Mamazine

Editorial Guidelines for Guest Contributors

Who We are

Mama Glow is a go-to, safe space swaddling individuals and families navigating the reproductive continuum. Mama Glow makes wellness more accessible through real-life stories, first-person perspectives, and expert-backed advice. Our staff of journalists, freelancers, and subject-matter experts research, report, and produce articles, videos, and social content that help people feel belonging as they navigate their personal journeys. Our purpose is to promote diverse voices and perspectives not only through the people and stories we cover, but also through the contributors we work with. We are open to pitches that represent a diversity of viewpoints and intersections of identity.

The Mama Glow Audience

The Mama Glow Reader self-identifies as educated and informed, committed to personal growth, spiritually grounded, and a life-long learner. The Mama Glow Community revels in personal stories, aspirational living, role models, intelligent and culturally relevant reporting and lifestyle guidance from like-minded parents, hopeful expectants, experts and luminaries so they can feel supported educationally, emotionally and grounded in community.

Our Content Pillars

Wellbeing + Holistic Health
The Reproductive Health Continuum
Healing Intergenerational Trauma
Black Maternal Health
Reproductive justice and birth equity
Body Literacy + Body Sovereignty
Empowered and Informed pregnancy
Transcendent + Spiritual Birth
Postpartum Reintegration + Healing
Reclaiming Ritual, Self-care + Radical Rest
Mental Health + Motherhood
Doula Support + Birth Village Keeping
Legacy, Family + Tradition Building
Lineage + Storykeeping

Our Tone + Voice

We’re open to submissions that provide honest, aspirational and informed insight into the topics that matter most to our community. We strive to provide our reading community with detailed narratives and storytelling, heart-centered and evidence-based reporting, and educational content spanning across the reproductive continuum.

Like our birth work philosophy, we strive to be a non-judgemental presence of support. Our voice is grounding and supportive, never punitive. We strive for our reader to feel seen, connected and have a sense of belonging at Mama Glow. As the trustmark in the birth space our tone is informal but anchored in trust. We are much like having a friend on speed dial or your crew on group text. We serve up actionable life lessons at your fingertips. Nurturing is at the core of our content.

Pitch Guidelines

Mama Glow is open to receiving pitches that speak to our content pillars and cover the areas of the reproductive life-stages of our core audience: fertility, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, parenthood, birth work, health and wellness. We welcome reported content pitches from experienced journalists. Pitches should be timely, but not necessarily newsy.

Your pitch should be brief, 2 paragraphs at most. In the pitch you should identify the topic, what angle you’d like to take, what format you are considering, i.e. essay, article, how-to, listicle, interview, etc. If you are credentialed or have a special expertise or connection to the content, please indicate why you should write it, (this could be a brief sentence). If it is your first time pitching Mama Glow, please include up to 3 links to relevant pieces of published content that show your work.

You can submit your pitch to: SUBMISSIONS@MamaGlow.com

PLEASE NOTE: We do not accept sponsored content through this submission channel. If you represent a brand, product or service and wish to publish a story or curate a content package across social media, our newsletter, and the Mama Glow website, please contact us at: PARTNERSHIPS@MamaGlow.com with your proposal and budget.

Once your pitch is approved by your editor, you can get started writing your piece and submit. Your editor may do a few rounds of edits prior to publishing your piece. Your editor will contact you once your piece has gone live on the website.

We have an internal observance calendar that we use to guide our content each month. If your pitched piece does not fall within the observance month and would be better suited for publication at a different time, then we can accept it for future publication.

Content Submissions

Content submissions that we accept and publish:

Article (a piece of content about a particular subject matter, e.g. “The Challenges of Navigating Reproductive Health in a Post Roe Landscape”.)
The Listicle (e.g. “Top 10 postpartum self-care products”),
The How-to (e.g. “Birth Bag Packing Basics”)
Tips (e.g. 5 “Ways to Have an Empowered Pregnancy”)
The Primers (e.g. “Everything You Need to Know about Working with a Midwife”)
Personal Essays (narratives that take us on a journey, e.g. “My Journey as a Doula Trainee”)
The Interview Q&A (an opening deck, introducing the interview subject, followed by detailed and edited version of your conversation)
The As-told-to (a transcription of a conversation with an interview subject, edited to read as an essay, always starting with an opening deck)

Word count: The best performing articles are up to 750-900 words. Submissions should be no more than 1,500 words, unless it is a reported piece.

Headlines: While we prefer you submit your piece with a well-crafted and actionable headline, we reserve the right to change the headline for style purposes and to optimize the reader’s experience.

Style Guide

Please use gender inclusive language.
Please avoid the use of slang or profanity.
Colloquialisms are welcome.
Please use an affirming and loving warm tone.
Please bring an objective viewpoint to your reporting.
Please use honorifics for decorated experts- (e.g. Dr., PhD, CNM etc.)
When referring to people by race, please capitalize “Black”
Please provide proper citations for reported pieces.
Please reference 3-4 sources in your reporting.
When linking to cited research or reporting, please use reputable and trusted media outlets and medical journals.
Please use hyperlinks when necessary.
Please provide suggested recommendations when necessary, (e.g. a hyperlinked list of online mental health service providers).

If a piece is submitted that does not adhere to the style guide, it will be sent back for revision prior to internal editing. Please strive to submit the best quality work possible.

Submitting Your Content

Written submissions

Please send submissions as a shareable Google Doc.

Your submission is ready to send when it features the following:

The article’s title
Your name and email address
Your title and 3-sentence byline
Email Submissions@mamaglow.com once you have uploaded to Google drive

Photo submissions

If you have photos you’d like to include for your submission, please send them via Google drive or Dropbox link. It is not guaranteed that we will use the photos submitted. Please provide photo credit for submitted images. The photo quality should mirror the images on the Mama Glow website and Instagram.

We accept: