We are no longer accepting applications for this position. For other opportunities, please visit the Pacific Standard careers page.
This is an exciting opportunity for a freelance editor to contribute to our new Ideas section, and be part of a team that is thinking openly and ambitiously about how criticism and the arts can help shape culture and effect social change. If you have a voracious appetite for books, film, and the arts, pay keen attention to the conversations happening around them, are eloquent about your cultural obsessions, and know how to edit essays about politics and art without giving short shrift to either, we’d like to hear from you.
Skills/Core Competencies
- Promising candidates will have experience assigning and editing stories and criticism about high culture, pop culture, and other kinds of culture, as well as a reasonably deep and diverse network of freelancers to tap.
- We are especially interested in applicants who are familiar with the publishing world and attuned to upcoming releases across the major, independent, and academic publishers, as well as applicants who share our commitment to elevating the voices of critics, artists, and creators who tend to get overlooked by the mainstream press.
- Candidates should have a facility at editing across a variety of formats, knowing how to tighten a Q&A but also how to push an already-ambitious essay to new heights.
- While the primary responsibilities will be assigning and editing, there will also be space to pitch and contribute; if you’re interested in writing for Ideas, please indicate as much in your application.
Job Requirements
- Writing, assigning, and editing criticism and essays on topics and titles central to Pacific Standard’s core coverage areas of social and environmental justice.
- Assigning/writing short capsule reviews of books and films across a range of subjects.
- Working with staff writers and contract writers, under direction from the senior editor in Washington, D.C.
- Maintaining the magazine’s calendar of forthcoming releases in books (and possibly film/music).
- Brainstorming and helping develop thematic story packages.
Location: Washington, D.C. / Remote
To Apply: To apply, send your cover letter and resume to careers@psmag.com by May 20th, 2019. Your cover letter should address your familiarity with the publishing world and with books coverage more generally, and include links to three pieces you’ve commissioned and edited, as well as two or three ideas for pieces about recently released titles that you would have assigned for Pacific Standard. All application materials should be submitted electronically. We regret that we cannot respond to all applicants. Absolutely no phone calls, please.
About Pacific Standard: Pacific Standard publishes stories that matter, stories that, by virtue of their ideas and craft, are capable of creating a better and more just society. With a methodology that mixes rigorous reporting and narrative journalism with peer-reviewed research, we are fiercely committed to covering social and environmental justice.
Pacific Standard is growing. We are committed to recruiting and supporting a diverse staff to help report on and advance a conversation about social and environmental justice issues in our society. People of all backgrounds and life experiences are encouraged to apply.
