How to Write a Cover Letter for a Journalism Job
Your best shot at showing off your skills
How do you write a cover letter for a journalism job? How are journalism cover letters different? What do editors look for in a cover letter? What are some examples of journalism cover letters?
There is one assignment that every journalist hates: Writing a cover letter.
While the profession involves a lot of writing, most of it is directed outward — at other people, social issues, breaking news or even data. Most journalists rarely if ever write about themselves.
Journalists also like to stick to a formula. But the standard examples of cover letters found online and in career advice books are chock full of the kind of generic corporate jargon that we try to cut from our stories.
To make matters worse, cover letters are private. Journalists used to editing and public feedback on their articles aren’t fond of the whole idea of sending a letter to someone they don’t know and then never hearing a response back.
“You rarely find out if they read your cover letter and you never get feedback on if you wrote it well,” said one frustrated recent graduate who’s applied for dozens of journalism jobs.
We talked with reporters, editors and recruiters about what makes a good cover letter. While there’s no consensus on exactly how to write it, there was a lot of good advice on how to give it your best shot.
Below the paywall, we’ll go in depth (seriously, there’s about 4,000 words here) on how to write your cover letter, with step-by-step instructions and examples from actual cover letters used by MSNBC’s Ali Vitali, The New York Times’ Katie Mogg, Slate’s Christina Cauterucci and others to get their first big jobs.
Don’t write a cover letter. Report it.
A cover letter is a good chance to show off your writing. But it’s an even better chance to show off your reporting skills.
You can do that by making sure that your letter is targeted to this exact job for this exact manager at this exact publication. Do some reporting to answer the basic questions about the position:
• What is the news outlet? What is its audience: general interest, niche, elite? What kinds of stories does it feature? How does it make its money: subscriptions, newsstand sales, advertising, events?
• Who is the hiring manager? What is their previous experience? Are they a lifelong employee of this publication or were they brought on recently to shake things up? What honorific do they use?
• What is the beat? Who had the job previously? Is it an unusual beat or one of the standards (health, military, politics)? Is the reporter expected to break news, provide regular coverage or do special features?
The best source of information on all of these questions is a journalist who works there now. The second-best source is a journalist who used to work there. Newsrooms are naturally very gossipy places, and almost anyone who works in one can give you the lowdown.
This can create a barrier for someone new to the industry. A journalist who already has connections can call up an old friend who works there or get an introduction to someone who does. But it doesn’t mean it’s not doable. You just have to do a little more shoe-leather reporting and work a few more angles.
Colleen Murphy, managing editor of Local Network at Open Campus, says that networking with other journalists long before you get to the point where you’re writing a cover letter will come in handy.
“Build and maintain a network,” she said. “Given the scarcity of jobs and the turmoil at many newsrooms, having people who can flag your application and give you the low-down on what it’s like to work at X place is more important than ever.”
How do you research a news outlet?
Your first stop is the publication itself. Pick some of its top stories and search Google News to see how its coverage differs from competitors. Click on author pages to see how many stories a week reporters are turning out. Look at sites like Similarweb to see how it stacks up to other news sites. Check to see if there’s a media kit for advertisers that might have more information on its audience. Look the outlet up on Glassdoor to see what people who work there say about it.
Next, go to LinkedIn and look up everyone who works there currently. Look at where they worked before that. You may be able to get a feel if you’re the kind of journalist they typically hire, but don’t count yourself out if your credentials don’t exactly line up. Sometimes the hiring manager knows that the newsroom is too homogenous. Other times they’re new to the job and looking to shake things up.
As you’re researching on LinkedIn, look to see if you have any second-degree connections, people who know someone you know. Reach out to your mutual friend and ask for an introduction.
Once you’re in touch, set up a time to chat by phone. Even if it’s just a quick phone call, you may be able to get some valuable information on the newsroom from them. All of this might seem awkward — especially if you don’t have a lot of work experience — and maybe it would be if you were looking for a job in, I don’t know, banking or dentistry. But we’re all journalists. We call people we don’t know all the time and ask them to talk to us about some of the worst days of their lives. You can do this.
Next, find the news outlet on social media. Look to see who the account is following — usually a mix of famous people the outlet covers, other news sites and its own staff. Find and follow everyone who works there from that list. Like or respond to some of their posts. If any of them follow you back, you can DM them, let them know you’re applying for a job there and ask if they’d be willing to chat with you for a few minutes by phone. Just don’t go overboard; nobody wants a stalker. Keep it short and polite.
This is a lot of work for a cover letter, and you don’t necessarily need to do it all for every opening you see. But this gives you an idea of how to figure out what the job is really about — beyond the often-unhelpful job listing — so you can tailor your letter accordingly.
Because as it turns out, editors aren’t that excited about cover letters either.
“Frankly when I am reading cover letters I mainly just skim them to see if they are addressed to the job and don't have errors or formatting mistakes,” said Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect.
Option 1: You’ve already done the job
Once you’ve figured out what the job is all about, the next step is to figure out why you are the perfect candidate for it. Sometimes, that’s really true.
In the best-case scenario, you’re applying for a job that is exactly what you’re doing already or have done in the recent past. In that situation, you just need to briefly explain your credentials, talk a little about some stories you’ve done on the beat already and discuss how you’d approach this job. Then you can throw in a few big-picture ideas from the beat and discuss interesting story ideas you have.
These kinds of letters can be more workaday because you don’t have to try too hard to sell yourself. You already have the credentials, and you can focus more on the nuts and bolts of coverage, which will show the depth of your knowledge.
That’s the approach that health care reporter Catherine Sweeney took when applying for a job with WPLN in Tennessee. She just jumped right into talking about story ideas in depth, even citing stories that the station had already run. Here’s how it begins:
Because I’m already a health care reporter in a similar state, I could hit the ground running.
Health care is a broad beat, but the focus areas I’ve chosen in my current job would be relevant to WPLN’s audience: maternal health in the wake of abortion bans, Medicaid policy and the medical workforce.
Oklahoma and Tennessee have two of the most stringent abortion bans in the US. Like the rest of the country, the states’ hospitals are struggling financially. That means cutbacks. WPLN has reported that 57 percent of Tennessee hospitals are already implementing them. I’m fascinated by the intersection of these two issues. Demand for labor and delivery services is likely growing. When times get hard and it’s time to trim, hospital administrators often turn to OB-GYN first. It’s an expensive service, and because Medicaid pays for about one of every two births in the country, it’s not a money maker.
This reads less like a cover letter than a beat memo from a reporter who’s already working there. It’s reassuring to an editor who wants to know you can do the job. And Sweeney didn’t have to spend a lot of time in her letter talking about how she was an experienced health care reporter with a demonstrated record of success blah blah blah. She just got right into the kinds of stories she would write and demonstrated those credentials. She got the job.
“I think my advice would be do your research and focus on the beat,” she said. “Read up on the issues you’d be covering, the latest developments on them etc. That takes some leg work, but it shows that you’re not sending a copy-and-paste cover letter. To do that, I’d recommend reading the outgoing reporter’s work in the archives. The further back, the better. It helps you see trends and big-picture stories.”
Option 2: You know the beat
Of course, you haven’t always done that exact job. Some jobs may be on a brand new beat that no one has covered. Others may be for entry-level jobs where none of the applicants will have much experience.
In those cases, a good option for your cover letter is to demonstrate that you know the subject area really well.
That’s the approach that Christina Cauterucci took when applying for a job covering the arts for the Washington City Paper, an alt-weekly in the nation’s capital. At the time, she had only an NPR internship and some freelancing clips. Her other experience was working in a restaurant and the communications department at a university. The first approach was not going to work because she simply hadn’t done the kind of reporting and editing the position required.
So she focused her cover letter on how well she knew the D.C. arts scene. The letter, which she cringes to read now because cover letters are always a little cringey, makes the case right from the start:
The D.C. arts scene and I are in a loving, committed relationship. I’ve sung in a band at the Red Palace. I’ve produced a new-media installation at Artisphere. I’ve performed slam poetry at Busboys. I’ve acted onstage at a grimy local black box theater. I’ve taught a course on avant-garde video editing at the 52 O Street Studios. I’ll even admit to DJing a horrible ‘80s dance party at Fab Lounge in my younger days.
“I went on to explain that I’m not cut out to be an artist, but I have a knack for spotting trends and finding good stories in the people and places that make up the local arts scene,” she said.
In the letter, Cauterucci also played up experiences that could reasonably be read as similar to the kind of reporting and editing she would be doing. This approach is kind of like when you substitute oil in a cookie recipe because you’re out of butter.
The City Paper editors liked Cauterucci’s letter, so they called her in for an interview. She drew up a detailed editorial plan and was ready to talk about the beat.
“I came prepared with a few local arts personalities to talk about, since I suspected they’d ask me to name favorites or offer a few ready-to-go story ideas—and they did,” she said. “After completing an editing test, I got the job.”
Put your newswriting skills to work
A cover letter isn’t a news story, but you can still use the same techniques you use in newswriting to make it interesting.
That starts with the first sentence, or what you’d normally call the lede. Even though Sweeney and Cauterucci used very different approaches in their letters, they both began with a strong sentence that will get a hiring manager’s attention right away. In Sweeney’s case, she didn’t need to work hard to sell it, while Cauterucci had to give a little more color to make the case that she knows the arts.
You can see the latter approach in this letter from MSNBC’s “Way Too Early” anchor Ali Vitali applying for a position covering the 2016 presidential election as an NBC News embed. Notice that she doesn’t just say “I love politics” but instead shows it right from the start:
I have a favorite presidential election. I love analyzing current social trends in the context of political elections. I frequently recommend the 1,000-plus page political tome “What It Takes” to friends looking for beach reads. And I recently found myself in the corner at a wedding debating politics with two senior partners at major Manhattan law firms.
At the time, Vitali had experience as an intern, multimedia editor and graphics producer for an MSNBC show, but not the kind of full-time daily political reporting that an embed position requires, so she chose to start the letter by emphasizing her passion and knowledge of the subject. That’s important for what is essentially an entry-level job that requires dedicated embeds to be on the campaign trail night and day for more than a year. But she also took time later in the letter to note that she’d done some reporting in those positions.
I’ve reported on the passage of gun control legislation in Colorado in the wake of the Aurora mass shooting. I’ve dug into fundraising on both sides of the 2014 Kentucky race between Senator Mitch McConnell and Alison Lundergan Grimes. I’ve produced segments for “The Cycle” about millennial voting patterns and performed original research into the still-pervasive gender inequities on Capitol Hill. Now I want to continue my political reporting by doing it on the most consequential stage there is: following a candidate on his or her run to The White House.
Again, the combination of knowledge of the beat — as demonstrated by vivid, detailed examples — and enough comparable experiences to credibly show you could handle the job was enough to land an interview.
Tell a story about your stories
You probably already submitted five to seven clips as part of the application. But that doesn’t mean the stories tell themselves.
In fact, it can be hard for editors to understand the importance of a clip if they’re in a different area or they don’t follow the beat closely. That’s where your cover letter can help. If you have clips that are good reads but also need some context, use the letter to tell the story about that story. Explain how you worked the beat, got that inside tip, found the scoop in public records or convinced a crucial source to give an interview.
Katie Mogg used that technique when applying for a fellowship program at the New York Times, perhaps one of the few opportunities in journalism where a team of hiring managers reads the cover letters very closely. Mogg used her letter to talk about how she gets sources to trust her on sensitive stories, elaborating on the clips she had included in the application to give specific examples.
“I try to home in on one particular skill emphasized in the job posting, and then use that skill as a theme throughout my cover letter through the anecdotes I choose,” she said. “For the New York Times fellowship, I decided to focus on trust building and wrote about how I broke the news that Sally Kornbluth was going to be MIT's new president because the PR person at the university trusted me. I also mentioned a trend story I wrote for Wall Street Journal about the lazy girl job TikTok trend: I had to get sources to trust that I'd reflect the trend with nuance and not literally paint them as lazy workers in a national publication.”
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Don’t forget to tell your story
Finally, use your cover letter to tell a story about who you are.
If you can weave into your letter some details about your life or background that might stand out and explain how those inform your reporting, then by all means do that. That could be anything that makes you different.
Smart hiring managers don’t just pay lip service to diversity goals. They really want a newsroom that looks like the community they cover, because if they don’t have that, they’re going to miss stories. But that doesn’t just mean that being a racial or ethnic minority is the only part of your life that might be worth mentioning. Are you the first person in your family to go to college? Are you an Eagle Scout? Did you grow up in an unusual religious community? These are all examples of biographical details from a cover letter that I’ve seen work.
Alex Samuels wove all of these approaches into a letter that tied together her background as a Black woman and her reporting on the state legislature while giving the backstory on a clip included in the application. She began by describing sitting in a Texas hearing “hungry and with a dying laptop” as she saw a Black mother plead with lawmakers not to pass a bill allowing school marshals carry concealed handguns on campus, and how that inspired her to look into how the bill might affect students of color. Then she detailed how she turned that kind of coverage into a beat, throwing in links to other stories (incidentally, a great way to sneak a few more clips into your application).
I created the race and politics beat for The Texas Tribune shortly after that legislative session. I knew there were more stories to be told of underserved Black and Hispanic people in the state, and I was determined to bring those stories to light.
Another cover letter shared by a reporter who’d rather not share their name went into detail about how they became interested in journalism after helping their immigrant grandparents understand the news when they were younger:
I quickly found a burning curiosity in me that questioned what I saw and sought the most accurate information for my family. When they inquired about local candidates, I would create a Powerpoint detailing their positions and background for them. When they wondered why the wildfire season was drawing out further into the year, I read through research papers to explain it to them.
What should you not do on a cover letter?
All of this advice is moot, however, if you do one thing: Make a mistake. No matter how small.
You misspell the hiring manager’s name. You use their instead of there. You use a comma when it should be a semicolon. Or inadvertently drop a word. Or leave in a typo. Or use the wrong honorific.
“Get the basics right — proofread, spellcheck, then proofread again,” notes Sean Scully, an editor at States Newsroom. “And if you're applying to multiple outlets at once, make sure you use the right name for the news organization you're addressing. Typos in your cover letter will earn you a quick trip to the round file.”
The best way to avoid this problem is to write a cover letter that is specific to this job. But in some cases, you’re simply applying to too many jobs at once and you need to reuse a letter. In that case, just make sure that you change both the first and the second reference to the publication. Nothing kills a cover letter that is otherwise going great than a throwaway line at the end about how you’d love to talk with them further about working at … another publication’s name.
The same goes for the name of the hiring manager and their preferred honorifics (Mr., Ms., etc.).
“Knowing the name (and honorific) of the hiring editor is a real plus,” Scully added. “I have never punished someone for saying something like ‘Dear hiring manager’ but someone who bothered to look me up and spell my name right definitely got a little gold star.”
Now, this is all probably true about any other job application. Nobody likes sloppy work. But keep in mind that the cover letter may be the only chance that the hiring editor is going to get to see your copy unedited. So they’re looking at your cover letter as a sign of how you are as a writer and a reporter. If you get something wrong introducing yourself, they aren’t going to trust you to get it right in your reporting.
In fact, it’s a good idea not to try to be the only proofreader of your letter. Enlist your friends, former coworkers — literally anyone — to give it a look and give you their honest feedback.
“Get someone to edit your cover letter before you use it,” said Axios’ business desk managing editor Ben Berkowitz. “Have you ever seen a cover letter from an editor candidate with typos in the first two sentences? (I have, more than once.) Don’t make a simple mistake that ruins your chances.”
Read more: Advice on cover letters from My First Byline interviews
Marina Koren: “Write your cover letter like you would an actual story, with a lede, nut graf, and kicker.”
Emily Atkin: “If your lede in your cover letter doesn’t grab me, then I don’t trust you to write a lede. Period. Be funny. Take risks. Show people who you are. Sometimes your risks will not work out. But that’s the biz, baby. You never know until you try.”
Nora Biette-Timmons: “ I workshopped my cover letter to death with the career services office at my college, and I think it helped that I was the editor-in-chief of my college paper.”
Heather Schwedel: “I didn’t have any special ins, but I think I demonstrated in my cover letter and interview what a big fan of the site I was.”
Kate Knibbs: “My big, bold, underline-it advice for people looking for jobs is to make sure your cover letter isn’t boring.”
Macy Gilliam: “I think since Morning Brew is so non-traditional, it was really important to lean into that and mention things like stand up comedy experience. I even listed my weekly average screen time in my cover letter to show them that I was tapped into online culture.”
David Roberts: “I sent my resume, such as it was, and a long cover letter saying, basically, ‘I have no professional experience in journalism, or environmentalism, or anything really, but I can write, and I extremely want this job.’ The Grist editor who received the letter said it was one of the only ones she got that didn't have grammatical mistakes in it, so she brought me in for an interview.”
Simon Owens: “After my apartment lease ran out that I was forced to move back in with my parents. I then proceeded to print up dozens of copies of my resume and a generic cover letter and mailed it out to every newspaper within a 100-mile radius.”
Christopher Bonanos: “I answered a classified ad for a copy editor—‘weekly consumer magazine; some night work required’—and it turned out to be at New York. The ad contained a typo, misspelling the word ‘grammar,’ which I mentioned in my cover letter.”