Right to Voice: Submission Guidelines
JHR UBC Inaugural Human Rights Magazine
JHR UBC—the UBC Chapter of Journalists for Human Rights, an international media development organization—is seeking pitches for short articles, photo essays, and feature submissions for the upcoming issue of its magazine Right to Voice, themed “Olympics, Human Rights & the Media: Past and Present”
This will be the inaugural issue of Right to Voice, JHR UBC’s biannual human rights magazine, inspired by Speak, JHR’s annual national magazine, which was organized last year by JHR UBC. For a clearer idea of Speak and how we envision the JHR UBC magazine, please see last year’s issue on our website.
For this issue, to be launched in February 2010, we are focusing on human rights issues directly related to delivering the Olympic Games, whether here and now in Vancouver or in another time and place in
history. We are also seeking pieces to do with the role or impact of the media in such issues.
We are looking to address issues surrounding the subject using primarily originally reported literary journalism. Topics include anything relating to the point at which the Olympic Games (any Olympic Games, not necessarily Vancouver’s), human rights issues, and the media intersect, be they profiles of people and organizations involved in civil rights, investigations into rights violations at past Olympic Games, stories about Olympians or host cities themselves, case studies, success stories, or any number of topics we haven't yet thought of.
The stories we are seeking must be 400-600 words for short articles, usually suited to second-hand or mostly research-based reporting; and 1000–3500 words for features, which are the magazine’s showcase stories and to be based on original reporting.
Stories may be written by anyone—and here we caution it is difficult to report well on distant issues without having covered them in person.
We are also seeking ideas for visual pieces that will constitute our Front-of-Book section, such as graphs, maps, creative diagrams, conceptual images, etc.
As JHR is a bi-lingual organization, we will be accepting submissions in both English and French.
If you are interested in submitting a piece, please send us a pitch detailing your ideas and outlining the intended direction of your article. All final article drafts will be due in late January (with earlier drafts due, yes, earlier).
Please do not send fully written articles—PITCHES ONLY. Pitches must be approximately 300 words
for features, and 1-2 paragraphs for short articles, front-of-book pieces, or photo essays.
If you have a good idea but don’t know where to take it, let us know anyway, though full pitches will be prioritized.
All pitches are due by deadline Monday, December 7, 2009. Please send pitches to jhr.ubc.publications@gmail.com, with “JHR Magazine Pitch: Article Topic” as the subject.
Please contact us if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions. For more information about our organization, please visit www.jhrubc.ca and www.jhr.ca.
