Writer’s Guide

How to write for the Chaser

Also bear in mind that senses of humour are subjective. We often disagree violently amongst ourselves about whether an idea is funny, so please don’t be offended if we decide not to use an idea that you think is hilarious. Material included in The Chaser has to conform to the majority of the editors senses of humour – it’s the same rule we apply to ourselves.

In style terms, make your story read as much like a real news article as you can, even if its very silly.

Short is good, and try to end each para with a punchline.

The headline is crucial, and should be funny in its own right. We generally spend as much time on headlines as on the actual text of articles. And we usually get new writers to pitch headlines rather than completed articles, so we can suggest which ones we think are goers because they nail a particular satirical point (the angle), or are just funny idea, or true observations. Generally, if the headline (ie overall concept) isn’t right, it doesn’t matter how good the gags in the article are.

Anyway, enough lecturing from me, and well done to those brave enough to actually pitch something.

– Dom

The Sparknotes

Do:

Pitch only headlines
Keep the headlines short
Keep them topical to the 24 hour news cycle
Try to invoice us within the week if your headline gets picked up
Email your pitches to [email protected]

Don’t:

Use comedy to make the world worse or attack people who aren’t in positions of power
Send body copy for stories unless we ask you to.
Take it personally if a headline doesn’t make the cut, we reject our own in-house stuff all the time

The Writing Process

Have a read through existing stories before pitching to get an idea of the tone, structure and style that is common to stories on The Chaser. Other good sites to reference are The Onion, The Shovel, Betoota Advocate, Waterford Whispers and The Beaverton.

Other than that here’s a few tips that can help you avoid common pitfalls in the writing process:

1. It’s all in the headline

The world is our audience, but in order to reach people we have to leverage social media. This means the headline needs to draw a reader in, because that’s all they’re going to see scrolling through their newsfeeds.

Our house rule since the 90s has been writing should be “50/50” in that loosely 50% of the effort in creating an article should be spent on getting the right headline. In the age of Facebook that’s probably shifted closer to 90/10.

That being said, if the idea can’t be fleshed out further than a headline, we do sometimes just have to drop a story and move on. Some days we’ll be publishing an article every half hour, so ten minutes spent labouring over trying to come up with a second gag for the body text might just not be an economical use of our time. Generally at the end of the week we’ll have 10-20 great headlines sitting in draft that just never saw the light of day because they were either too hard to flesh out, too similar to another story, we couldn’t get the headline wording quite right, or we just couldn’t get a good enough image.

2. Write, and write more

In professional comedy writing sometimes 100 good jokes might be pitched before a single one gets bought. We’re a little more forgiving, but we still only pick up the standout pitches, so if your pitch doesn’t get picked up, don’t let that get you down, and by all means try again. There’s a bunch of reasons a pitch might not get picked up, and trust us it’s nothing personal (in fact we will quite often read through pitches without checking who sent them to make sure there’s no bias involved). On a related note, unfortunately we can’t realistically sit down and write feedback on every pitch that comes in, we’re only a small team and doing so would eat into the limited time we have to publish, edit, and lay up stories.

“A lot of the pitches we reject are great. They just need to be, you know, a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot funnier.”
– Joe Randazzo (The Onion)

3. Keep it simple, keep it short, keep it funny

If your headline is picked up we might ask you to write body copy. Just keep in mind, as ridiculous as the news is these days, we’re not yet a real news organisation. It can help to give some background on a topic, but at the same time don’t go over two sentences of dry content without throwing the readers a joke on the third. Remember this is the internet, people have short attention spans. Our general rule is aim for three sentence paragraphs, the first two explaining, the third comprising the punchline.

Try not to spend too long on the body copy, it’s much better to get an okay-written story out while everyone’s still talking about it than to be five hours late to the party with something that’s a work of art, and if we’re being completely honest, almost nobody reads the body copy anyway.

If you’re asked to write the body copy on a story:

Have a read of some existing articles to get an idea of how we format them. It’s standard AP style for the most part.
Aim for 3-5 short paragraphs.
Try to end each paragraph on a gag.
Standard format is
- Explain the topic in first para
- Second para is a quote from someone involved unintentionally pointing out hypocrisy or irony
- Third para is a ‘However’ presenting the opposing view, and possibly another quote
- An easy way to end a story is on an italicised update/contacted for comment/meta gag but that’s by no means necessary

4. Your jokes should be obvious to you and us, and especially the audience

It’s an easy thing to do to write something that sounds funny but isn’t actually a joke. But just like we wouldn’t accept a tradie who built something that vaguely looked like a door without actually being one, we’re not looking for writers that only vaguely know how to build a joke. If we can’t easily make out the punchlines, then we might need you to go back to the drawingboard.

Also if you send us stories based around puns or wordplay unfortunately we won’t be running it. This style of humour has its place, but the Chaser isn’t it. Keep your pitches limited to satirical news parody, and same goes for body copy.

5. Write backwards

Come up with the jokes first. It’s much easier to frame a satiric story around some inherent ironies you spotted than it is to try and insert jokes into plain reporting.

6. Know the voice

It’s important you get the voice of the Chaser down before writing your article. While the AP guide is a great startpoint, the Chaser is just as much about what you say as how you say it. You can sum up the Chaser’s voice in fourish words: Self-important, intelligent, irreverent, and left-leaning centrist. Our main mission though is pointing out hypocrisy. For quite a while we simply ran with “Statement” says person who holds similar but conflicting view (eg. “Marriage can’t change”, says Church founded to change definition of marriage), but we’ve moved away from it being our trademark style. Still, it’s a good way to write an easy headline that points a finger at obvious hypocrisy so feel free to use it as a template starting out.

Unlike Clickhole the Chaser generally doesn’t do absurdism unless it’s been a particularly dark news cycle and we feel like people need a bit of light relief, and edgy humour has probably passed its moment in the sun, so pitch those type of headlines sparingly.

“I takes a lot to know what headlines are suited for the Onion. We get a lot of headlines that come in that are really funny, but just wouldn’t feel right.”

– Joe Randazzo (The Onion)

7. Write like a robot

If you are struggling to come up with witty one liners, remember the central tenants of satire:

Hyperbole, juxtaposition, lampoon, irony, misplaced focus, logical conclusions and illogical deductions

Find examples of these that apply to your topic, and you’re halfway to a finished article already.

It’s also important to remember that a punchline is best when it takes an unexpected turn from where your setup started out. Seinfeld calls this making the audience “make a mental leap” between two ideas.

“Laughter’s often a startled reaction to surprise and danger. Humor is a strange thing.”
– Had Hanson (The Onion)

8. Write too much, let us edit

It’s much better when pitching stories to include way to much and let us cut articles down. We generally run about 3-4 paragraphs on a story, but you can always aim for 5-6 paragraphs if you’re not confident in the gags.

Sometimes jokes you thought were hilarious might be cut because they’re just not as funny to a fresh pair of eyes, and sometimes a joke you thought was easy or lame will be what makes an article golden.

We want to get the best out of our comedy writers, and this means editing, re-writes and sometimes taking advice from others. It’s nothing against you but we’d rather make the audience laugh than to keep in a joke that isn’t funny just to stroke a writer’s ego.

“Why are all these quotes from the Onion and not from the Chaser?”
– Charles Firth (The Chaser)

Invoicing guide

If you’ve pitched a headline and it’s been accepted and run on our site, we pay you a licence fee for your work. That means that you retain copyright over it, but we get a non-exclusive licence to use your work on our website, in print and other media. Basically, what you’ve written is still owned by you, but we get the right to publish it.

However, a lot of first time writers aren’t familiar with the process of invoicing for their work, so here’s a quick guide to how it’s done:

1. You’ll either need an ABN, or to declare you’re doing this as a hobby (this page by the ATO might help you decide if this is a hobby). If you think this is just a hobby for you, then we need you to complete this form, and send it to us along with your first invoice.

2. Fill out an invoice and send it back to us as a PDF. If you don’t know how to do that, this tool will help you (just choose to fill out the no GST template). Here’s an example of what your invoice should include and look like.

3. The invoice should include up to two line items: Firstly headlines which are $30 each, and then body copy if we requested you write it, which is $20 each. Generally it’s a good idea to invoice at the end of the week, that way if you’ve had multiple stories picked up, then you can invoice them all in one hit.

4. Please include your email address on the invoice!

5. Email us your invoice (and hobby form if needed) to [email protected]. Our payout rate is a bit sporadic, but you should see the money in your account within two weeks at the latest. If it doesn’t turn up, please don’t hesitate to chase this up as something has probably gone wrong.

Terms of Submission

By submitting any headlines, copy, or other creative ideas, you agree to grant Chaser Digital Pty Ltd, it’s owners and subsidiaries a perpetual licence to use, adapt, modify, and commercialise the submitted content and ideas globally across all mediums, and you forfeit any right to collect royalties, licencing fees or other payments that may be incurred in the course of Chaser Digital’s use of this work, unless volunteered by Chaser Digital as remuneration for your contribution.

Authors will be credited as deemed appropriate by Chaser Digital’s editors.

Why are these terms so harsh?

We often receive multiple copies of the same idea, whether it be something that seems like an original observation that turns out to be quite common, or just multiple contributors riffing on a news story coming up with the same joke (even if a joke might seem incredibly original to you, when there are hundreds of writers even the most niche idea can come up more than once). These terms just mean that should someone send in an idea that we’re already busy writing, or that 50 other people submitted, there’s less of a chance of us getting sued out of existence by 50 different writers demanding credit.