Tell us about POPSUGAR Australia. What is the publication about and what does it aim to achieve?
POPSUGAR Australia is a trusted space encouraging you to explore everything you’re curious about and a place where women at all points and on all roads of life can turn to for direction. Our mission is to power a brighter tomorrow. We do this by celebrating the power of positivity, solving our audience’s problems, putting trends within reach, and always making time for an unapologetic moment of play. We’re Australia’s most positive digital community. 

Who’s reading POPSUGAR Australia?
Our audience is predominantly women (though there are some men in there!) and almost half of our audience is between 16 and 29-years-old, so they’re mostly a mix of Gen Z and Millennials. 

What sort of content do you publish, and how often?
We publish a mix of content across our six verticals on POPSUGAR Australia. These include celebrity, fashion, beauty, health and fitness, living, and gaming, our most recent vertical that we launched in partnership with Dell as a global-first in October last year.

Within these verticals, our audiences come to us for entertainment news, reality TV coverage, streaming recommendations, movie reviews, celebrity style, beauty hacks, product reviews, skincare advice, workouts, DIY home content, tech news, game recommendations, and female gamer profiles; the list goes on and on. Being the Australian edition of a global brand, we publish content around the clock. 
 
What are the issues or trends your team is excited about covering in 2022?
Our team has a lot of exciting editorial initiatives in the works for 2022. We will be launching POPSUGAR Sport, giving Australian women a place that they can celebrate the achievements of our female athletes and help reimagine how mainstream media support young women playing sport and supporting teams.

We will also be launching POPSUGAR Powerhouse, a 10-part content series designed to hand women the keys to financial freedom. We’ll also be furthering our support of Share the Dignity as our charity partner in an effort to see an end to period poverty. This will be a continuation of the editorial initiative we launched at the end of last year in partnership with Modibodi called POPSUGAR Uninhibited, our immersive custom-built content hub discussing period-related topics from PMS to sustainability, post-partum periods, first-person period diaries, and more. There will be lots more coming, but these are just a few! 
 
How can PRs work with POPSUGAR Australia? What makes a pitch stand out?
PRs can work with us by doing their homework on our publication and audience and ensure there is alignment and value for our audience in what they are pitching. Beyond this, I would ensure the angle PRs are pitching is interesting, relevant and offers a story or perspective outside of convincing the audience to purchase the product.

A pitch should offer expert comment, a case study, survey findings or anything that will take it further to make it a story. If a PR is able to capitalise on a topic that is being widely discussed or is gaining a lot of coverage, it will also help in getting a pitch picked up. Outside this, think about the sort of content editors are looking for around key dates and how you can assist in producing meaningful content through the brands or experts you have access to. 
 
Any editorial deadlines to be aware of?
Like most digital newsrooms, our team has pitch meetings in the morning to set priorities for the day and finalise our coverage plan. If your pitch is timely or related to a key date, please keep this in mind. If your pitch is evergreen or around a date that has a little more lead time, the best time to send this is in the afternoon. 

Tell us about your editorial team. Who covers what?
Being part of the Val Morgan Digital editorial team means we’re in the lucky position where we are able to write across a number of brands within our network, outside of POPSUGAR Australia, including The Latch and Thrillist Australia. However, our talented and diverse team do have their areas of focus or beats that they cover daily: