Submission Guidelines

We’re delighted you’re interested in writing for us. 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.

If you’ve found your way here because you read the site and are interested in submitting, welcome. We consider long-form feature pitches and occasionally need new writers for short, “quick read” pieces, reading lists, and other content. See details below.

We are an extremely small team and have been getting dozens of spam articles that are plagiarized from the internet. Because of this, we are unable to respond to pitches that don’t follow our guidelines or to pitches that include articles that have already been written.

What We’re Looking For

We’re excited by stories that tease out the details of an 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—these free links to JSTOR are marked with a red J icon. 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—or the ways the past lives on inside the present.

We are particularly interested in work that highlights research by BIPOC scholars and professors, and are committed to diversifying our pool of regular contributors. We welcome contributions on the following topics in particular:

We are also looking for writers to engage with some of the new Shared Collections on JSTOR, the primary sources in the South Asian Open Archives, the Independent Voices Black American Press collection, and Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa. We are also interested in introductory discipline-based Reading Lists like the ones you’ll find on the site.

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.

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, a news peg, 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 will provide access to JSTOR for writers who need it, but we encourage you to use the free MyJSTOR reading program to do preliminary research. Pitches without JSTOR references will be considered, but we won’t accept pitches or assign pieces without talking to you first about the scholarship or other JSTOR content you’re in conversation with. We do not accept stories written on spec and cannot 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.

Please use our Contact the Editors form to submit your pitch, and please be sure to include your name and institutional affiliation, if any. We look forward to hearing from you!

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. At a newspaper, you might say that we have assigned these writers a “beat”. We do occasionally hire new writers for this section. We often use the shorthand moniker “blog posts” for this type of quick reads content, but they are more like “research reports” that summarize scholarship that’s on JSTOR. If you’re interested in becoming a regular quick reads contributor, please use our Contact the Editors form to express your interest and help us understand why you’d be a good fit for the site and your proposed beat.

Reading Lists, Syllabi, Pedagogical Essays, and Columns

In addition to our daily quick reads and weekly feature articles, we also publish reading lists, pedagogical essays, columns, and a few other types of content. If you are interesting in contributing this type of content, please use our Contact the Editors form to express your interest and help us understand your expertise.

Please keep in mind that we are 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.

NOTE: If you’re interested in submitting an essay about the American Prison Newspaper collection, please visit this page to read this call for submissions.