Welcome. If you were invited to read this page, it means we have read your writing and really want to see you writing on The Speaker. Probably, we’ve taken into account other things too, like if you have interests that we think will help in covering the type of news we are aiming at, and covering it in a terse and informative way.
We have this page because there are some things we will have to say to everyone, and it’s better everyone hears them the same way, so we’re all on the same page. Then we’ll communicate individually at length, particularly at first, to form the channel of news you’re working on.
For the most part, we’re hiring new writers part time. We usually make a contract that will include around 50 articles per month. We are hiring one or more writers from several countries (Spanish writers to cover Latin America and Spain, and English writers to cover the rest of the world — there will be two separate websites, and editors will translate pieces to publish them on both sites), as well as some writers to cover particular themes not tied to any country. Because we don’t know any of you guys, we will wait and see how your writing goes. When we see how great a job you’re doing, we’ll increase your hours and pay. It’s best to think of the current phase of The Speaker as a starting point for something much bigger. Your writing for this phase should be thought about as laying the foundations for your category. We’ll be working with you to decide the broad players and themes relevant to your category, about which many of your first articles will be.
The articles have no wordcount minimum or maximum. We don’t count words. Some of your articles will be two sentences. Some will be a page or two. We want you to consider only what the story requires, and only focus on doing journalism as well as it can be done. If the story is interesting but can be told with just a headline or a few sentences, and anything more would be gratuitous for the reader and waste his energy, don’t write more. If the story requires more, write more. For sure, some of the articles you write will take 2 minutes, and others will take hours.
Examples of short articles:
Examples of longer articles:
North Korean camp escapee interview
Science article on math of crowds
Minimum wage and politics
We created a few other pages as well to introduce you to what we’re doing at The Speaker: Resources for New Writers.