Newsletter
eat feed midwest submission guidelines
Overview
We’re looking for audio shorts that tell the story of Midwestern food from the Great Lakes to the Great Plains and that celebrate the tastes, traditions, foods, flavors, and producers in the region. These might be aural journeys, sound snapshots, interviews, on-site reporting, or a composition that combines several of these approaches into a documentary piece. Our style is very NPR. Eat Feed Midwest is built on a similar model to the original Eat Feed program, which one listener called “This American Life but with food.” Before submitting a query, please familiarize yourself with our style and sound and read our About section to get a sense of how we think about food in the Midwest. It’s a lot more than hot dish and Jell-o salad.
Contributors should be familiar with the geographical area. EFM covers Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota. But keep in mind that our audience is global, and, through the medium of podcasting, we have listeners around the world. EFM celebrates the food listeners inside the region already love and encourages listeners around the world to find out more.
When it launched in January 2005, the original Eat Feed program was one of the first independent food podcasts but quickly built a large audience by providing the kind of high-quality program listeners have come to expect. Freelance pieces should be polished and professional to maintain our standards and style. Most of our listeners are college-educated and many also are pursuing or have earned graduate degrees. They range in age from 18 to 65, with a concentration in 25-40. Men are as likely to listen as women.
Finished Length
Audio essays: less than 3 minutes
Interviews: 3-7 minutes
Documentary composites: 5-8 minutes
Submission process
1. Please query first with your audio idea. Email us a 200-400-word written pitch, which paints a picture of your piece and tells us why the Eat Feed Midwest audience would be interested. Also, tell us a bit about yourself and why you would be the perfect person to create the piece. If you have an audio clip of your work, please include it as an MP3 attachment. Submit to: contributors@eatfeed.com
2. We usually respond to queries within 3 weeks. Please contact us again if you haven’t heard from us in the allotted time. It doesn't mean we don't like it, just that we're busy.
3. If we’re interested in your idea and we ask you ask you to produce it, we’ll give you a deadline and possibly make additional suggestions. If you’re new to audio work, but we really love your idea and believe in your ability to pull it off, we’ll also help you through the process.
4. When you submit the final piece, before we include it in the show, we’ll ask you to verify that you have the sole rights to the content and to grant us the right to duplicate and transmit your audio short on Eat Feed Midwest and in other venues related to Eat Feed. You retain ownership of the piece. We reserve the right not to accept a final piece if it doesn’t meet our standards.
5. When the piece “airs” it will be introduced by the host, Anne Bramley, with a byline and a bit about the creator, so we’ll ask for a short bio, too. We’ll also include a link to your site in our show notes. At present we are not able to pay our freelance contributors.
What we are particularly interested in
Our listeners expect to hear what they can’t get anywhere else. Run wild with your creativity in approaching the topic of Midwestern food. We particularly love pieces that uncover something surprising, focus on small producers or local foods, or demonstrate the diversity of Midwestern foods. At present, we are particularly in need of pieces that cover the Plains states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas, and Nebraska, and in pieces on Indiana or Ohio, but we welcome interesting audio shorts on any region in the Midwest. We want to hear about farmers, cheese makers, chefs, mom-and-pop restaurants, new food products, indigenous ingredients and immigrant cuisines, university research, childhood food memories, local traditions, state fairs, microbrews, the best cocktail in your town, food history, your favorite goat cheese. You get the idea.
What we have already covered
Have a listen to EFM previous shows. Also, before Eat Feed launched a separate program devoted to Midwestern food, we frequently covered the topic in our main Eat Feed feed. Before submitting your idea, please make sure we haven't already covered it in one the shows from our complete show index .
What we definitely don’t want
Eat Feed Midwest is a celebration of Midwestern food, so if your aim is to recycle stereotypes or criticize the region, don’t bother submitting. Eat Feed Midwest takes an informative, but also entertaining, approach to its topic, so ‘hard news’ pieces also aren’t up our alley.
Some ideas to get you thinking
• Are you a blogger who raises sheep in Michigan? Take EFM’s listeners out to your farm and tell the story of what goes on there.
• Are you a podcaster who also has a penchant for Iowa corn? Reflect on your favorite corn experiences.
• Are you an expat living in California and craving Wisconsin cheese curds? Share your memories.
• Are you a transplant to the region who has experienced a culinary epiphany in the Midwest? Convert our listeners outside the region.
• Are you a local journalist who has a favorite café where you go for inspiration? Let us sit down to lunch with you.