How to pitch and write comment pieces

Each week, Social Housing’s comment section features new opinion and technical insights from finance leaders and housing sector experts. A selection of these are also brought directly to readers’ inboxes through our fortnightly comment bulletin and weekly news bulletins.

 

While we do not accept unsolicited articles, we maintain a rolling schedule of contributors and we are happy to receive pitches to complement these.

 

We particularly welcome pitches from, or on behalf of, authors who support our commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion.

 

1. How to pitch

 

To make your pitch, please send an email to commentdesk@socialhousing.co.uk, CCing Michael Lloyd, with a short summary of the angle and key points you would like to cover in the comment piece. (Please do not send fully written drafts.)

 

Please also include the name and job title of the intended author.

 

2. Article submission

We will then let you know if we want to commission the piece and agree with you a date for submission of your full article.

 

We will give an indication as to when the article would run (although we may sometimes need to change the publication date, reject an article or request that you make changes to it).

 

Alternatively, if we have offered you a pre-agreed slot in our rolling comment schedule for a much later date, we request that you contact us two weeks ahead of your article submission date to pitch us the intended subject of the article and confirm who the author will be. This is so that we can ensure the subject is topical and suitable for our readers, and avoids any duplication.

 

Any comment submitted to us needs to be:

 

• No more than 800 words long (and above a minimum of 500 words)
• Exclusive to Social Housing and not pitched to, or published, anywhere else (including on your own website) before or after publication on our site. (However, after publication you may share a link to the article on our site, with full attribution, or share the link on social media)
• Original work, authored by a real person, and not written or edited by AI software
• Attributable to a single author or, where strictly necessary, a maximum of two co-authors
• Accompanied by a recent high res, colour headshot of the author(s) (300dpi+ or over 1MB in size, taken against a light/plain background), which will be used by our production team to create the byline image published alongside the article. Please send this in advance of your article submission so we can ensure it is suitable

3. Tips for writing for us

Social Housing’s readers are busy finance and funding-focused leaders and senior professionals within the housing sector. Things to consider are:

 

• Is your chosen subject topical, and why will it be of interest to readers?
• How does your role, experience and organisation make you best placed to write about it?
• Is it new? (Please refer to our previous comment pieces to avoid duplication)
• Have you included the facts, figures and data sources (and their web links) to back up your argument?
• Have you avoided salesy language?
• We are unable to accept write-ups of sponsored/commercial roundtables, or comment pieces written in the style of features that introduce quotes from named individuals outside of your organisation (eg “at a recent webinar, Named Person said ‘xxx’.”), unless these have already been published online (eg in a report or news article). This is because it deviates from the ‘comment’ style and we don’t have capacity to verify quotes in this section.

 

We reserve the right to edit or cut down your piece, but any substantial changes will be discussed with you prior to publication.