Your next pitch could be over the phone. Thank AI.

Hello friends! Before we get started, I am utterly thrilled to announce a pair of workshops coming up in September. This is an absolute top-tier lineup, and both are simply can’t-miss opportunities.

First up, on Sept. 17 @ 4 p.m. Eastern, Emily Stewart of Business Insider is joining us for a session on how to come up with more, and better, knockout story ideas. Emily is famous for finding fresh, unique angles to topics and digging up ideas that never fail to surprise and delight readers — if you ever see a BI headline that makes you think, “Wow, I never would’ve even thought of that idea,” odds are it’s an Emily special. She'll give us a peek into her process so we can all generate stronger, more original, and more attention-getting story ideas. Click here to join Emily and me in this workshop.

Next, on Sept. 24 @ 4 p.m. Eastern, Slate features editor Shannon Palus will join us for a workshop on how Slate builds its iconic features, and how we can use those techniques in our own writing. Shannon is an ace editor at crafting unmissable stories, and she works with and commissions a ton of freelancers, so I’m beyond thrilled for her to bring her years of expertise to this workshop and share her tips, advice, secrets, and wisdom about pitching and writing the perfect feature story. Click here to join Shannon and me in this workshop.

(As always, upgraded subscribers get 50% off registration to all events, and all registrants will get a recording, whether or not they attend live.)

Now, onto today’s newsletter!

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Just about a year ago, I got a pitch from a writer named Margaux Blanchard.

Ostensibly, she was a veteran freelancer having a breakout summer, with fresh bylines in major outlets including Wired (which was written up in Mashable), Business Insider, SFGate, Naked Politics, Cone Magazine, and more. She reached out to me in early August hoping to share some wisdom about freelance journalism with readers of FWT, and I was delighted by her pitch: a survival guide for the first 90 days of freelancing, aimed at journalists who had recently made the jump. Her pitch was sharp, clear, specific, and thorough, and I was excited to get her work in front of my audience. I commissioned the story, and she sent in a draft.

The only problem was that, after I dug around a little bit, I realized this Margaux did not seem to exist. There are a few Margaux Blanchards out there, but the “Margaux” emailing with me appeared to be a fake persona being used by someone to publish AI-written stories that were, in at least some cases, entirely fabricated. I had my suspicions about the story “Margaux” filed, and I posted about it on LinkedIn seeking advice, but things became clearer when “Margaux” began aggressively asking for payment. The PayPal account this person wanted the fee sent to was listed under the name Onyeka Nwelue, and the email address attached to it appeared to be connected to Onyeka’s broader online presence. I caught this in time and alerted a few other outlets that had published the byline.

When I emailed Onyeka at the time to ask about all of this, he responded: “Go fuck yourself!” By now, you’ve probably read about “Margaux” and “her” extensive portfolio.

I’m telling you this story because last week a LinkedIn post caught my eye from someone with an idea that may be at the vanguard of countering AI journalism slop: ditch email pitches altogether.

Hanna Raskin is the founder of The Food Section, an ASME award-winning independent publication based in Macon, Georgia, that covers Southern food. Hanna is the only full-time employee, but she works with a handful of regular contributors, and nearly 100 freelance writers have contributed. Hanna handles all pitches — around three to five per week, more when TFS is mentioned in other outlets — via pitch form.

But last year, Hanna started noticing more and more pitches coming in that gave off the whiff of AI. Around the same time, but not quite as a direct response to the increase, she added a clause to her ethics code that bars writers from using AI “in the creation, generation, or revision of any part of the deliverables.” And, because of an initial spark of possible AI pitches a few years prior, she had added a question to TFS’s pitch form that asks, “Did you use any AI tools to help develop this story idea, or put the pitch into words? (That's not necessarily disqualifying, but transparency is a TFS rule.)” Thirty-one pitch submissions have ticked “yes” to that question, though Hanna suspects that number is probably far higher.

“AI is getting better and better, and it's less and less obvious,” Hanna said. “I am very fortunate that we have a very narrow coverage area, and I know it so well. It's really hard to get anything by me,” she said. But “even having that expertise and that skill set, I was like, ‘This stuff is getting really good.’ ”

She added: “I was spending more and more time backgrounding these pitches, and more often than not, discovering, like, this was totally fabricated.”

The idea of taking phone-only pitches came to Hanna while on vacation, after she started feeling almost resigned to the notion that, well, this is just how it is now. So she set up a dedicated Google Voice number for writers to pitch stories and plans to launch it next month. For now, she doesn’t think the calls will be overwhelming, and the line will be open only during specific hours to help keep things manageable.

I called the hotline before Hanna and I were scheduled to talk for this story to see what pitching TFS would be like, and, very much to my surprise, Hanna herself picked up — not a voicemail or automated system — which is kind of the point.

“I can imagine a writer saying, ‘I'm a writer. I express myself better in email.’ I totally can see that,” she said. “But I think if you're pitching a story — not writing the story, pitching the story — there needs to be some level of just natural conversation about it and passion for it, and I think the phone is the right way to express that.”

Still, she said there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to the problem of AI pitches. This is just the one she’s guessing will work for TFS. And while she’s excited to try out this new system, it does come with one caveat: Please don’t pitch her any more stories about pawpaws. It’s been done, y’all.

Editors at mainstream publications are facing the same deluge of AI-written or -assisted pitches, but solutions are elusive. A handful of editors I asked about AI pitches said they’ve become an increasingly noticeable problem, especially over the past year or so as AI models have become more sophisticated, but it’s not yet a red-alert issue. Still, some said they’re far more skeptical than they used to be about cold pitches from new writers, and, for now, they’re handling it by doing more research into pitches — and the people pitching them. One editor at an international outlet I spoke with said that while the issue isn’t a pressing, top-priority one, it is a topic of conversation with other editors across the organization.

Shannon Palus, a features editor at Slate (and, disclosure, a former colleague at The New York Times Company), said “AI pitches are a huge problem” that “clog up my inbox and make it harder to find emails from legitimate, honest freelancers,” but phone calls may not be the answer.

“The actual writing is a huge part of what makes a story work for Slate, so phone pitches wouldn’t work for me,” Shannon said. “Even when I have a call with a new-to-me freelancer to talk stories, I always have them follow up with a written pitch.”

Shannon said “a ton of very obvious” AI pitches land in her inbox after she posts a pitch callout, but “on a day-to-day basis, not a huge percent at all.” Still, she said, “I definitely spend more time vetting each pitch I assign, and writer I assign to, than I did previously.” (Read Slate’s AI policy here.)

“I loved doing my phone pitch!” said freelancer Sian Meades-Williams, who successfully sold a pitch via phone to the U.K. outlet Mslexia and writes the newsletter Freelance Writing Jobs. She added that, for some pitches, the back-and-forth of a phone call can help an idea take shape in the moment.

“The idea very much evolved in conversation, which I loved. It felt collaborative, and you don't get that as much as a freelancer,” she said. “Every time I've had a conversation with an editor over the phone, it feels good. You're finding the way to tell the best story you can with someone who wants that story to be as good as it can be.”

Sian added: “I think if you're scared of an editor — we've all been there — then calling them is honestly great. They are usually nice people who love the same publication you love!”

Paulette Perhach, a freelancer who has contributed to FWT, has done a total of one phone pitch, and she was, decidedly, not a fan.

“Yes I hated it!” Paulette said in response to a LinkedIn callout I posted asking whether freelancers have ever pitched by phone.

“Anytime you’re doing a live pitch, it’s almost like you’re doing comedy and bombing,” Paulette said over the phone. “You don’t know if your pitch is bombing when you just send it over email, and that pitch feels long when you’re not getting any feedback or there’s silence on the other end.” And yes, Paulette does do comedy; she even made an Instagram Reel about the experience.

“Even then I was like, ‘Oh my god, I never want to do that again,’ ” she said. “So I can’t imagine someone who is introverted and less comfortable on the phone.”

She added that, setting aside how awkward or natural someone feels on phone calls, pitching a story over the phone is just an entirely different beast from pitching over email.

“It is the difference between a written sales document and a live pitch, and those are really two different skills,” Paulette said. Pitching over email sometimes just makes more practical sense, too, she said, because it gives writers space to self-edit and collect and focus their thoughts, while also allowing them time to check back in with sources and reporting notes for follow-up questions from editors. (And, for the record, the editor Paulette pitched didn’t commission the story, but she did eventually sell it to a different outlet — via email pitch.)

Regular readers of this newsletter know that, for all things freelance, I always say: It depends. And that certainly applies here. Both editors and freelancers are still figuring out how to approach AI, but there are no clear-cut, simple solutions — and even the ones that can seem so usually aren’t.

In the LinkedIn post where I asked freelancers about phone pitching, one writer chimed in with an experience that, I’m guessing, will probably remain the most common response to phone pitches for a while.

“I have tried, but the response is always ... send me an email pitch 😜”