We’re delighted you’re interested in writing for us. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with the website before querying us and to read more about JSTOR Daily here.

Due to the small size of our staff, we cannot read or respond to submissions of full articles.

We’re excited by stories that tease out the details 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 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—or the ways the past lives on inside the present.

We are particularly interested in a reading list/annotated bibliography about structural racism, work that highlights scholarship by BIPOC, and are committed to diversifying our pool of regular contributors. We are also looking for writers to engage with some of the new Open Community 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. We prefer to consider pitches rather than full articles written on spec.

We do not accept stories written on spec and cannot accept attachments. Your pitch for a feature story (1,800–2,000 words) should include a detailed description of the subject you’d like to write about, links to your clips or CV, a news peg, and if possible, a preview of the academic 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 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.

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.