About

Freelance opportunities with Snipe

Every time you pick up a newspaper or magazine you roll your eyes and shriek (or sigh), “Damn it! I can do way better than this! This sucks!”

Well, here’s your chance to prove it.

Snipe will concentrate on important news and arts stories that other London rags somehow, inexplicably, miss, or explore them from angles the others are (sometimes intentionally) blind to. Do we care if yet another MP is caught wearing his wife’s underwear in a seedy, squalid hotel in Earl’s Court? Only if we were drinking mojitos and discussing the impact of the world economic crisis on the price and quality of street drugs with him at the time.

There is an old saying in the journalism business that there are a million stories in the naked city. In London, there are a million stories unfolding every minute. Everywhere you look Londoners are doing extraordinary things. Some of them are doing extraordinarily wonderful things. Others are doing extraordiarily horrible things.

Still others are doing extraordinarily stupid things that beggar belief. Find those stories. That is your mission.

Pitch us stories about news within the M25, music, film, theatre, art, and politics. Timeliness is everything – the subject of the story should be relevant during the next fortnight.

News & Politics: London City Hall, nefarious borough politics, profiles of people that we ought to know about, old London, new London. We want colour, not an inverted pyramid. Features are 2000 words, news items are 600 words.

We also use squibs – short, punchy pieces of 200 words.

Music: If you have read about it in the NME or heard it on Radio 1, Snipe doesn’t want to hear about it. Touring acts from North America and the North, we have a good handle on. Good pitches would be musicians from your patch or from Europe. We don’t care about the next big thing, but we do love music. Find us stories of people who do as well. Features are 1000 words, interviews are 600 words.

Art & Theatre: If it is in Central London, somebody else is already covering it. There are thousands of art showings and off-West End theatre performances every year outside the safety of a nearby tube station – and dozens are worth writing about in Snipe. Features are 1000 words, interviews are 600 words.

Cartoons & Photography & Cover Suggestions: We love to see samples from artists and photographers. Contact

Poetry: Please send all poetry submissions to: Paul Dacre, [email protected]

Payment: Payment is terrible. Beer money at best. And that is only if it’s a Sam Smith’s.

Internships: If you are interested in an unpaid internship, you have made poor career choices. But that was apparent when you chose journalism. Contact the publisher, if you must.

Contact the editors at [email protected]

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