We’re delighted you’re interested in writing for us. We consider pitches based on material available in JSTOR’s digital library, open Shared Collections, and Reveal Digital. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the website before querying us and to follow our guidelines below. You can read more about JSTOR Daily here. We’re unable to respond to pitches that don’t follow our guidelines or cover fields not well-represented in JSTOR, Reveal Digital, or Shared Collections.
We’re not usually interested in republishing content that’s been previously published, articles written for specialists in a particular discipline, or anything that feels like work to read. We are interested in timely, engaging, and reported stories on scholarly topics, including interviews with researchers doing cutting-edge work in their fields. For more advice about writing successful pitches, check out this Nieman Lab article.
What We’re Looking For
We’re excited by stories that tease out the details of a current event or historical moment or that look at the obvious in a non-obvious way. Subjects that are newsworthy, entertaining, quirky, surprising, and enlightening are right up our alley. Each of our stories is informed by, links to, and provides free access to underlying scholarship or other content on JSTOR. Because JSTOR’s digital library holds mostly archival content (rather than just-published research), our stories tend to look at the ways the present is informed by the past.
Reading Lists, Annotations, Pedagogical Essays, and Columns
We’re particularly interested in work that highlights the way JSTOR and/or JSTOR Daily can be used by instructors or librarians—in the classroom or as part of a research project, learning exercise, or assignment. These contributions can take the form of pedagogical essays, Reading Lists (annotated bibliographies), Annotations, or limited-run columns.
Shared Collections, Reveal Digital, and Path to Open
We love it when contributors dig into the primary sources available on JSTOR. We have a growing corpus of digital special collections shared by our institutional partners, and we welcome pitches based on them. Explore our Shared Collections stories to get a feel for what we’re looking for.
The collections in Reveal Digital are sourced from a wide array of libraries, museums, historical societies, and individual collectors. We welcome pitches based on materials from the Reveal Digital collections. Our stories based on the American Prison Newspapers collection are good models.
We’re also excited to share JSTOR’s Path to Open initiative with our readers. We’re looking for something more than an academic book review—creative takes are welcome. If you have an idea for an essay based on one of the released titles that could appeal to a wide audience, please pitch it to us.
Feature Submission Guidelines
Your pitch for a feature story (about 2,000 words) should include a detailed description of the subject you’d like to write about, why it’s interesting now, links to your clips or CV, and a preview of the academic angle or articles from JSTOR that you’d like to reference. Please keep in mind that we generally cannot cite JSTOR Book chapters. We’ll provide access to JSTOR for writers who need it, but we encourage you to use a personal JSTOR account to do preliminary research. Pitches without JSTOR references will be considered, but we won’t assign pieces without talking to you first about the scholarship or other JSTOR content with which you’re in conversation. We don’t accept stories written on spec and can’t accept email attachments. We generally need at least two months’ lead time for stories pegged to upcoming events, and we don’t usually cover developing stories like a newspaper. The best way to understand the kinds of features we acquire is to read a few of our published features.
Short-Form Content, aka Quick Reads
We have a pool of writers who contribute short-form content (about 500 words) to the site in their area of expertise on an ongoing basis. This type of quick reads content is similar to a “research report” that summarizes scholarship that’s on JSTOR in a lively, engaging manner. If you’re interested in becoming a regular quick reads contributor, please express your interest and help us understand why you’d be a good fit for the site and your proposed beat.
How to Contact Us
If any of the above appeal to you, please use our Contact the Editors form to submit your pitch, and please be sure to include your name and institutional affiliation, if any.
Please keep in mind that we’re a very small team. If you don’t hear from us within three weeks, feel free to send a follow-up query. If you still don’t hear from us, it’s safe to assume your submission isn’t a fit.
All of our contributors are compensated for their published work. We look forward to hearing from you!