Since its founding 10 years ago, Pacific Standard has thrived. We’ve won several of the industry’s highest honors (most notably, two National Magazine Awards, a Mirror Award, and a medal from the Society of Publication Designers), we’ve reached an audience of more than 10 million people per year, and we’ve crafted stories that have had real legislative and cultural impact. In the process, we’ve succeeded in proving the conventional wisdom of many modern media outlets wrong: There’s indeed a substantial audience for thoughtful stories in the public interest, what we call stories that matter.
While planning for our second decade of publishing, we realized that many of our editorial ambitions have started to run up against the boundaries of what’s possible in a traditional magazine. In service of our non-profit mission to produce some of the best high-impact public service journalism, and to better serve our readers where they are, we’ve decided to sunset our print product and to accelerate our growth online, shifting more resources toward investigative reporting and digital innovation. This shift presents an enormous opportunity to create a more responsive and dynamic social and environmental justice magazine for the 21st century, one that is among the country’s finest non-profit publications.
The next phase of Pacific Standard will preserve all of the traditional writing, editing, fact-checking, copy-editing, proofreading, and legal review standards that have made our reporting so celebrated and reliable. More importantly, it will allow us to hire more journalists. In the coming months, we’ll grow in the crucial areas of specialized accountability reporting, data editing, multimedia production, and design. We’ll also reorganize our newsroom around the subject and scope of our work rather than the platform it lives on. A new audience team will focus on the packaging, promotion, and presentation of every story, ensuring they’re published at the moment they’re most valuable to readers and best positioned for impact. Finally, we’ll work to expand our Pacific Standard premium program, which offers subscribers early access to some of our most ambitious feature stories and investigations, and build the digital infrastructure needed so our readers and supporters can directly fund specific projects and future initiatives.
Thanks for reading us in print, and we hope you’ll follow us online and into the future.
