Yesterday, in my post “Who You Working For?” I hypothetically wrote about pitching a story to Wired. Today let’s talk about a real story I pitched to Wired which failed to result in an assignment.

The pitch is here, in my list of failed proposals. It’s second from the bottom, the one about Masdar. There may be a lot of reasons this proposal didn’t fly. The editor told me that it ran up against “Abu Dhabi fatigue,” a sense at the magazine that they’d covered gee-whiz technology in the Emirates a few too many times. But who knows? Maybe the proposal simply wasn’t good enough. And  this blogger wisely points out that it’s hard to tell the difference between the proposals Margaret and I sold and the ones that we didn’t. There’s a lot of mystery and luck in this business.

But look right below the Masdar proposal to Wired on this page and you’ll see how I tried to re-work the proposal for the New York Times Magazine. That didn’t work either. I should have known it wouldn’t. I’ve hardly ever been able to write a proposal for one magazine, and, upon failure to sell, shop it to another.

Everybody’s different; I can only speak from my experience, which tells me that stories have to be conceived for a specific magazine from the very beginning. When writers tell me they have an idea for a piece, my first question is, “For what magazine?” It’s got to be “Masdar for Wired,” “Wounded soldiers for the New Yorker,” “Fort Ord for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.” If it’s just “Masdar,” “wounded soldiers,” or “Fort Ord,” I figure the writer is headed for trouble. Magazines have distinct personalities, and the proposal not only has to be worded to match a magazine’s sensibilities, it has to be conceived and reported to match them as well. The questions you’d ask while researching a proposal for Wired will be different from the ones you’d ask researching a proposal for the New York Times Magazine. The thinking you’d do about the story will be different. The subject of the story and its intended magazine are of a piece, and inextricable.

When the Masdar piece didn’t sell to Wired, I’d probably have been better off not sending it to the Times Magazine. Somewhere, on the great invisible scoreboard that every magazine keeps, that got recorded as an E. You want every contact with an editor to be scored as an H, so that you get thought of as reliable.