as much as you love cooking or eating it, and have a great idea, we’d like to hear from you.

We accept pitches from all types of digital content creators - writers for articles, recipe developers, video journalists and shooters for video packages, photographers for studio and location assignments, and concepts for web series from production companies (if you have a television prop, pitch it here instead). 

We appreciate that pitching is difficult, so here are some tips from us to make sure your pitch gets our attention.

Our content is unlike most other digital publishers because SBS is governed by a Charter. SBS inspires all Australians to explore and celebrate our diverse world. Your pitch needs to touch on issues relevant to culturally and linguistically diverse communities or First Nations peoples. This is very important. (While we publish content that falls outside of our Charter, occasionally, keep your pitch aligned with our remit to give it the best chance.)

"I’m trying to get people to be less afraid of their neighbors.” ~ Jonathan Gold

Please browse our site. Nothing cheeses us off more than a generic pitch that hasn’t been tailored to our brand or our audience. Hold tight to this advice from indomitable writer Helen Rosner (which not only applies to articles but to all forms of content): “The best way to be a writer is to read like an editor”.

Don't tie yourself in a knot about pitching a story. Source: Getty

Craft your pitch with a good idea about which section it belongs to on our site

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SBS

• We write and produce digital content to support our flagship commissioned food programs on SBS (shows like The Cook Up with Adam Liaw, Food Safari, Cook Like an Italian with Silvia Colloca, Plat du Tour and Gourmet Farmer). 

SBS Food (Channel 33)

• We write and produce digital content for our sister channel, SBS Food (Channel 33), Australia’s first free-to-air 24/7 food channel. Praise be the shows.

Cook

• Bringing the world to your kitchen, with 15,000+ recipes and 3,500 cooking videos from more than 100+ cuisines. What we're cooking (or thinking about eating) at SBS HQ. Do you have a recipe that makes us want to rush into the kitchen and start cooking or baking? #wakeuphungry

"Aboriginal women began grinding grain into flour and baking bread 65,000 years ago - nearly 50,000 years before another woman anywhere in the world came up with the same kind of enterprise, invention and chemistry." ~ Bruce Pascoe.

Read

• From the Food desk: The latest food news. What's happening on plates locally and around the world.
• Eating my Childhood: First-person: food is full of memories and some taste as real now as they did back then.
• Feels like Home: Uncovering stories of chefs and businesses and the recipes that inspire them.
• Feaster: Your local insider for just-opened restaurants, cafes, bars, food events, festivals and pop-ups. Feaster celebrates the stories behind the dishes and the people making them – it’s not a review section.
• Institutions: The businesses, cafes, restaurants and grocers that have cemented their place on our menus and in our hearts. Spanning years, decades and, in some cases centuries, we pay respect and shine a light on these so-called institutions that make our local areas tick.  
• Postcards from an Eater: Love to travel? Love to eat?  Postcards from an Eater is exactly all about that. Embracing the way we eat around a place or dish. This is where we combine our food and travel memories, learnings and triumphs.
• Eat Well: Feel good and eat better. Separate the food from the fad with our food-related health stories. You’ll need to be an expert in your field or have bonafide qualifications to create content for this section.
• Play With Your Food: What our very own SBS Food editor is playing within her kitchen.
• Bite-sized: A round-up of our daily eats and recipe inspiration from our very own catalogue.

Pitching Note:

• Right now we are still accepting features and first-person yarns, but most of our commissioned slate for the next 12+ months is geared towards supporting our 24/7 SBS Food channel, recipe and video projects and also finding content that is yet to be explored across our SBS Food home. We often commission out our story ideas, so if you'd like to be included in that call-out list then please do drop us a line.

We’re after well-crafted, thoroughly researched stories (features and first-person yarns) and video content that will connect with an online audience from a wide range of age groups and cultural backgrounds. It could be a punchy 500 words or a powerhouse 800-1000 words (although we're mostly publishing pieces in the 600-800 word range); it could be a 60-second clip or a 3-5 minute video story. 

We’re looking for content that excites people about food; explores current trends or shares insight on food-related events. Stories that engage, challenge or inspire. How a Sydney cafe takes care of the homeless. 50 years of baklava: That's a lot of filo. How a Cambodian migrant is making Australia’s best pie. These flatmates are feeding the community from their doorstep. Why Grandma Pizza is the easy pizza anyone can make at home. How a baker and his 13-year-old son preserve their Syrian culture through baking bread at a refugee camp.

Be original. Think beyond the obvious - we don’t want stories telling us there’s a trend in food. We want to know why that trend matters. Think about how your story makes an issue interesting to people who didn’t think they cared or excite them to try something new. Do surprise us, make us laugh out loud, and want to share it with our friends and our mother. 

Tell us who you are in a sentence. Attach a few links to your writing.

Have we already covered it? Very important. Fire up Google, or keep up to date with us via Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, our e-newsletters or our always-reliable RSS feed. Search is all our friends. 

Nail the pitch with a headline. A pitch with a bang-on headline gets us excited.

Be succinct. A well-thought-out two to three paragraphs of your idea will suffice. Be specific about the thrust of the story: What’s the hook? Who's your talent? Please include links to any websites, references or reports, but keep it snappy until we think it's the right fit.

How is it relevant to an Australian audience? Also very important. We are deeply interested in the world around us but your pitch must have a local angle and feature the voices of this melting pot of a continent. 

The images. Still or moving, how will this story best be illustrated? Are you supplying photographs or footage?

If you're pitching a web series, please ensure it is a genuine multimedia concept (not just a prop that got knocked back from TV) that will engage audiences across our digital and social platforms. Right now we're busy snacking in our activewear and supporting businesses where we can given covid-19. Think of this as a wishlist item we hope to support in 2022/23.

Send your pitches to [e-mail]. We receive a large volume of pitches every day. Apologies in advance but we won’t be able to respond to every pitch, but if it’s the right fit, we’ll be in touch in a week or two. If your story is time-sensitive, please flag it in your pitch.

Yep, we pay. Our rates are comparative to other digital publishers and will be outlined at the time of commissioning.

Look forward to reading your pitches!

Happy feasting, the SBS Food team

Sudeshna Ghosh, Managing Editor (Acting) / [e-mail]

Tammi Kwok, Digital & Social Producer / [e-mail]

Farah Celjo, Managing Editor (Currently off the SBS Food desk) [e-mail]