Create a flatplan
The way that magazines keep track of all this is by creating what’s called a "flatplan," which is essentially a tabulated map outlining what story goes where in the entire issue.
To get to know the magazine to which you'd like to pitch your story, try creating your own flatplan of one of their issues.
I realise this sounds like a lot of work, but if you genuinely want your stories and ideas to be picked up by the media, it’s absolutely well worth it.
Creating a flatplan will give you an overview of the types of stories the magazine (or whatever the publication is) publishes, and how many of them that are in each issue.
Even if you’re listening to, say, a radio show, it will be helpful for you to map the length and frequency of different types of segments, such as interviews, opinion, news, music, caller interaction, etc.
Homework
Using the publication that you read (in its entirety) in the previous activity, create a flatplan for it.
To help you, I’ve shared a genuine flatplan, one that my team and I created many moons ago for a magazine I used to edit, called Nett. You’ll be able to see how we categorised the different types of stories (features, opinions, how-tos, etc); where we created section breaks; and the pages that we kept for advertising. Download the sample flatplan >>
I’ve also created a simple flatplan template that you can use to complete this homework. (Note that I use the colours to indicate pages with full pictures - no text - so you’ll need to change these around to suit. Download the template as an Excel file, or download the template as a Numbers file >>