Welcome to day two of my five-part series where I teach you about how to query effectively by giving you behind-the-scenes on my biggest, most profitable, and most prestigious assignments.
(If you want to read some of the pitches that landed me these assignments, you can get them here.)
Let’s talk about wastepickers
Many years ago, I got obsessed with wastepickers in India. Wastepickers are people who dig through the trash the country throws out and sort through it for recyclable material. Selling those materials is their livelihood. It’s an exceptionally hard life with obvious health and human rights issues, not to mention child labor and environmental impact.
I covered it. For many years. The work led to thousands in dollar terms, it led to awards, but most of all, it led to fulfilling work that actually helped me believe that I was making a difference in the world and that my reporting was meaningful.
It was the dream. The reason I became a journalist, the kind of stories I believed I was born to tell.
But I didn’t start out knowing anything about wastepickers. In fact, when I first got the assignment, I wasn’t even sure I wanted it.
In which I move to Africa
In my last post, I told you that I left Delhi and headed off to Accra, Ghana for a few months. I was there in association with a non-government organization to do some reporting on the fishing community.
However, a couple of weeks before I left India to go to Africa, I got an email from an editor at Scrap magazine asking if I’d be available to do some reporting on wastepickers. She gave me a brief explanation, offered about $1 a word, and was even happy to connect me to sources. It was an assignment I sort of wanted, but I was leaving in two weeks and there was no way I was going to pull off this last-minute deadline, and so I politely turned her down explaining my circumstances. She understood and said she’d love to stay in touch.
I didn’t stay in touch.
In which I move to America
When I arrived back in India after finishing my Africa stint, I got offered a Visiting Scholar position at UC Berkeley’s School of Journalism and so off I went again.
Nine months later, I returned. But I had changed.
What Berkeley had done for me was that it had shown me that I was an excellent reporter who could stand tall and proud and that I had to stop thinking of myself as an “Indian writer” and start thinking of myself as someone who wrote about India for international audiences. I had been limiting myself before I left and it was time now to start making some serious income writing about the stuff that mattered to me.
I emailed the new bureau chief of TIME, as I told you yesterday, and I started pitching publications like The New York Times and GlobalPost with news and analysis stories from India. I also started checking in with editors who had been in contact with me in the past.
Including the Scrap editor.
To my utter surprise, the original assignment she had offered was still available, a full year later. “Couldn’t find anyone suitable,” she wrote to me in an email.
I don’t know whether the editor couldn’t find another writer she liked or if she’d particularly wanted to work with me. I didn’t care and I didn’t ask. She assigned me the work at double the original rate, which at a good four figures hadn’t been bad to begin with.
I wrote it up. She was happy with it. It became the cover story. And it won a prestigious trade magazine award.
But I wasn’t done yet.
A specialty is born
By the time I was done with the first day of reporting for the Scrap assignment—my photographer and I went to the landfills at 5.30 in the morning and talked to dozens of wastepickers—I knew that this wasn’t a topic I was going to write 2,000 words and be done with. Just the environmental impact of this work was worth talking about repeatedly. Not to mention the child labor, the health hazards, the daily lives. Just so much.
I was madly jotting down every story I could find and effortlessly become an expert in less than a month. This stuff was interesting to me. It was important. I had to tell more stories. I was obsessed. I had to write more about these people.
So I did. I wrote about the topic for GlobalPost. ABC News. Ms. Magazine. Caravan magazine. Ensia.
The Caravan magazine story got nominated for a prestigious journalism prize. And I ended up walking away with my second award for this work. I was named Development Journalist of the Year for 2010 by the Developing Asia Journalism Awards Forum.
Wastepickers, who until then were almost never written about, went mainstream. Every major Indian and international publication started writing about them. Their stories are being told now, by many other journalists at major national and international publications.
I made money. I won awards. I felt immense satisfaction with my work. I helped make an important topic no one was talking about mainstream. It was the stuff journalists live for.
And it all came about because one small thing that I did right: I checked in with an editor.
I followed up.
Lessons learned
1) Follow up. Let me say that again: Follow up.
2) You can turn one idea into several assignments (and thousands of dollars) if you can learn to find unique angles and opportunities to tie in with current events. You should do this as often as you possibly can.
3) Never assume anything. An assignment that was offered to you over a year ago could still be available today. You never know.
4) The only labels put on you are the ones you’ve agreed to accept. You don’t have to be an “Indian writer” or a “female writer” or a “gay writer” unless you choose to be. You can certainly choose India or feminist or gay issues as your specialty but if you don’t want to be defined in that way, you can choose not to be.
5) It doesn’t matter if it’s been two months or ten years. If you’d like to reconnect with someone, do it. Chances are, they’ll be glad you did.
So that’s the wastepicking assignment.
Stay tuned—tomorrow I’m going to talk about how I landed the sweet sweet gig as a contributing editor for Elle.
In the meantime, don’t forget to download my sample pitches. They’ll show you what successful pitches look like and provide a template for when you’re writing your own.
(Missed part of the series? Here’s Part 1. And Part 2. Part 3 lives here. Click here for Part 4. And the final one, Part 5.)