Reporters are always looking for a story, even if unconsciously. So when a random thought about a food crossed Robin Tricoles’s mind during a coffee break—Why do people eat cottage cheese?—she immediately explored PubMed to see whether it could turn into a pitch.
Digging online for new research on a topic is Tricoles’s usual first step in turning stray ideas into published stories. Next, she reached out to authors of the papers she found to ask about new directions in their field. One of them mentioned that sales of another dairy product—Greek yogurt—were on the decline. That’s when she felt there could be a timely angle to cottage cheese. By immersing herself in the world of dairy production and research, Tricoles, a freelance science writer as well as a journalism professor at the University of Arizona, managed to milk a story out of a centuries-old product that rarely makes news. The piece she wrote for The Atlantic in 2019 explores how the decrease in Greek yogurt sales, together with an increasing demand for high-protein foods, could result in a cottage cheese revival. “This statistic was important not only for story context but also because it made the story timely,” she says.
Finding what makes a story relevant now is an essential step in selling a pitch and shaping an engaging story for readers. Many outlets explicitly require this element in their pitching guidelines. Some stories will come with a clear time hook, such as a new publication or award, an upcoming conference, or a project milestone. But in other cases, it can take more creativity or pre-reporting to find the “why now” that anchors a piece. The hook might be a paper in progress, a forthcoming season or anniversary, or a connection among multiple facets within a story that creates a newsworthy angle.
And sometimes, capturing a story’s timeliness requires patience and active waiting: letting an idea rest while keeping an eye open for new developments that create opportunities to pitch it.
Find New Research to Freshen an Evergreen Topic
When asked for tips on how to find a timely angle on a subject, many reporters echoed the strategy of looking for new research on an evergreen topic. Tricoles’s process is straightforward: “I’ll start researching it on science databases,” she says.“ And by science, I mean everything from anthropology to chemistry. … I’ll contact three or four [researchers] and see if they’ll get back to me. And then the story starts to develop, and the timeliness comes out.”
Setting Google Alerts for new publications on the topic of interest is always a go-to move when pre-reporting a story. Social media—following scientists who work on that topic, for example—and conference proceedings are also good places to look for current discussions within a field or early reports of unpublished findings.
Anniversaries can be “why nows” because they give journalists and readers opportunities to ponder how a subject has evolved over a year, a decade, or another time frame.
Many times, a researcher’s latest publication on a particular subject will already be too stale to use in a pitch. But talking to them to learn about ongoing work may yield a timely hook.
U.K.-based freelance journalist Dalmeet Singh Chawla often follows this route when looking for stories in his beat of peer review, scholarly publishing, and other inner workings of the scientific system.
Chawla has a list of questions ready to ask researchers when looking for a timely peg: Are they still working on the topic he wants to report on? What are the latest developments? Do they have any new papers in press or in preparation?
Different outlets have different criteria about how new a paper must be to consider it timely. Through experience, Chawla has learned what different editors are looking for when it comes to novelty. Some might publish stories based on preprints (papers which have yet to undergo the peer review process). Some might be interested in a two-week-old paper, while others would consider it old news. “If I find a paper that’s interesting and hasn’t received any news coverage, I look at how old it is,” Chawla says. Then he limits his pitches to editors he knows might still be interested.
Check the Calendar: Anniversaries, Holidays, and Special Dates
In September 2025, a flood of stories came out about a massive physics experiment, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. Ten years earlier, that instrument had detected ripples in space-time for the first time in history. Science journalists used the anniversary to write about gravitational waves and how the field had evolved since that milestone.
Anniversaries can be “why nows” because they give journalists and readers opportunities to ponder how a subject has evolved over a year, a decade, or another time frame. Journalist Amber X. Chen, a student and contributor at Inside Climate News, used the first anniversary of climate activist Disha Ravi’s arrest as a peg for a profile. In her 2022 story for Atmos, Chen wrote about how, a year after the arrest, authorities hadn’t yet begun criminal proceedings and how that delay limited Ravi’s civil liberties. The one-year gap also allowed Ravi to reflect on the arrest and its impact on her personal life—following the news of the arrest, she was “violently harassed by India’s mainstream media,” Chen wrote.
Even when there’s no single obvious timely reason for the story, there might be a sense of momentum that builds from the accumulation of smaller developments.
Chen has also used an anniversary as an opportunity to follow up on one of her own pieces. In another 2022 piece for Atmos, she wrote about the Department of Defense’s promise to shut down a military fuel facility in O’ahu, Hawai’i, that had leaked fuel and toxic chemicals for years, creating a water crisis on the island. In a follow-up story for the same outlet the next year, she reported that progress remained slow and that residents had organized to demand faster action. “It’s always good to follow up with your sources because environmental stories are always developing,” Chen says.
Seasonality is another way to make a story timely, by connecting it to topics that are already top of mind for readers. For example, widespread weather events can be a good excuse to write about science and health. The BBC covered the science of the polar vortex in the midst of one in 2025, and a spate of 2024 heat waves in the southern U.S. anchored a story in The Oklahoman about how extreme heat can affect health.
Holidays, too, are common time hooks, even if there’s only a loose association. When Lauren Schneider was looking for angles to pitch a story she had written in one of her classes at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting program, she made a connection between the subject of her piece—bats—and the upcoming Halloween holiday. She published a 2024 piece in Texas Monthly on how local researchers were tracking bat activity. Although the piece ultimately ran in November with no mention of the holiday, the connection between Halloween and bats is what prompted Schneider, now a freelance fact-checker and journalist, to summon the courage to pitch. “It just gave me a bit more confidence that put me over the edge. Like, ‘OK, I should pitch this and not just hold on to it,’” she says.
Building Blocks for a Big “Why Now”
While checking for significant dates can be a good place to start looking for a hook, Tricoles warns against forcing a connection if it doesn’t feel natural. When editing her students’ work, her advice is often to swim a bit against the current and try to find more creative hooks, she says. “I’ll tell my students, ‘When they zig, you zag, because it’s fresh.”
Writing a list of latent ideas and reviewing it regularly can help rouse dormant ideas.
The art of zagging can involve further pre-reporting. Even when there’s no single obvious timely reason for the story, there might be a sense of momentum that builds from the accumulation of smaller developments. With the right framing, these developments can combine into a larger, compelling case for why this is a story now.
Chen did just that in a 2025 story for Inside Climate News on a bill in Illinois requiring climate education in public schools. Sometimes a new bill serves as enough of a news hook on its own. But this bill had been passed in 2024 and wouldn’t be enacted until 2026. Chen found a peg when she learned that education advocates were organizing to create climate change resources for teachers that could be ready when the bill took effect.
Derick Matsengarwodzi, a journalist in Zimbabwe, followed the same logic of adding up phenomena to make a story more timely. For The Xylom, he wrote a September 2025 story about period poverty in his country. Lack of resources to access menstrual products is a widespread problem, affecting many girls and women around the world. To tell a timely story within this ongoing crisis, Matsengarwodzi connected the experiences of young Zimbabwean women to increasing water scarcity driven by climate change. “We have been having a lot of droughts,” he says. That makes washing reusable menstrual products even more difficult and can result in women using unsanitary alternatives.
Let It Rest (But Keep an Eye Open)
Sometimes, though, despite a journalist’s best efforts, there’s just no good news peg for a story. In the absence of timely developments, many dormant ideas live in limbo—half-formed, without enough substance to find an editor and outlet.
New Zealand-based journalist Conor Feehly admits to regularly having ideas in such a state, “percolating in the background for a year or two.” Finding the “why nows” to his stories can take a lot of work, since he often focuses on some of the broad, profound, and epistemological questions of science. For example, in October 2025 he published a piece for Noema on how science studies the origin of life and how new approaches are considering lifelike behavior in simple chemical systems as a possible bridge between inanimate matter and living organisms.
It’s a story as old as life itself, and it wasn’t until Feehly came across the work of one particular researcher that the timeliness started to coalesce. The scientist’s theoretical papers describe inanimate chemical systems that behave in lifelike, self-preserving ways, as though seeking to sustain their stew of molecular interactions for as long as possible. The concept—“a little bit outside of the box,” Feehly says—may call into question more-established ideas: that life arose with the emergence of an information molecule like RNA or with some energy-making metabolism.
Feehly anchored his pitch for Noema in an ongoing discussion among scientists about how to approach the question of the origin of life. By watching academic conference recordings and paying attention to the conversations happening there, he keeps up to date with current debates and finds sources and ideas that work well for features and reported essays. Though they’re less time-sensitive than breaking news, “you still want to be able to give the reason for why we’re having this conversation now,” Feehly says.
A variety of new developments can rouse dormant ideas. For example, a scientist might release a new book or documentary on the topic, there might be a debate on social media, the field might receive new funding, or a connection could emerge between current events and that dormant idea. Catching these moments requires keeping the story idea within arm’s reach. Writing a list of latent ideas and reviewing it regularly can help. Having done some pre-reporting—and maybe even drafting a pitch—makes it easier to act quickly once the right “why now” appears.
Dutch independent journalist Anne Pinto-Rodrigues recalls precisely what awakened one of her dormant stories about wildlife in Asia. She had been wanting to write about how habitat loss and fragmentation are driving elephants into deadly conflict with humans. Then, in late May 2020, a pregnant elephant was killed in India because of human-elephant conflict. It made headlines. “People all around the world were really upset and angry,” she says. “That gave me just the perfect timing.” Pinto-Rodrigues didn’t report directly on that incident but used it as a timely anchor for her August 2020 story in The Guardian on what people in India are doing to reduce this kind of conflict.
Knowing that she can’t always rely on a major outcry to awaken a slumbering idea, Pinto-Rodrigues has developed strong systems to detect potential “why nows.” “I do have Google Alerts,” she says. “But I think I rely more on my network of people: researchers [and] people on the ground. I reported a lot on wildlife and conservation [in Asia], so I do have quite a strong network there.” She stays in touch, regularly asking them what’s new and if there’s anything in their area she should be writing about now. “I rely on them for stories that I wouldn’t see anywhere else.”
These strategies can help reporters find and publish stories that matter to readers now. In addition, the challenge and creativity involved in finding a strong “why now” for your pitch offer an opportunity to showcase your reporting skills. A well-nurtured network of sources, the ability to dive into scientific conferences and understand a field’s debates, and a sharp eye for spotting reporting opportunities are all attributes editors look for in the journalists they trust to deliver a compelling—and yes, timely—story.
Lucila Pinto is a freelance science and technology journalist. Her work has appeared in Nature, Science, Rest of World, and La Nación, among other publications. She is a Pulitzer Center reporting fellow and a graduate of Columbia University’s science journalism program. She is currently an early-career fellow at The Open Notebook supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. Follow her on X @luchipaint and on LinkedIn.