In the past four years, Mill Media has become an important new home for great writing and innovative long form reporting in the UK. Most of our stories are written by staff writers (we’re hiring staff writers and editors, by the way), but we also have a network of brilliant freelancers, which we are always looking to expand. We would welcome your pitch – please read the guidance below before getting in touch.

What we’re looking for: Our publications are built around publishing stories that readers couldn’t get anywhere else – including narrative features, reported profiles, cultural essays, data pieces and groundbreaking investigations. These stories must be based in the cities we cover – Manchester, London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow and Liverpool – and they need to feel completely different to anything else that has been published on that topic. The most important thing we look for when we commission is ideas with a real story to them: a strong narrative at the heart of them, often with a key character the piece is built around and always with a new argument or a sense of revealing something new. Please read some of our strongest stories before you pitch to get a sense of the kinds of pieces we run.

Who we are looking for: In most cases, we’re looking for contributors who have a particularly strong and compelling writing style. The thing we’re best known for is publishing pieces that that are both thoughtful and well written – stories that transport and delight readers as well as giving them new information about the world around them. When we assess pitches, we tend to look closely at previous features or non-news writing to assess the strength of a contributor’s writing, including their humour, the originality of their sentences and how they build tension in a narrative and hold readers’ attention. The exception is exclusives – if you pitch us a strong scoop, we won’t worry too much about your writing style because the story can be written in a newsier format or we can pair you with one of our staff writers.

What we’re not looking for: Stories pitched must be totally original: we don’t run stories based on press releases or that have run in another form elsewhere. If a story has already received coverage in the press before, we will only run a story that offers completely new details or is done in a totally different way. We’re also not into stories that don’t have a very clear angle to them (often pitched as “Here’s an interesting topic – I’m going to speak to a few people who are involved”) or stories that feel like local versions of a national story (“There’s a local case study in Manchester of a story covered in the Guardian”). Please don’t pitch national stories or stories about areas we don’t cover, and don’t pitch features that are thinly veiled ‘hot takes’ and are intended to tell readers what to think without offering new insights and reporting. We do publish reviews of books, plays exhibitions, but only really big, significant ones.

What we pay: We agree a fee with writers when we make a commission and our fees vary greatly depending on the type of story and the location of the writer (it’s much more expensive to live as a writer in London than it is in Liverpool etc, and our fees reflect that). We don’t have a standard word rate because different types of stories require such different amounts of work and standard word rates reward stories that are fast to write and don’t properly pay for stories that take lots of reporting. Some examples as a rough guide:

• At the bottom end, we might offer around £150 to £250 for a review of a new play at the Royal Exchange or a colour report about a protest march, or a little more if it’s in London.
• We might pay £200 to £400 for a 1,500-word feature that doesn’t require extensive reporting, depending on how much work is involved and the location and experience of the writer (we tend to spend a lot less time editing writers who have done this many times before).
• We’ve also now created a larger budget for very ambitious stories: if a London-based writer pitched a 5,000-word story about a criminal case or profile that involves dozens of interviews and court visits over several months, we would happily pay between £1,500 to £2,500 if we felt it would have a big impact.
• We also cover reporting expenses if they are agreed in advance with the commissioning editor.

How to pitch: Please send us your pitch via our pitching form, which then puts your idea into a spreadsheet that our editors can review at our next editorial meeting. If for some reason the form isn’t working, please email your pitch to pitches@millmediaco.uk, outlining the idea in a couple of paragraphs and including links to your previous work. Please don’t expect a rapid response – we try to come back to writers within a week, but in many cases that isn’t possible if we are discussing the idea among several editors. We may ask you a few questions in response or commission the story, offering a fee and deadline.

How to write your story: We have developed some basic guidelines about reporting and writing for us, and how to get paid, that you can read here.

Don’t forget: We’re also hiring staff writers and editors across multiple cities.