Pitch Us - The Margin

About The Margin: Who we are, how we operate, and who we serve

The Margin was founded on the 40th anniversary of the environmental justice movement which began in North Carolina. We are the only newsroom exclusively dedicated to reporting on environmental justice in the United States. 

Reporting at The Margin is by, for, and with communities on the frontlines of environmental and climate injustice. We work with journalists, writers, and photographers who are proximate to or reflective of the communities their reporting on. That means we want to get a sense of the communities and stakeholders you have access to and your relationship to those communities. You can read more about our founder/EIC here and our mission and founding principles here.

On our editorial process: 

• We are proud of our rigorous approach that is helmed by editors who are deeply involved in the reporting process from story conception to data analysis to fact check to publication. We pour a lot of resources into these stories and want to work closely with you to ensure your reporting is revelatory and impactful. 
• All of our stories feature bespoke interactive data visualizations to illustrate the environmental harms at stake, and we work with reporters—those who regularly analyze data to first timers—to conceive of and execute these elements. 
• We encourage our reporters to develop rich narrative and immersive scenes that establish a sense of place and offer our readers an in through the five senses. 
• We work collaboratively and increasingly hyper-locally. We also welcome pitches from fellow nonprofit newsrooms, in particular. 

What we're looking for—and passing on

Topics/approaches we'd like to see [updated March 2026]: 

• Topics top of our editors' minds: food justice, agriculture, energy/infrastructure, biodiversity & conservation, 
• Pitches from regions, states we've yet to cover: Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, the Midwest, and the Northeast 
• Pitches in the deep South where communities are disproportionately burdened by environmental and climate injustice
• Stories that elevate solutions from the frontlines of environmental and climate injustice
• Investigations into data centers with under-explored angles, new findings, fresh approaches 
• Wildfire coverage, particularly from states like Oklahoma
• We encourage Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and those from historically oppressed communities to pitch us

What we're not looking for: 

• Press releases 
• AI-generated story ideas or reporting 
• We do not accept or produce AI-generated story ideas, images, or the original content on our site. Our editors will not reply to pitches generated by AI 
• Stories with a focus outside of the U.S. and its territories 

Our previous coverage: 

We are open to creative approaches, and out-of-the-box story formats, like our participatory framework in the feature story "Breathing After BioLab." Here is the kind of work we've commissioned in the past: 

• Explanatory journalism (Examples here and here)
• FOIA-driven investigations (Examples here, here, and here) 
• Deeply-reported features (Examples here, here, and here) 
• Collaborations: 
  • Between photojournalists & reporters
  • With nonprofit/local newsrooms 

How to pitch us

In the body of an email to contact@themargin.us, please include the following (no attachments, please): 

• What's the story you want to tell? (1-2 paragraphs) 
• Why is this an important story now and why are you the best person to report it? 
• Media review: What other reporting has been done on this topic and what sets your pitch apart? Please include links to previous reporting on your topic.
• Tell us about your access to the key stakeholders, people most-impacted by your topic/pitch. 
  • Who have you spoken to thus far? 
  • What is your relationship with these communities? 
  • Do you have an idea of the people who will anchor the piece? Or will you be building new relationships? 
• Optional but encouraged: what kind of data can support this story? We encourage reporters to come to us with an early sense of existing data that we can showcase or a notion of which entities we need to FOIA to shake data loose. 

Next steps

We will respond if we are interested in moving forward with your story. We will do our best to reply to every pitch. 

If you don't hear from us within 30 days assume that it is not a fit. 

If we like it, you'll hear from us within 2 weeks.