We’re open for pitches! You can fill out the form at the bottom of this page to submit your pitch.
We’re currently looking for a small number of articles. While we’ll likely only be able to publish a few of the great ideas we receive, we’re encouraging all interested athletes, coaches, track fans, and anybody else with something to say about the world of track and field to apply.
We’re primarily interested in track and field topics that have a global appeal. About 50% of our readers are in the United States, and about 75% are in North America. We’ll occasionally consider local stories if we think they’ll resonate emotionally with a broader audience.
Open Pitches
We’re currently accepting pitches for the following categories on our website:
We pay $0.10 US/word for articles in the following categories:
- Voices (Opinion): Do you have strong opinions about track and field? This is the section for you. Most of our opinion pieces range from 600 to 1000 words, with approximately 700–800 words being the ideal length. Here’s an example: https://theovalupdate.com/fred-kerley-enhanced-games/
- Coaches Corner: We’re interested in publishing educational articles on a wide variety of track and field topics. These articles primarily target coaches and athletes and typically run around 1,000 words.
- Interviews: We’re interested in a limited number of interviews with athletes, coaches, and other people involved in the sport. Typically, these articles are also around 1,000 words.
We’re also interested in articles in the following categories, but we don’t currently offer payment for these articles at this time:
- First-person narrative: We’re interested in publishing a limited number of first-person narratives from athletes and other people involved in the sport.
Other Information
Your pitch should provide us with enough information to:
- Understand your idea
- Convince us why you’re the best person to write on this topic
- Get an idea of your writing style
Generally, this can be achieved in about three paragraphs. If you need help formulating your pitch, here are some examples of successful pitches that you can take a look at.
- We’re expecting to receive many more pitches than we can publish, and we may not be able to respond individually to every request. If you haven’t heard from us within two weeks, you can assume we’re passing and feel free to pitch the article elsewhere.
- We ask you to limit your number of pitches to no more than one every three months
- At this time, we’re not interested in general news stories since we handle these in-house
- When sending assignment contracts, we’ll send a target word count. Payment won’t be increased for exceeding the word count unless agreed in advance.
- We’ll send you a copy of our style guide with your assignment.
On AI technology like ChatGPT – The rise of AI technology has changed the workflow of many editorial teams, including ours. AI can be a great tool in the research and development of your article, but we’re not interested in articles entirely written with AI. If your pitch is clearly written by ChatGPT or other programs, we’re almost certainly not going to accept your pitch. If we were interested in these types of articles, we would write them ourselves.
Occasionally, we may publish articles with a regional appeal if the story is right.
We have a zero-plagiarism policy. We run all articles through plagiarism checkers before publication. Plagiarized articles will be killed without payment.