is looking for today’s true stories about community connections, hard choices, under-explored comforts, and the moments (cathartic, routine, or totally bizarre) that clarify a need for systemic change.

Read on and get in touch with us to shape the next season of our program, or develop your ideas into entirely new shows with the support of our studio.


We’re interested in your ideas for audio stories and new series centering Asian Americans or Pacific Islanders. If you're a reporter or producer with print, audio, video, or other journalism experience, we’d love to hear from you! We also welcome pitches from folks with storytelling experience, not necessarily in conventional media or reporting.

If you have a great idea for the show that you want to tell us about, but not make yourself, please share that with us over here instead.

We appreciate pitches with clearly defined characters and voices, concrete details on how you’re gathering tape, and a simple description of how you’d like us to collaborate with you.

Please tell us how you imagine the story sounding to a listener — in terms of format, plotting, voices (including narration), sound design, and music. Tell us why the story matters to you, and how it could shake up the world of listeners who aren’t you.

We especially love stories that challenge our assumptions about Asian American experiences, reveal the complicated webs that lie beyond ethnic identities, and tackle some of our hardest decisions in life. We’ll offer some topics and broad story types below, in no particular order, that we’d like to collaborate on with people outside our own team... but if you have a pitch that doesn’t line up with any of these, feel free to submit it anyway! 

  • Decisions and family conversations around having kids (or not)

  • Asian American choices and challenges in organized religion and faith groups (but also how Asian Americans navigate spiritual connection not necessarily in organized settings)

  • The dark side of high-achievement capitalism and how it shows up in our personal lives

  • Broadly speaking, stories from Pacific Islander communities

  • Living with long-term mental health challenges — whether personal, or in your circle of loved ones (we’re interested in really walking in the shoes of folks as they navigate both the personal challenges and more systemic failures and barriers around care — more so than prescriptive looks at stigma, the importance of self-care, or a sole focus on racialized experiences)

  • Broadly speaking, stories from rural and non-coastal communities

  • The borders in our lives… whether that’s relating to, say, Iranian immigrant students still dealing with the consequences of American Travel bans; indigenous people pushing against the colonial borders of American states and territories; or Midwestern families building routines around supply chains that lead to your most necessary pan-Asian supermarket

We review pitches on a rolling basis and do the best we can to respond to everyone who gets in touch.

Previous Contributors Include

“I felt truly heard and supported by a team made up of Asian American and POC storytellers working hard to fill a representation void in the media landscape.”

- Thanh Tan, creator of Second Wave and guest host of the Season 1 episode, Hello, Freedom Man

A story I've been trying to tell for a really long time about Domestic Violence in the Asian immigrant community is finally out in the world.

- Rosalind Tordesillas, veteran audio reporter + editor and guest host of the Season 2 episode, Finding Joy

“James, Julia and the Self Evident team were wonderful, thoughtful and insightful collaborators. I found their ability to narrow in on the aboutness of a story to be very helpful in the editing process. I appreciate their mission to create a platform for Asian American stories.”

- Julianne Sato-Parker, documentary filmmaker + journalist and producer of the ‘Self Evident Presents’ episode, Shikata Ga Nai

“Why do stories of Asian Americans so often fall into the camps of ‘exotic food,’ ‘generational gap,’ or ‘sad immigrants?’ Those narratives didn’t sound how my life felt. I wanted my own ‘24 Hours’ story, so I set out to make one.“

- Erica Mu, award-winning audio reporter + producer and guest host of the Season 2 episode, A Day at the Mall


FAQs

Do you pay?

Yes. $3,000 is our standard flat fee for a complete 30-45-minute episode. Typically, we’d ask you to do all of the reporting and most audio recording as well as take the lead on scripting — while we contribute production help, project management, fact checking, and several weeks of in-kind editing work. We can also cover reporting expenses for local travel, and provide audio equipment + training if needed.

Depending on how much labor is involved and how we share in that work, this rate can be lower and higher — which we can figure out, before signing a contract, together.

We also are open to re-publishing work you’ve already published with another show non-exclusively, and we can pay an honorarium of $200-$300 for that.

OK, but how much work does that money cover?

Our standard flat fee of $3,000 is meant to cover 50-70 hours of reporting, producing, script writing, and reviewing 4-6 drafts of the edited story — spread across however many weeks it takes to do that.

We calculate fees by referencing the latest AIR rate guides and adjust based on how many days of work are truly required. We sometimes provide reporting stipends to help contributors develop a story that just needs a little more resourcing to figure out — but under our current budget constraints, that tends to be rare.

How do you work with a contributor like me?

Our most common arrangement is that you report and record the tape with project support + story guidance from us, then write up an initial outline and rough script.

Once all tape is down, we take over the steering wheel and hand you successive drafts of the story to read, listen, and provide direction.

We value open, direct, and proactive communication at all stages of production. Our whole team works remotely — so expect some video calls, several Google Docs, Dropbox syncing, remote recordings depending on the story, and of course emails.

We use Descript and ProTools for various stages of production, but you don’t need to know any specific audio software to work with us.

If you have significant experience working in a DAW to bring a story to a polished fine cut, then we can increase our flat fee so that you do this work. In this scenario, you’d send over audio stems when the edit is locked and we’re ready for music, sound design, and mixing work.

We mix and master all episodes, so this won’t be part of your responsibility as a contributor.

What if I have no audio experience?
If you have no audio experience, we can serve as your personal production studio, enabling you to focus on reporting the story.

We also believe that anyone can learn to record audio, and are happy to provide training and mentorship so you have the agency to record anytime you want to get the tape you need for the story.

Are you going to steal my idea?

No. Your specific pitch submission confers absolutely no intellectual property rights to us, and will be kept in confidence.

Whenever we have the capacity, we try to provide support in developing stories to their greatest potential, whether or not they end up with us. We have spent weeks workshopping not-quite-there-but-very-promising ideas with contributors in the past before getting to a place where everyone’s excited and ready to sign a contract.

Our greater mission to build a resilient, supportive, trusted, and trusting home for collaboration — not get the drop on stories at any expense.

I have another question that isn’t answered anywhere here.

Email James, our Managing Producer.

We’ll keep adding frequently asked questions + new answers here 🙃