Introducing the New PSmag.com

We want to bring the kinds of stories we tell — stories that matter — to the widest possible audience. Medium is going to help us do that.

By Nicholas Jackson

Throughout the fall and winter, the Pacific Standard editorial team gathered in coffee shops and conference rooms (and, in true California style, on the occasional patio), using paper and pen, whiteboard and keyboard, to completely make over our print magazine. We began by re-considering and re-affirming those things that set us apart from all the other media outlets vying for your support and attention, and then we rolled up our sleeves and overhauled the magazine page by page. The result is an all-new reader experience: a distinctive and compelling combination of stories that matter with visuals that beckon; a magazine for our age, as well as the ages to come. We’ve fine-tuned your favorite niches, created several new sections and departments, expanded the number of pages reserved for top-shelf longform features, and introduced interviews and photo essays into the mix.

You’ll find the new sections in the navigation bar on our homepage, and descriptions of the kind of stories we’re aiming to tell going forward on our How to Contact Us page. Here’s a brief overview:

• Pacific Standard features explore and illuminate what it means to be human: what plagues us, what thrills us, why we do what we do. The magazine publishes ambitious longform stories that are finely crafted, meticulously reported, and fueled by a bottomless curiosity about society and the relationships that sustain it. We place a high value on originality in both subject and execution, and are always looking to be surprised.
• Field Notes place the reader in a dramatic moment or in an outlandish place they have never seen before: They impart a sense of discovery and immersion. When executed perfectly, these snapshots implicitly telegraph an idea larger than themselves.
• The Fix is a section in Pacific Standard that provides a space for us to highlight, in columns and accompanying sidebars and infographics, solutions to some of society’s biggest problems.
• In The Culture Pages, we examine entertainment through ideas, and ideas through entertainment — from books to film, television, podcasts, video games, museums, music, and street art — with two simple questions that guide our work: How do notions of conscience and justice energize, illuminate, or inform current cultural efforts, and how do arts lead the way in social progress?

The new Pacific Standard is at once bold, classy, and indispensable — equally at home in your beach bag or on your coffee table. With this new format we’re drilling down on our mission to combine research with narrative and investigative reporting, telling stories about society’s biggest problems, both established and emerging, and the people attempting to solve them.

But, while print is a medium we remain committed to, we’ve always been about reaching readers wherever they are, across platforms. We want to bring the kinds of stories we tell — stories that matter — to the widest possible audience of civically engaged citizens interested in improving both private behavior and public policy to promote a more fair and equitable world, particularly in the areas of economic, educational, environmental, and social justice. So when Medium approached us about joining its new premium publisher program, we couldn’t say no. While the re-design of our print product — subscribe now so you can see the results of our work starting this summer — was in full swing, we decided to re-build PSmag.com too. Medium’s easy-to-use content management system, large network, and stellar product team will allow us to reach more people, faster. And the responsive site — void of clunky advertising networks — ensures readers will get the best experience, no matter where they’re coming from.

When I joined Pacific Standard three years ago this week — after a few years at Outside, The Atlantic, and Slate — I did so because I believed that there was still space for a wide-reaching publication that could inform and engage readers in new and interesting ways. We’ve built a team that’s passionate about and excited by our refined mission statement, and we’re using these dual re-designs to double down on that commitment. The credo that has guided our work over these past few months is as follows:

Pacific Standard matters because there’s no fluff. Because we offer something that lasts longer than a moment. Because we aim to influence policymakers. Because our stories are informed by research and reporting rather than relying solely on anecdote and experience. Because the stories we publish are all stories of consequence.

Whether you think we’ve missed the mark, or you want to let us know what we should be doing more of, I welcome your feedback at njackson@psmag.com and on our social media profiles. As of today, we’re re-opening comments on our pages; you can respond there too. I’ve long been wary of comments, but have some faith in the system Medium has built over the past few years. It’s participatory at its core, and every action is networked, meaning that when readers engage with our content, their followers can see all of those notes. If friends and followers aren’t enough to keep everyone in line, the platform also surfaces what it considers to be the most high-impact responses, and we’ll be actively hiding messages that are off-subject.

On that note, we’re also shifting our internal metrics for success. Instead of focusing on unique visitors and absolute pageviews, we’ll be optimizing our work around true measures of engagement, like how long people spend reading our stories and what drives them to highlight, share, and recommend.

After a couple of days off to prepare for the move, we’ll resume publishing this morning; we have a lot of strong stories in the works that we’re excited to get your feedback on. You may notice some hiccups in the meantime, but there’s no need to report them. Over the next few days and weeks we’ll be cleaning up our archives (and making sure they’re complete), assigning stories to their proper authors, managing URL re-directs, re-starting our email newsletter (subscribe here), and more. We’re also planning new features and brand extensions that we’ll announce soon. If you haven’t already, sign up for our event about the future of fresh water.

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