Here Are All My Rejected Pitches From the Last 6 Months

I feel like a valued part of the Gawker staff, but every time we have a pitch meeting, I have to confront the fact that I might exist in a different reality than most of my coworkers. I like to pitch blogs and essays about small, observable phenomena. But every Tuesday for the last six months, I re-learn that the things I notice have no relation to how everyone else on staff perceives the materiality of the real world. If the pitch gets rejected, nearly 100 percent of the time it’s because the editor-in-chief of this website deemed it “not real.”

Is this gaslighting? I think these are keen observations and once again I can’t help but think I’m being held to a different standard than everyone else around here.

At my editor’s request, I went through all six months of my rejected pitches to find examples of things I believe are true, and I do think Gawker readers will agree with me on most of these. I have not abridged this list, but I have added context for clarity.

***

THE PITCH:

Examples in television of men clapping at each other's jokes instead of laughing. I also offered to make and compile GIFs of men clapping at each other’s jokes, which was generous of me

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

All men love to clap at each other’s jokes instead of laugh. They think laughter is for children or women. They think laughing is the G word (g*y). Husbands of Real Housewives do this a lot, but I’ll admit that those are some of the few men I ever see on my television screen.

*

THE PITCH:

Reading SongMeanings.com comments from 15 to 20 years ago is everyone’s favorite hobby

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

This is just what everyone has always done when they run out of websites to read. For those five years that Gawker herself was gone, I’d spend the time I would’ve spent there re-litigating The Killers’ “Andy, You’re a Star.” Everyone did this and still does this.

*

THE PITCH:

Nobody has ever donated their Sephora Beauty Insider points to charity.

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

By offering a “donate your points to charity” option at check out, somehow this corporation is committing some sort of tax fraud. Nobody would ever donate their Sephora points to charity. I also offered to do some forensic accounting here on behalf of the website, which was also generous of me.

*

THE PITCH:

#journorequest is a pyramid scheme

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

The only people using Twitter are journalists (I wouldn’t know; I have everyone muted, and I don’t participate in discourse on principle), and so when people are looking for quotes for their stories to confirm their theses by use the hashtag #journorequest, only other writers are seeing this. This is not an accurate way to poll people, and ultimately, just as with LuLaRoe leggings, there will soon be nobody left who is not a #journo.

*

THE PITCH:

Dads say “magic marker”

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

I don’t know how to help you with this one. Dads say “magic marker,” and kids just say “marker.” I hate to be like “Facts.” but this is a fact.

*

THE PITCH:

Everyone needs to step up their fake cobweb decoration game. They’re all way too thick. That isn’t how cobwebs look.

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

I was trying to do a seasonal pitch around Halloween. People go all-out on Halloween, but it always looks like children have applied their seasonal fake cobwebs. If you want a really spooky house, you must must must apply that gauzy mess with a lighter touch. And do not even think about doing orange or green cobwebs. Who ever saw a spider spin that sort of web?

*

THE PITCH:

The Facebook Papers were a flop because they weren’t called something sexier

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

Nobody really cared about the trove of documents that journalists discovered about Facebook. Similar to how CNN kept trying to get Trump’s election fraud theory “The Big Lie” and it never caught on, the Facebook Papers flopped because of their quotidian name. I offered to rename them something sexy, like “The Facebook Dossier” or “Zucky’s Zittle Zlack Zook.”

*

THE PITCH:

Just Asking Questions: Is everyone’s favorite Instagram account @My_Country_corner run by Russian operatives? That "Based in Georgia" geotag on all their photos? It isn't the one you think… (It’s the Republic of Georgia…)

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

This meme account lulls one into passive resentment of "modernity" and then offers related Trump content (similar to how the Youtube autoplay algorithm can start with Trump content and eventually makes its way to Q content). All Instagram accounts with a certain following are required to disclose location, and “Georgia” is picked strategically to trick American followers into thinking it’s a South of the Mason-Dixon situation. More like East of the Iron Curtain! Once again, I offered to do undercover reporting, risking my life for this pitch.

*

THE PITCH:

Nobody is talking about Worcestershire sauce!

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

It rocks so much. When the pandemic hit and famed Danish restaurant Noma pivoted to making “garums,” they were just reinventing Worcestershire sauce.

*

THE PITCH:

These names from the Bible are surprisingly hot

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

Asher? Jacob? Lucas? Extremely sexy and surprisingly ancient. More than one of my coworkers asked me if I have ever met a Jewish person after pitching this, which is so rude. I’m just surprised there’s a name like “Caleb” in the Old Testament when I picture that as a classic hot-guy name.

*

THE PITCH:

Everyone certainly wants to learn about the twisted history of the square bathtub in the apartment I just moved into.

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

I moved into the first floor of a brownstone that was built in 1902, and I have a square yellow bathtub. I spent some man hours Googling this and discovered that it’s called a “sanitary tub” and it was invented so one’s nurse could kneel on the bathtub to scrub her sickly little patient.

I just thought it might be nice to write about. I emailed three different editors of ancient bathroom periodicals and did not hear back from any of them. I hope the mastheads of these publications were just busy or had a private vendetta against my gawker.com email address and not…you know…flushed down that wooden seated toilet like so many state fair goldfish.

*

THE PITCH:

Why is everyone falling for one specific genre of AI-generated spam text? In the text, a girl claims she and the recipient matched on Tinder last time she was in town visiting a relative. When the recipient says, “Wrong person,” she responds. “Oops. Well you seem kind of cute!”

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

Everyone, not just me, is getting this text. I’m not responding because I’m savvy enough to know that anyone who mentions “my cousin” is lying through their damn teeth. Is this also the Russians? Or the Georgians. I offered to respond.

*

THE PITCH:

An Instagram account called Story of a Gilmore Girl is breaking the space-time continuum. A fan is going beat-by-beat through the first season of GG blogging as Rory, but sometimes, they're watching the 2021 summer Olympics on a television made in 1999.

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

It would be impossible to get Peacock or a YouTube Live stream on that television. 3,000 or so words about this at a minimum for this one.

*

THE PITCH:

How did we just all have colds all the time before? It's very scary now, and I can't believe for 28 years straight, pre-masking and isolation, I just had a cold 8 to 10 times a year and didn't talk about it.

WHAT I BELIEVE IS TRUE:

It is very scary to have a cold now, and I pitched this far before the “g*y cold” or the omicron variant destroyed our young, hot thirties. Were we braver before?