ArtsHub’s editorial team hosted a short series of free writing workshops for those who would like to delve into art criticism and arts journalism. The first iteration, ‘Crafting Insightful Criticism’ was hosted by Performing Arts Editor, Richard Watts, and our Reviews Editor, Thuy On. Find the full recording and transcript here.
In this second workshop, ArtsHub Managing Editor, Madeleine Swain, and Diversity and Inclusion Editor, Celina Lei, dived into pointers on how to effectively pitch feature article ideas, conduct interviews, structure a piece and more.
The recording of this event is now available on ArtsHub’s YouTube Channel along with the transcript below:
In this article:
Introduction
Madeleine Swain
Good evening and welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. I have to say that with the crazy weather that Melbourne has been having today, I didn’t expect to see anybody come here tonight. So thank you very much. You’re very welcome and your fortitude is appreciated.
Before we start, I’d like to acknowledge that we are meeting tonight on the Traditional Lands of the five clans of the Kulin nations, and I would like to offer my respects to their Elders past and present, and also pass on those respects to any Aboriginal People who may be with us today. I also acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded.
A little bit of housekeeping before we start, if anybody needs the loo, toilets are right through there and you can pop out at any time. Please turn off your mobile devices and we are being recorded today. I do want to note that all this is not my natural environment, I’m normally behind a screen or sitting in the audience watching things. So, if I stumble or make a mess, and you want to heckle, please don’t use four-letter words because we are being recorded and you will be on screen for posterity and people will know. So just be kind!
A little bit about who we are. I’m Madeleine Swain. I’m the Managing Editor at ArtsHub and I’ve been with the company since November 2022, which is not a terribly long time, but I love it there. Previous to that I trained as an actor in England, and I’ve worked as an actor there and here. But I’ve been in journalism for about 30 years on and off, but with no training. [I] just fell into it. And I’ve been stuck in it ever since. I say that I’ve had a career because I know how to use an apostrophe and we’ll get to that a bit later.
For people with visual impairment who might be listening to this later, I am a very middle-aged late middle-aged, Caucasian woman with hair tied up and glasses on my head, wearing white trousers and a blue and white flowery shirt with a gold locket with my mother’s wedding ring on for luck. This is my colleague Celina who will tell you a bit about herself.
Celina Lei
Thank you, Madeleine. Hi, everyone, welcome and I too would also like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Stolen Lands – always was, always will be Aboriginal Land.
I am Celina Lei, I am the Diversity and Inclusion Editor at ArtsHub. I started with ArtsHub in 2021 as an arts writer, and before that I was doing some work with Art Asia Pacific in Hong Kong. I did my Masters in Art, Business and Law, so I was really interested in things like the art market, artists’ professional development and things like that. I’ve been in journalism a little bit shorter than Madeleine has – she’s [been for] 30 [years], I am three. So still growing here but feeling really privileged and honoured to be here. For those with visual impairments, I am an Asian woman in my mid-20s. I have a black bob hairstyle at the moment. I’m wearing a denim jacket with a black slip dress.
Should we get into it?
Madeleine Swain
Sounds like a good plan.
Celina Lei
We’re going to structure the talk a little bit today, going through the process of writing a feature article from pitching to working with your editor, how to choose a topic, what should you look out for when you’re connecting with your interviewee, for example, and how to go about that.
Pitching your idea
Celina Lei
So starting off with pitching an idea… As a little bit of background, I’ve been working on a new ArtsHub initiative called the Amplify Collective, which is a collective of over 40 writers from around Australia, writers from diverse and marginalised and underrepresented backgrounds. As a result of that work, it has really got me into thinking about who is the right person to tell this story. And not in the sense that, if you’re not from a particular community that you shouldn’t approach a story that you’re interested in, but more in the sense that when something comes to mind, the first thing you should really think of is to evaluate your own status and purpose of approaching an article, and certain privileges or biases that might have come up; assessing those to ensure that it’s going to be a safe and effective approach and process for the people that you’re reaching out to. For the article that you’re working on, ensure that it’s authentic, basically, that it involves truth telling at the end of the day.
Once you’ve come up with your idea, think also about how it is connected to your expertise and your knowledge in the area. The good thing that I always find about doing a feature article is that if it’s a particular area, or profession that you don’t have expertise in, you can reach out to professionals in the sector – artists, arts workers, curators, performers, writers who have been at it for a really long time, but also, to a certain extent, [drawing on] your own experiences and your own knowledge will really contribute to a strong feature article as well.
And then it comes down to your angles. I think even when it’s an angle that you feel like has been covered a lot in the past already – very broadly, something like diversity and inclusion – but there’s always a specific way that you can go about it that can give your piece an edge. Madeleine, when we were talking about this, you were saying a good feature article is something that tells you something you didn’t know before, and provides you with a fresh lens. So that could be really valuable.
The next thing is, know the publication you are pitching to and know what their coverage is, like the topics they’re interested in, also their readership. For example for ArtsHub, we have a very industry-focused readership. A lot of them are arts workers and artists in the sector as well.
Madeleine Swain
And that actually means looking at the site or looking at the publication that you are hoping to pitch to and getting a feel for the sort of articles that they run. We often get people asking to do a profile of an artist or ‘somebody’s coming to town, and I want to do an interview with them’. But we don’t tend to run those sorts of stories, because we will have a broader focus. If somebody’s coming to town and the show that they’re doing has implications or is echoed in other shows, we can sort of pull a story out of that, then we’d be much more likely to look at it. So just be aware of who you’re pitching to and what sort of story they’re likely to be interested in.
Celina Lei
You’ve also added a note here, Madeleine, to check who you’re sending the pitch to.
Madeleine Swain
Yeah, this is a really good one. I mean, as as an editor, you have a little bit of an ego. So, if somebody sends you an email to an editor from not just three years ago, but three editors ago, you think they don’t really know the publication, they don’t know who I am, they haven’t really done their research or done their homework. It’s always easy to find out who you should actually be targeting. I still get emails for Deborah Stone, who I don’t think has been with ArtsHub for 10 years, something like that. It’s just a little bit of extra work that makes people realise that, you know, you’re serious and if you show that you can research it makes me think you’ll probably be able to research your story as well.
On that note, also get the name spelling right when you’re writing to somebody. Spell their name right and they will notice because they will notice if you don’t and they’ll think ‘oh I’m gonna have to do a lot of work fact checking and spell checking their work when it comes in’. Just little things, but everything with an editor is about making their job easier, making their job quicker and and we appreciate those things.
Celina Lei
Just giving an example of something that I received today. If you’re using a template to send your email pitches, that is completely fine. But do remember to fill out the “xxxx” if that’s where you’re putting what the name of the different publications.
Madeleine Swain
And also, I don’t know if this is the right place to talk about the good pitch… When it comes to saving an editor time, the way you formulate the pitch makes a difference. You may have a lot of ideas for your story, but if you put them all in one email, and it’s going to take me 10 minutes to read, my eyes are going to glaze and I’ve got other things to do.
I’ve got an example here of a chap that writes for us quite often. His name’s Daniel Herborn and he sent me an email the other day. It was, ‘Good morning, hope you’ve had a good start to the week’, quick over, ‘I’ve got some story ideas here, which I think would work for ArtsHub across the comedy programs at the Adelaide fringe, and upcoming Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane comedy festivals’. So he’s telling me, he’s already got a national focus, which is great, because that’s what our site has. Then he says, ‘Please let me know if any of these grabbed you, or you’d like to discuss further’. And then after that, ‘thanks, regards, Daniel’. And then he has given me four options: the difficult second show, wellness on the festival circuit, from the courtroom to comedy, and building a following as a comedian – four different pitches. And with each of them, they’ve got four lines, short paragraph afterwards explaining the idea. I can look at those and immediately say yes, that one really suits that one really suits. And I go back to him and say we’ll do those two things.
I already know that [Daniel] can write because we’ve seen him before but he [also] knows that writing too much is taking our time. He knows what the site likes and it’s not ‘Bill Bailey is coming to town, shall I do a profile?’, it’s ‘there are all these comedy festivals but this will be a good story about comedy’.
Another thing I’d like to mention is this works for publicists, too. We recently had a fantastically clever pitch from the publicist at Red Stitch Theatre. Her name is Meg Bennett and she wrote to us because she’d got a show [she is publicising]. This isn’t really about writers, but it’s same sort of lateral thinking and just being a bit clever about your pitch. They’ve got a show that was on Red Stitch last year or the year before, and we reviewed it then but it’s coming back. So she wrote to me and said, ‘I’m not going to ask you to review it again because you already have’ – and she’s right, we wouldn’t review it again – but she said, ‘How about if you do a profile for “So you want my arts job?” on the playwright’. We have a series called ‘So you want my arts job?’, and our in-house writers do these articles about all different sorts of professions in the arts community and sector. And we hadn’t actually done one about a playwright. So, what that told me was that Meg had looked on the site and done a search of ‘So you want my arts job?’, looked at what we’ve done before and thought ‘they haven’t done playwright, this is maybe the go for this’. So we went, ‘Yes, perfect’. And she gets her coverage, she gets her publicity for Red Stitch, and we get a good article out of it. And one of our writers will do it. Again, it’s that research, looking at who you’re writing for, what they’re looking for, and targeting your pitch.
Celina Lei
As you’ve mentioned [Madeleine], sometimes it can be all about timing, as well. Like Daniel’s pitches were really good and relevant, because the comedy festival is coming up. So sometimes think about why it is important to do this piece now, why should we commission it now? Especially when you think about things like the news cycle… But also just going back a little bit on the pitch. If you’re really unsure how to structure a pitch, ArtsHub does have a pitch template. So you can always reach out to ask [for one], and it will give you the preferred word count, what should you include, like estimate draft submission and things like that, to hopefully help drive the process along a little bit.
Organising and conducting the interview
Celina Lei
Moving next to, after your pitch has been accepted: it’s got a green light, we’d love to for it to go ahead, how do you contact your interviewees? There are a few ways to go about it. If we have a publicist contact, if it’s an artist on a show, a director of a show, or a curator, we can link the writer up with the publicists say, ‘Hey, this is one of our freelance writers, they want to work on this topic, and they want to interview this person’. And then you go about organising the time among yourselves, and things like that, or you can reach out to your interviewee directly. And this is, I feel like pretty common sense, but in your email, just say, you’re the writer for xx publication, give them a little bit of a context of your article. Sometimes interviewees like to know if there are other interviewees and who they might be. [Madeleine], do you find that there are times when you shouldn’t reveal other interviewees?
Madeleine Swain
That kind of depends if it’s a sensitive topic or not. But there is one thing I’d like to say about what you shouldn’t do when you’re contacting a potential interviewee, which I’ve had one of my writers do, not at ArtsHub but before in a previous publication. She would call people up and say, ‘I’ve never done this before so I’m really excited to talk to you’. It was true, but it doesn’t sound very professional. And, and so, even if you’re new to it, you can say ‘I’m fairly new’, but make sure you keep a professional tone all throughout.
Celina Lei
Yeah, and I think it’s all right to let that curiosity drive your interview process, but if you know this is your first time, do prepare, do a little bit of research, as always, jot down two or three questions depending on the length of the interview. But also allow for the conversation to stay open, if it needs to.
Madeleine Swain
A lot of interviewees will ask, ‘Can I see the questions first?’ And that’s absolutely fine. It helps them because I know if somebody was interviewing me and they threw me some questions off the cuff, you often think later on, ‘Oh, I should have said that’. Whereas if you’ve got a bit of time to prepare, obviously, it can really help.
But, as Celina says, then when you’re asking your questions don’t just sort of rote ask. This, again, is common sense. If somebody gives you a really interesting answer, follow that train of thought for a while.
Celina Lei
I do find it helpful to set a time slot for your interview. Because, for example, our feature articles are mostly 800 to 1500 words. If your interview is 40 minutes, that’s like 2000 words of content [already], and how much are you able to include? So sometimes it’s important to stay on topic and set a time.
Madeleine Swain
Such good advice and it’s something I’ve never learned! I have never got that right, but I don’t do that much writing anymore so it’s OK.
Celina Lei
Just on the topic of communication, consider what is the best method of communication for yourself, and also for interviewees. That includes certain access needs and preparing questions in advance is really helpful. But some people might prefer to give you a written response because they can really sit down, consider and edit it if they need to. Others prefer the sort of conversational tone of a phone interview, some might prefer Zoom, because they can see body language and face to face and really make that connection as well. Do ask what people’s best method of communication is.
If you’re doing multi-person interviews, for example, you’re interviewing the actor and the director of the theatre production at the same time, do ensure that you’re sort of guiding the conversation and that each interviewee gets a chance to answer because sometimes people can just get really excited in the midst of it and kind of take over the microphone. I find it really helpful to include at least one question specific to each interviewee so that they do feel it is personalised and you care about their perspectives and opinions.
We’ve kind of touched upon the rest of this. Do you want to go on to working with your editor?
Drafting and editing process
Madeleine Swain
When you’re writing the piece – so you’ve done the pitch, you’ve done the interview, and now you’re forming it into an article – the overwhelming or overarching thing is, we do want to hear your own voice. At ArtsHub, I do all the sub-editing as well as the [wearing the] managing editing hat because I’m a pedant. So what I’m looking for, is I try to have a very light touch, I don’t like to change the way people present themselves. But what I am looking to try and do is keep things clear.
I’m looking for clarity, and that does mean grammar and spelling and those sort of things because for me, grammar is good manners. If you’ve got good grammar, people can understand what you’re trying to say and that’s all it’s about, really, I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than that.
Keep your own voice, but also, again, think about who you’re writing for and don’t overwrite. Don’t use long words just for the sake of it. ArtsHub is not an academic essay. We’re not looking for footnotes; we’re not looking for words of several syllables when a short word will do. We’re looking for clarity and easy reading – people need to be able to read it easily. It’s online, a lot of people are looking on their phone on the commute and reading your article. So, if things are really obtuse or complicated, it’s probably not the right place to be writing. We do cover stuff that has a more complicated story to tell, but even with those deep themes or topics, try and make it as simple and clear as you possibly can. Does that make sense?
Celina Lei
And we have published a piece from the Amplify Collective by one of the writers, Nicole Smith, who did a piece on ‘Tips on accessible writing’, which is really helpful just around the use of language to reach a broader readership as well
Madeleine Swain
If you’ve pitched to a site like ArtsHub, your pitch has been accepted and we’ve published it, and then you want to go ahead and do another piece, go back and have look at the piece that we published and see and compare it with what you have submitted in the first place. See what the changes are, what has been cut out, if anything – often I will hardly cut anything at all, but if it has, have a look and think about what’s been changed and why it’s been changed, and bear that in mind the next time around.
Celina Lei
I know no one likes to go through a 50-page editorial style guide, so this is your opportunity to pick up some of the changes in terms of editorial style as well. Things like quotation marks and en dashes over em dashes. Sometimes I’m not the best at these things and Madeleine picks it up…
Madeleine Swain
I think going through a 50-page style guide is a really good idea actually, Celina, and I’m always happy to share it with pretty much anybody. I don’t know if it’s 50 pages long – maybe it is. It’s lovely reading, there are jokes in there, aren’t there? I’m sure I put in some jokes.
Celina Lei
Madeleine has tried her best to make it as entertaining as possible, using a lot of my examples.
Madeleine Swain
Oh, well, I think what Celina is talking about there is the dangling modifier. Do you all know what dangling modifiers are?
It’s quite a common thing that people don’t know any more, but it’s something that really, really bugs me. If you can remove dangling modifiers from your work before you ever pitch it to me, you’ll certainly do better. But [a dangling modifier] is when the second clause in a two-clause sentence doesn’t align with the first clause. I’m not a grammarian and I can’t really put it in better words than that. But just look it up, dangling modifier and say, ‘Oh right, now I understand I will never use them’. You see them all the time, you see them in The Age.
Celina Lei
Just before we move on to structure, a little bit around the tone of a feature article. We pitch topics because we’re super passionate about them, but we also want to avoid being very, I’d say, marketing almost. As writers and journalists, we do get a lot of press releases where everyone wants to say the best things about everything. Give credit where it’s due, but also be very conscious of whether things have been really hyped up and the overuse of certain adjectives.
I’m moving on to structure. Because there are interviews involved, you will, in most cases, end up with a transcript. But what we don’t want to publish is a complete transcript of your interview. We want the structure to reflect certain topics of interest, certain things that really popped out that would be almost like a hook to the readers and connecting those. Especially if you have more than one interviewee, don’t go, they say, she says, he says, but [it’s] more about connecting those ideas to make it really flow, I think is really important and drawing together the major points of focus. But also combining facts, quotes and ideas.
Madeleine Swain
Apart from when you’re doing a specific op-ed piece (or an opinion piece) where your personal experience is really irrelevant, try to take yourself out of the story as much as you can. This is the same with reviews. People do sort of put themselves in reviews a little bit, but the times we see ‘I went to see this’ and ‘I thought this was great’ and you know that’s not a great start. Try and remove yourself from the story as much as you can. You are a journalist and you’re reporting on something.
Celina Lei
I think sometimes there’s this sort of idea that people can only include their own observations if the sentence starts with ‘I’ and that’s not necessarily the case. The first-person narrative is obviously something we want to avoid in feature articles, but observations are still something I think that can be included.
Something else that is relatively new for writers… I’m not sure some freelancers might have come across this is SEO. Does anyone know what [SEO is]? I see some people nodding. SEO for ArtsHub basically equates to searchability, the searchability of your article on the internet. Because we are a digital publication, that is something that’s really important for us. I think there are probably a lot of YouTube tutorials that you could watch, if you have no idea what SEO is. Basically [once you’ve drafted your article], a keyword is going to give it the highest searchability score, and you want that keyword to be consistent throughout.
Madeleine Swain
It’s about using your keywords in your opening paragraphs and weighting the article at the top with the themes and the keywords and all the search engine optimisation notes that you’re looking for. A lot of people won’t do it automatically.
If you have something published to ArtsHub [and the first paragraph] doesn’t seem very much like the one you submitted, that’s usually what’s going on. We might have changed stuff at the top just to help out the SEO, which is still something we don’t brilliantly understand, but our digital team are more across them and the editors are all learning as we go and trying to improve all the time. It’s a moving field, Google Analytics changes all the time.
Celina Lei
And SEO takes into account the accessibility of your article as well, which includes the length of your paragraphs. So sometimes if you have too many things going on in one sentence or in one paragraph, SEO actually does prefer for you to break it and make it as clear as possible.
Madeleine Swain
It’s actually awful that the the advice is to write – I think this is even for publications like The Age – for grade nine level, which is, well today, apparently grade nines are all illiterate anyway. That’s not the area that we focus on most but it does mean shorter sentences and, again, not too many hugely long words, if you can help it. Teachers know and that’s just sadly the way of the world it is.
Celina Lei
In terms of using references and quotes in your article, be really clear whether the quote is from the interview. For example, we often say this person ‘tells ArtsHub‘, which indicates that this is during a conversation with an ArtsHub writer. But some articles might also include quotes from other publications and you really need to clearly link them to it. Yes, and it is possible to plagiarise your own articles as well. If you are referencing a previous previous piece that you wrote, do link those and specify as well to ensure that we’re upholding best practices.
Madeleine Swain
And talking about plagiarism. Because there is so much content out there now and we all see and read so many things, you have to also be aware of unconscious plagiarism. There are other terms for this as well, “subconscious cobbling” I think is one of the expressions I’ve been told about recently. That is where you’ve read 20 reviews of a show and then you come to write your review, and just a couple of terms or references or style or structure will seep through into the way you write if you’re not careful. Some of our writers been picked up for doing that.
I still do reviews outside of ArtsHub, film reviews, and so I try not to read any other reviews before I do it just because you find yourself influenced without even realising it. And of course, then there’s actual outright plagiarism and those people should be put in the stocks, obviously.
Celina
Onto the topic of writing feature articles that are a little bit more critical because, we love our sector but we also often know of its flaws.
Madeleine Swain
We are there to interrogate it.
Celina Leu
Yes. So sometimes, you might be pitching a feature article that is critical on a certain topic or a certain position, issue or a person – hopefully not, but as a publication [considering] when we do give a right of reply, which is, in most instances. We give the person or the company that the writer may be critical of a right of reply.
But also, sometimes it’s best that you let them know what the content of the article is and be upfront about it when you reach out for a response. Even if they don’t reply, then that’s something you can actually list in the article. You can say, ‘ArtsHub attempted to reach out on this topic to this person at this date, and we are yet to hear reply.’ It just means that, as writers and journalists, we’ve done our due diligence and the rest is up to them once the article is out there, really.
Madeleine Swain
And if you are writing anything critical of any organisation or any particular individual, of course, you have to be even more rigorous about your fact checking. And I mean, that goes without saying, obviously, doesn’t it?
Celina Lei
At the same time, I think at the end of the day, you can still retain your criticality but… Working with ArtsHub as in-house writers all the time, we’re managing relationships with publicists, and media and comms teams, and PR companies. And I think in most cases we are still able to build up trusting relationships, but retain that level of criticality, and journalistic independence. And know how to deal with backlash.
Madeleine Swain
We’ve recently had some articles published, and I’m thinking particularly about one of our Amplify writers, who has done other work for us as well, has been targeted on social media and in other ways. Some awful things have happened, where they’ve been targeted for things they’ve written and things they’ve said. If that ever happens to you, or to any other writers, the first thing to do is, well, if it’s a dangerous situation, obviously contact the authorities or the police, but also get in touch with us straightaway. People that have been written about on any site or ArtsHub, they should contact the publication, not the writer – it’s appalling when they do because it’s just not professional. But yeah, always, always let us know if anything happens or if you get any feedback that is concerning, detrimental to your mental health or anything like that, because we will take steps and do whatever we can to protect you.
Celina
Exactly, and even with right of reply, they should always focus on the issue at hand, and any attacks to the writers will not be tolerated. (Madeleine Swain: Zero).
I’ve sort of touched upon this a little bit, the benefits of writing a feature article and I’m really speaking from my experience working at ArtsHub, especially being based in Melbourne. Different to reviews where you’ve really got to see the show to form your own judgement or opinion, with a feature article you’re really less geographically bound. I’ve covered stories in WA, in Queensland, in Alice Springs and Tasmania – it’s a phone call away, to the topic and to people who work in those areas.
Madeleine Swain
Well, our team has spread out all over Australia. Most of our team are in Melbourne, but we have our Visual Arts Editor is based in Mittagong, we have a stringer one day a week in Perth, and another one in Brisbane. And then we have regular contributors. There’s one in South Australia and others spread across and they are not confined to writing about their state or their city. They can write national articles too, which is one of the things we like best about ArtsHub and the Amplify Collective, of course, meant we had writers from all over the place with so many different backgrounds and lived experiences that just gave us some fantastic content and different perspectives. That’s the sort of stuff we love because there are only so many of us and we only have so many perspectives. So, the more freelance stuff we get the better if we can afford it in the budget.
What makes a good feature and common areas of improvement
Celina Lei
Yeah, for sure. Before we wrap up, and we want to leave plenty of time for questions as well, I thought it would just be good to quickly note, three points that a really good feature would have or that we will look for and three points that are common areas of improvement in feature articles. So did you want to go into your first point of a good feature, Madeleine?
Madeleine Swain
Tells me something I didn’t know, and gives me some information that I didn’t have.
Celina Lei
And my second point was sort of the same, but invite fresh perspectives and also authenticity, and that it’s informed by lived experience, whether that is from the interviewee or yourself. I think it really comes through even though you’re not specifying what an experience is. It’s just that generosity in the way that the interviewee has chosen to share with you, which is really a privilege as a writer to have all of those perspectives comes through.
Madeleine Swain
And thirdly, that it tells a story. So, it has a beginning and a middle and an end. But in clear language with clarity and without the use of unnecessary, without the use of any jargon, really, unless it’s relevant, which is rare.
Celina Lei
If you need a paragraph to explain what the word you’ve previously used was, and two Wikipedia links, then maybe don’t include this.
Madeleine Swain
Sometimes it is appropriate, there’s a word that will be used in the article because it’s relevant and you might think, I’m not sure if people will know this. I think there was something today that came up, it was about glory holes. Well, most of us know what glory holes are, but I’m not going to assume that all of the ArtsHub readers do, so I’ll put a little quick link into Wikipedia. Because I didn’t want everybody going and Googling it and sort of having a bit of a shock. So I thought it was safer to just put a link there for you – I do all the work for you.
Celina Lei
Welcome to the world of feature articles, right! OK, three points that are common areas of improvement in a feature article.
Madeleine Swain
Bad grammar, a lack of fact checking and lack of spell checking. Again, it’s not just when you’re pitching to an editor and getting their name right. If you’re writing about somebody you’ve spoken to, make sure you get their name right. And anybody else that’s included in the article.
We often publish a lot of reviews and at the bottom, they will have a list of all the cast and creatives involved, if say it’s a performing arts show. But elsewhere in the article, they have spelled the names incorrectly. I’m thinking you’ve actually got them at the bottom of the page, you just cross check and give it another read through before you press send. That’s my advice.
Celina Lei
Yes and we’ve spoken on structure a little bit. There are times where a Q&A might be appropriate, and it might give a really clear outline of the conversation.
Madeleine Swain
[For example] ‘So you want my arts job?’.
Celina Lei
‘So you want my arts job?’ is in Q&A format. It depends on the context. But I think being able to make a feature article flow really well around the topics of interest is really important.
The third one I had, we’ve also touched upon, this is the use of first person ‘I’. Personally, I think if I’m a reader, and I’m reading ‘I’ all the time, it takes me a little bit out of the reading experience, because I feel like this is the writer’s experience and I don’t really relate to that.
Madeleine Swain
It’s sort of like I’m reading their diary instead.
Celina Lei
Which can sometimes be fun if we know the person, but it becomes a little bit too personal and that sort of distances the reader to a certain extent.
Madeleine Swain
Not always, though. There are always examples, or exceptions, that prove the rule. There was somebody who wrote a review recently about a production that had a lot of grief. This writer had put themselves in quite a lot and then at the end, they explained why and I went, ‘Whoa’, you know, it’s a real blow to the solar plexus. But without that information at the end, it wouldn’t have made sense, but when it did, it made the piece much more powerful. So sometimes it is relevant and appropriate.
Q&A
Celina
And we’re at 6.45, which is the right time that we planned to open up to questions.
Madeleine Swain
We timed this so carefully when we did it 78 times earlier didn’t we? OK, does anybody have any questions?
Audience member
I just wanted to ask you a bit about the different types of interviews. You know, in terms of whether you make notes or whether you just require… if it’s a Skype do you just have it recorded or you take a recorder with you. I haven’t done very much of it, but here can be some awkward kinds of things when you’re with somebody and scrambling around making notes.
Madeleine Swain
I always have recorded everything. Because I can’t read my own writing afterwards because it’s scribbled, but also you’ve got it there if there’ a problem as well and you can just check back. ‘Exactly what was the format of that sentence?’
The tricky ones were if you were in the olden days, it used to be when you’re on the telephone and you couldn’t [rely on] record[ing]. I once did this wonderful interview with Isabelle Huppert from Paris, and none of the recording worked – it was heartbreaking, because well, it’s Isabelle Huppert! But usually I record everything. And if you’re on the phone or they can’t see you, you always have to make sure you tell them first and check that it’s OK [to record]. Just legally, ‘I’m recording this, is that OK with you?’
Celina Lei
Yeah, I also do record and the transcription software we use this Otter, which is really useful, because it will also differentiate between your voice and the speaker’s voice and make outlines for you. But I also do take notes, because I also had an instance where my thing didn’t record and I was able to make out enough of the conversation for my article through my notes. Sometimes it can just be a bit of a pointer when you’re looking back on it as well, just to see… When you’re looking at, you know, 800 words, the ones that you really want in your article will become quite apparent.
Madeleine Swain
And there are such great transcription services now. In the old days every interview I did, I would have to write it all out or type it all out by hand, which took you months, whereas now there it is.
Celina Lei
Just while we’re on that topic, I’m going to ask you a question, Madeleine, because I feel like sometimes, especially writers who are starting out they don’t know how much they need to clean up in the interview and quotes, things like ‘um’, ‘like’ and ‘I think’.
Madeleine Swain
Yeah, take them out because the person you’re interviewing or quoting in the story will never come back and say, ‘You took out my “I think”’, they will only be glad that you’ve made them look smarter and cleaner, and that they constructed a whole sentence. Sometimes it actually even means just jiggling their sentence around a little bit, tweaking it. And a lot of interviewees will ask to see what they’ve said and they’ll do that themselves. They’ll just change the articles a little bit.
Also whether you do let them see the article before it goes to press, that is also a subject up for debate. Sometimes it’s appropriate. Sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you might just send them their quotes. That’s often the way but not what everybody else has said, because that’s none of their business till it’s been published.
Celina Lei
A little bit of a trick that I found if you do share the draft with your interviewee, for whatever reason, say, ‘Please review the draft for fact-checking purposes’. That really helps in terms of the amount of things they really want to jiggle around.
Madeleine Swain
Because otherwise they’ll try and rewrite it for you if you’re not careful, to put themselves in a good light. I mean, who wouldn’t? But yes, clean up the sentences so they make sense as well. Because when we’re talking as I’ve done all night, I don’t speak in clean sentences and there are big gaps and people don’t look like that in print or on the page. Anybody else? It’s Melinda, isn’t it?
Audience member
I just want to go a bit further into that question. How do you make a decision about whether to send a draft to an interviewee? I’ve always had the practice of if I’ve had a personal conversation or an interview with them that brings up personal information, talking about their life or their thoughts or feelings, I’ve always had a personal preference to send it to them for approval before it’s submitted to publication. But there’s been a few times where people sort of said, ‘What are you doing that for?’ So is there a protocol now or how do you make the decision around whether to do that or not?
Madeleine Swain
I think somebody like Melinda has a lot of experience. I think it’s your sense and your intuition about what’s the gut feeling and what’s the best thing to do in that situation. But if, as you say, if you’ve spoken to somebody and have formed a personal relationship with them, it’s polite to do that and and if they say I don’t need to see it, fine, but the offer is certainly nice.
Audience member
It’s not an expectation across publications that you don’t or you do?
Madeleine Swain
No, I think it’s a case by case basis. Certainly with ArtsHub, isn’t it? When it’s appropriate.
Celina Lei
If you’re unsure, just ask. Even before you start the drafting process, [ask] ‘Would you like to see a copy of the draft before it goes to my sub editor or before it goes to publish?’ (Madeleine Swain: And also talk to the editor)
Audience member
So in terms of interview, I wonder to what extent this article is considered a co-author with the interviewee, because obviously much content is also generated by the interviewee. And it’s the interaction between the interviewer and the interviewee. Does this question makes sense? So about the authorship here.
Celina Lei
I think you’re still the one guiding the conversation and as we said, how do you structure it is really important. I guess it might come up more in instances where they’re giving you a written response, because all of that editing that the writer does, for example, all of that construction of the article, they’re sort of taking part in it. But I’ve never really come across an instance where the interviewee asked to be a co-author of an article.
Madeleine Swain
Yeah, I don’t think it would happen, really. Even if it’s a Q&A you’re still the author. You might say in the excerpt at the top, so and so speaks with so and so about this and this and this, but you’re the author, it’s your article, you posed the questions and you wrote the piece up. So yeah, the interviewee would never be the co-author as a rule. I’m sure you’ll find it an exception now, but not as a rule.
Celina Lei
And you’re the one working with the editor because that is an integral part of the process. Do we have one?
Thuy On
I’ve just thought of a question while you’re both up there.
Madeleine Swain
This is Thuy, she’s also [a part of] ArtsHub and our Reviews Editor. So she’s gonna throw us a curly one now probably to catch us out.
Thuy On
Some interviewees expect payment, which is just really weird. But just to clarify, we don’t pay interviewees. That’s all I needed to point out, because they just kind of go, ‘Am I getting paid for this?’ And then we kind of go, ‘No, why do you expect to be paid?’ We are not a big production company, we don’t have squillions of money to throw at people.
Madeleine Swain
Or even our writers, we have very limited budgets. And there is a tiny exception to that, though, usually as interviewees, no, people don’t get paid, and they should understand that. But we are also at ArtsHub, doing a series of webinars and podcasts with Creative Victoria and sometimes the people that will participate in those, they will either be artists, or they will be arts sector workers. If they are art sector workers, then their time has been covered by their organisation, but if they’re artists, we’re actually taking them away from the time they will be spending on their practice and they’re not being compensated for that. So we will, as far as we can, we will pay them for their time. But that’s the only exception to that, that rule.
Thuy On
So if you are scouting for comment from various people just say ‘No’, if they say, ‘Do I get paid for talking to you?’
Madeleine Swain
Sorry, we can talk to somebody else. That’s it.
Anybody else? See say ‘money’ and everybody is not talking to you anymore. And we’ve been paid to be here… No this is free! Also just mentioning that you all know about the event in two weeks on the 27th [February]? There will be a bit of finger food and a few drinks, first drink is free and then there’ll be bar prices, but the finger food will be supplied. We’re not charging for that either and the rest of the team should all be there for that as well.
Any other questions you can think of in the next couple of weeks, ‘I wish I knew a bit more about this’, you can ask us directly on the 27th if you want to come along. Yes, back here again but no chairs I think, maybe a few around the outside…
Audience member
Thank you, I was just wondering if you ever do more series, like it’s a continuation of several articles on a different subject?
Celina Lei
So the question was, do we ever do a series, like a continuation of several articles on the same topic.
Madeleine Swain
Jessi [Ryan’s] three-piece drag queens piece.
Celina Lei
Because we do have a word count and the reason we have a word count is because sometimes people’s attention spans are very short. But also, if it is a topic that you feel like deserves to be broken up into several parts, and each part has a sort of distinctive theme and focus, then you’re welcome to pitch it in several parts. We’re there any sort of specific examples that comes to mind for you?
Audience member
Was just thinking generally about artists in their practice and potentially shows or like deep dives into one piece of work and how that came about.
Celina Lei
OK, so for ArtsHub, we normally don’t do like an analysis into a single artwork and as Madeleine mentioned, we don’t really do artist profiles. But if, for example, you’re bringing together three artists on the topic of what has your career trajectory been like since – I don’t want to say the word – lockdowns that might break into a three-parter. One might focus on the professional, one might focus on mental health, for example.
Madeleine Swain
One of Amplify writers, who also has freelance written a few things for us as well before joining Amplify, did a three-part series on queer history, focusing on some different drag queens through the sort of 70s/80s and coming up to the present day. That was a huge topic and it needed at least three articles to cover. So yeah, it happens sometimes. How are we doing for time?
Celina Lei
We’re good. We’re at 6.59, one minute.
Madeleine Swain
Yes, jump in.
Audience member
OK. Before I came here, I didn’t know much about feature writing. Just gave it a search and I wasn’t quite clear if Arts Centre has a website and a section to publish feature writing articles? Do we have sections to publish the feature?
Celina
On ArtsHub, we have some main news types: feature articles, news articles, opinions and analysis (op-eds) and reviews. The main difference between a feature article and an op-ed is the fact that for feature articles, you have interviewees, right?
If you’re interested in writing for ArtsHub, we can leave an email, you can reach out to our editor inbox, do you want to write this down? I can give you an email for anyone who’s here and online as well. So it’s editor@artshub.com.au and I usually manage that editor inbox, but I’ll forward any relevant information or pitches and I can send you a feature pitch template if you want as well. Just reach out if you’re interested and that template will give you a better idea of what we’re looking for in a pitch.
Audience member
How you mentioned about fact checking. These days, I think there’s, it’s not really feminist theory, but there’s lots of, we call it, felt experience on certain things and, in that case, it is the embodied knowing. Sometimes we can’t really reach out to check… stuff in that case. So would you still consider this kind of writing?
Madeleine Swain
Again, it’s a case-by-case basis, when it’s appropriate, then that’s fine. But if you’re talking about a specific organisation and you make a claim about them that can be disproven, or you don’t spell the name right, then that’s the sort of fact checking I’m talking. If you say, for example, that they received $4 million from Creative Australia and they actually only received $5, then that’s the sort of checking we need to make sure happens.
Madeleine Swain
Thank you. One last one from Thuy.
Thuy On
This is not a question, just a query quick comment. The editor inbox and the reviews inbox, we get inundated with emails every single day. So if you want to make a freelance pitch for a feature writing article you’re thinking of, actually make sure you say in the subject matter, so Celina and Madeleine or whoever else, can actually go right there’s a freelance pitch. If you just leave it blank we’ll just probably ignore it because we get emails from just about everyone. Just make it really clear, say ‘Freelance pitch’ and then ‘comedy festival’ or whatever else just clarify things.
Madeleine Swain
Making our lives easier is great. OK, I think we’ve reached the limit of our time. On my behalf thank you so much, again, everybody for coming and for being so attentive and listening and not heckling at all. There was no heckling, no four-letter words. So thank you. And Celina?
Celina Lei
That’s all. Thanks everyone.
To watch the first workshop in this series, ‘Crafting Insightful Criticism’.
ArtsHub received support from The Channel – Arts Centre Melbourne to host this workshop series; check out the full PLAY program.
