Pitch Us: Announcing The VICE Fellowship For Collegiate Reporting

The VICE Fellowship for Collegiate Reporting is a program that connects the VICE digital newsroom with college journalists to publish content on a focused topic. Through dedicated mentoring and editing from the Vice staff, college journalists will have the resources to tackle on-the-ground reporting. The stories, which may be in any format, will be dual-published by VICE and a college outlet, if the journalist is associated with one.

For its inaugural semester, the VFCR will focus on mental health.

Mental health is a core area of focus across the VICE network. Tonic covers mental health every day in the form of essays and original reporting. Our readers have told us that mental health coverage for college students is an important under-covered story, and we’re looking for college journalists to pitch us story ideas that we can develop and produce together to deepen and broaden our work in this area.

For example, Tonic is currently reporting on the lack of medical privacy for college students and the responses from college administrations in dealing with their students' mental health problems. The VICE network also has two newsletters: Coping, a weekly newsletter from Tonic that shares actionable insights for those with anxiety and depression, and This Is Fine., a newsletter published by Broadly that looks at the highly personal and specific ways we go about improving our days. There are so many facets of mental health to explore, and we strive to tell these stories with and for our readers through impactful storytelling.

The VFCR is accepting pitches that use human-interest storytelling and reporting to uncover untold stories. We encourage college journalists to tell these important stories in creative ways. All platforms — video, audio, text, photo, social media storytelling, something we haven’t thought of yet — will be considered.

Pitches can come from individual or teams of up to four college journalists. We’ll provide selected teams with dedicated mentoring and editing throughout the story creation process. Selected college journalists will be engaged as freelance contributors.

Pitches are due by midnight on January 27, 2019. We’ll respond to all pitches no later than mid-February.

Reach out to managing editor Rachel Schallom at rachel.schallom@vice.com with questions.