What Editors Talk About When They Talk About a Pitch

Pitching is less about ideas and more about passing the editors' vibe check. You’re not just selling a story—you’re auditioning for a space in their mental Rolodex of what counts as “fresh,” “relevant,” or worse, “not repetitive.”

A while ago, I pitched an op-ed to a respected international magazine to explore the controversy surrounding the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. The gist: a film created by Palestinians, about Palestinian struggle, is being boycotted by the prominent Palestinian advocacy group, Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), for violating BDS movement's “anti-normalization guidelines.” PACBI’s logic is crystalline: collaborating with any Israeli who is “not on record supporting the comprehensive rights of the Palestinian people”, no matter how critical of Zionism, constitutes normalization. “Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation, or permission from Israelis to narrate our history,” they concluded.

My pitch made it clear that this isn’t a controversy over a documentary, but the network of demands, betrayals, optics, and moral economies that have colonized art itself. It’s a schism in the soul of the pro-Palestinian movement—a battle between moral absolutism and strategic coalition-building, diasporic orthodoxy and local urgency, tribalist politics and universalist ethics. It's also a foundational fracture gnawing at the soul of the left, raising questions about whose suffering is legitimate, whose solidarity is suspect, and who, in the end, gets to tell the story of resistance and liberation—or worse, who gets edited out entirely when that story no longer fits the frame.

But the editors didn’t just reject my pitch (to this day, I’m not entirely sure if they did); they offered a response laced with patronizing undertones—the kind of feedback that doesn’t just question your argument, but quietly implies you’ve missed something obvious, without telling what the obvious is, and leaving you wondering whether the substance of the pitch was ever really the issue.

Take Editor 1's critique, which managed to channel a style best described as “been-there-done-that-but-please-enlighten-me-more.” According to Editor 1, my pitch didn't offer “a new argument” and instead fed into “fundamental—and often-repeated/argued—issues about the nature of boycotts.” Let's pause here for a moment and ask: did the editors forget they're reading pitches, not finished, polished treatises? Expecting a 500-word pitch to deliver a complete, original argument is a bit like faulting a movie trailer for not resolving the plot—it misses the point of what a pitch is meant to do.

What’s more grating, though, is Editor 1's somewhat lazy invocation of “this isn't new.” I'd love to know when exactly Palestinian filmmakers last won an Oscar, then became targets of settler violence, Zionist lobby and a major boycott by a Palestinian advocacy network—simultaneously. Perhaps Editor 1 has another successful example in mind? Like Edward Said's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra? But guess what? That was also boycotted by PACBI!

Then comes Editor 2, who admits they're “torn” about my pitch—right before dismissing it, again, as lacking in originality. While acknowledging the serious pitfalls of ideological purity tests and even admitting personal distaste for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement’s targeting of individuals, Editor 2 nonetheless demands that the pitch address whether “boycotts even work, ever.” But isn't this like responding to a pitch about a hospital bombing by asking, "but do wars really solve anything?"

Editor 2’s solution? Read more (specifically the Aeon article titled Passion and Palestine). Which is of course fine, if it weren't presented in the spirit of “do your homework, come back smarter.” Obviously, the full research isn't done yet, and why would it be? Should I remind again that this is just a pitch, not a finished article? One they'd eventually read and comment on if it were given to develop into one that is...

But let's step away from my own personal pique for a second. What bothers me most here isn't the content of the argument—assuming there is one? It's editorial judgment crossing into gatekeeping. There’s an implicit assumption here: the writer must not only convince editors of the topic's urgency, but also pass an arbitrary originality test. Never mind that Palestine remains the global epicenter of moral, political, and ideological fracture; unless the writer presents some never-before-seen angle (preferably with full citations), the topic risks being dismissed as “old news.”

In other words, the real bar isn’t set by what matters—it’s set by what sounds new. For the editors, it seems that the experience of Hamdan Ballal, Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham is apparently only compelling if freshened up like a Netflix reboot. This strikes me not just reductive; it’s ethically thin.

The real issue here isn’t the rejection. That happens. What matters is the absence of genuine editorial curiosity, the kind that invites collaboration rather than gatekeeping. When even timely, urgent ideas are waved off as too familiar or insufficiently novel—mind you, before they're even fully developed—you start to wonder: are we having a conversation or passing a purity test?

So just a little piece of advice. The next time someone tells you that your story isn’t “new,” ask them: new to whom? Because for the people at the center of this fight, it’s not old. It’s not tired. It’s happening.