Pitch Perfect: How to Sell Your Story to an Editor

This virtual event featured editors Heidi Kyser and Peter Rubin talking about what makes for a good pitch-the kind of pitch email editors will actually open and respond to-and the writer/editor relationship.
Desert Companion welcomed Heidi Kyser as staff writer in January 2014. In 2018, she was promoted to senior writer and producer, working for both DC and State of Nevada. She produced KNPR’s first podcast, the Edward R. Murrow Regional Award-winning Native Nevada, in 2020. The following year, she returned her focus full-time to Desert Companion, becoming Deputy Editor, which meant she was next in line to take over when longtime editor Andrew Kiraly left in July 2022.
In her 20 years as a print and on-air journalist, Heidi’s done it all, from news writing for a weekly business publication, to producing multimedia stories for an alternative weekly, winning a handful of Eddie, Maggie, and Nevada Press Association awards along the way. She got into journalism after leaving academics to pursue a more pedestrian form of research and writing, but managed to lock down a master’s degree from Harvard on her way out.
When she’s not camping, hiking, riding her bike, or doing some other outdoor activity with her husband Peter, Heidi is most likely to be found on a yoga mat, being spotted by her 90-pound American Bulldog Buster.
Peter Rubin is head of publishing at Automattic, where he oversees the publications Longreads and The Atavist. He's also a journalist and critic with more than two decades of experience covering culture, technology, and their intersection. He was previously the founding executive editor of Level, a (then) Medium-owned publication for and about Black and Brown men, and a senior editor and senior correspondent at Wired, where he spent eight years overseeing culture coverage in the magazine and online. Prior to arriving at Wired, he was executive editor of Complex and a staff writer for GQ, and penned cover stories for Elle, Details, GQ, XXL, and other titles. He also won Jeopardy! a couple of times, which can make for a fun story. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife.
This virtual workshop was moderated by the writer and UNLV MFA candidate Krista Diamond.