Contact

INQUIRIES

For general inquiries, send a joint email to cpews@torontomu.ca and adifrancesco@torontomu.ca.

SUBMISSIONS

To publish a story at The Otter, please read our submission guidelines.

The basics:

  1. The Otter publishes journalistic features written by post-secondary students around the world. If you’re no longer a student, but wrote your piece while you were a student, we’d love to see it. 
  2. We’re looking for high quality first drafts, though we’ll accept short pitches. If you choose to submit a pitch rather than a draft, please make sure you include details from your reporting so far, including any potential scenes and sources/characters, as well as a sense of your narrative voice. 
  3. The Otter publishes long-form journalism. Our features range from 3000-6000 words. Accepted submissions will likely reflect this word count.
  4. The Otter publishes narrative features. We’re looking for characters and scenes that will pique our readers’ interest and drive the story forward. 
  5. Our stories go through a rigorous fact-checking process. We’ll need to be able to contact your sources, and independently verify everything that goes into the final published piece. Submissions should also come with a well-documented reference list for all information cited, such as research papers, academic articles, news articles, or any other secondary source (we ask writers to use Chicago style). We can walk you through how to create a solid fact-checking package. 

We suggest writers take a look through our website to get a feel for the type of features we publish. Our favourite pieces are well-reported and tell a story through interesting characters and thought-provoking scenes. Don’t be shy! We like hearing the writer’s voice in the piece. 

Here are some pieces to give you a taste of what we publish: 

“Losing My Mother’s Mind”
“The Price of Sugar”
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Your email to us should include your first draft, a short description of your topic in the body of the email, and a little bit about who you are and your journalism background. If you’d like to include links to other published or unpublished work, we’ll look at those as well. We publish work from students and new journalists, so writers with little or no experience are encouraged to submit. It should be sent jointly to cpews@torontomu.ca and adifrancesco@torontomu.ca. You can also email us with any questions about the pitching process.

REPRINT DETAILS

Most of our feature articles are available for reprint with full attribution and a link back to theotter.ca. Please reach out if you are interested in reprinting one or more of our articles.