Want to Write for AnandTech?
by Anand Lal Shimpi on December 16, 2010 12:17 PM EST- Posted in
- Site Updates
- Call for Writers
Last year we put out our first ever public Call for Writers. Over the past year we've added many new faces to AnandTech and we're looking to do it again. It takes a great deal of time to cover the products that we do on AnandTech and we continue to have more to review and analyze than we have time to actually review and analyze them. We need your help.
I'm continually impressed by how ridiculously smart our readers are. The comments in our articles alone are some of the most well informed content on the web. You guys know your stuff. Which is why we turn to you for writers.
This time around we have some more specific needs that need to be filled, although we're always looking for more writers in general. The categories we're looking for writers are below:
CPUs
Video Cards
Motherboards
Memory
Cooling
Smartphones
Tablets/Notebooks/Netbooks
Apple
Storage (NAND based and HDDs)
Displays
News
If you find that you're passionate about another topic that isn't listed, please get in touch with us. Although those are the areas we're looking for, we always need more writers across the board.
You'll also note that there's a new category listed above: News. In 2011 you will see the return of regular news and short form content to AnandTech. We've been doing a bit of that lately but we're looking to expand it. If you're up to date on what's going on in tech and want to keep others up to date as well, this may be a good fit for you.
The rules are the same as before. If you're interested in writing for AnandTech, simply email your name, location (you can write from anywhere) and a writing sample to callforwriters AT anandtech DOT com. The writing sample can be any of the following:
1) A sample of a product review you've written. This can be any product in the categories mentioned below, the review can follow any format and be of any length. Ultimately your content would live on AnandTech, so take a look at our reviews and how we do things and keep that in mind as you submit your sample. You don't need complete testing. If you don't have things to compare the product being reviewed to just outline how you would test, what tests you'd run, what you'd compare to and how. Obviously the more complete your sample is, the better it looks :)
2) A sample guide. This can be a how to, a tutorial, or anything of the sort. I'd caution you against submitting a guide to building a PC, try to do something a bit more unique.
3) A sample analysis piece/column/editorial. This would be something similar to our Micron ClearNAND analysis or my take on the Google Chrome OS announcement. Again, these are just examples, think of something creative on your own :)
4) A sample set of blog/news posts. We're looking to bring back some tech news to AT with the new site. Submit a handful of interesting stories along with your brief analysis. These can be product announcements, interesting revelations around the web, drawing attention to a forum post, etc...
We'll read every submission although we won't always be able to respond to each one.
If you enjoy the site, if you like what we do and think you'd like to be a bigger part of it - drop us a line. As always, thanks for reading!
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Sunrise089 - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
I think Jared should be fired from his editing responsibilities tomorrow. Not because he's a bad editor (I'm sure he's excellent) but rather because I think his competitive advantage lies in writing articles. Jared's overclocking and buyers guide articles are sorely missed.NCM - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Dustin writes: "Respectfully, I've written for a few sites and Jarred is simply the best and easiest editor I've ever had the pleasure of working for."I didn't think that AT had an editor, which probably says it all. Writers don't need the easiest editor, they need the most effective one.
One obvious and recent example would be the headline of your otherwise perfectly respectable article: "HP Envy 17: HP's MacBook Pro Killer?"
Please, not another "XYZ Killer" comment. That's simply technical and journalistic laziness, and unworthy of AT's standing in the online technical community. An effective editor would never have let that pass, or never have applied that headline (whichever was the case).
And:
"...there are definitely much, much worse tech sites out there."
Is that the standard to live up to?
Sebec - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Agreed.Snotling - Monday, December 20, 2010 - link
I so totally second that.Also, since I'm commenting, I want to mention the computer case evaluations and the much too little attention that mATX motherboard reviews get.
I mean yeah, we all like to compensate for our sexual shortcomings with huge cases and full ATX motherboards but the truth is... nowadays almost nobody needs 5 expansion slots (except for SLI or CF) since everything except the TV tuner is integrated.
Someone need to get the message to manufacturers about making good quality cases for mATX form factor and also performance cases that don't look like a star-ship... we may all be enthusiasts but we're not all 40 year old virgins living in our mother's basement.
I've seen great mATX boards out there with SLI capabilities that are not reviewed anywhere and I have yet to find a case that's neither horizontal or huge or without neons, exposed insides or alien looking paint jobs.
For people like me who like to look serious and secretly kick ass, please find us a voice and help us chose the right hardware for the job.
Thank you.
Spazweasel - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
It's the job of an editor to show tough love, not warm fuzzies.Seriously, the complaints about misleading and sensationalist headlines are valid. The complaints about a lack of copy-editing for grammatical and spelling errors are valid. The complaints about stories being put up with mislabeled (or missing) graphs and inserts are valid. Head-in-the-sand won't make those problems go away; neither will a group-hug.
The editor is there to make the writer LOOK good, not FEEL good.
And as for worse tech sites... who cares? That doesn't justify sloppiness. AT is claiming to be the best. Fine.. back it up with results. You're being held to a journalistic standard, not a blog standard.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
I used to do nearly all of the final editing/posting of articles, but frankly that was too much for any one person. So these days, I edit/rewrite the PSU articles from Martin, I usually read through all of Johan's articles and make minor edits before they go up, and I read Dustin's stuff and any other notebook review before they go live. If I see a glaring error in an article from someone else, I'll also go and fix that, but otherwise I don't edit every article. Most of the time, I don't really make major changes unless something is really wrong; I let the writers have their own style and voice, and people get to know a personality slightly more that way. Or that's my theory.One of the things the readers don't generally realize is that many articles are in the finishing steps when NDA expires, so there's not a whole lot of time to carefully review and edit each article. Imagine one of the GPU articles that are 5000+ words getting wrapped up at midnight, and then along comes an editor and says, "no, we can't post this because there are some grammar errors, the headline needs work, and...." And that's assuming the copy editor is even awake when a review is ready to post.
In the grand scheme of things, a headline that you may not like on occasion (i.e. HP Envy 17: a MacBook Pro Killer?) is a drop in the bucket. It looks like a MacBook in styling, and that's what many people were saying when it originally launched. Most readers just went along and read the article (or not) without complaining, but the Apple crowd in particular loves to jump on anything that so much as suggests someone can compete with Jobs and his crew. And sometimes, it's just fun to ruffle their feathers a bit. ;-)
NCM - Wednesday, December 22, 2010 - link
JarredWalton writes:"In the grand scheme of things, a headline that you may not like on occasion (i.e. HP Envy 17: a MacBook Pro Killer?) is a drop in the bucket... but the Apple crowd in particular loves to jump on anything that so much as suggests someone can compete with Jobs and his crew."
Sorry, but you seem to be avoiding the real point, one I thought would be made evident by my not using the company names. It's not about HP or Apple or Dell or anyone else.
It's about lazy writing and trite metaphors. Write like the National Enquirer and that's the level of respect you earn. As simple as that.
(You do, however, have my full sympathy regarding exigent deadlines.)
prime2515103 - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
"1) A sample of a product review you've written. This can be any product in the categories mentioned below,..."Actually the categories were mentioned above. Need a proof reader? heh j/k...
FITCamaro - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
But I'd be happy to proof read your articles and spell check them. Since your current writers seem incapable or unwilling to do so.dustcrusher - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
Is it safe to assume that your choice of sentence structure is a sly reference to the less-than-stellar grammar that afflicts AT articles? My Sarcas-O-Meter is on the fritz.If AT wants a copy editor, I don't know if I'd be a good fit. If you guys want a style snob that will nitpick the living tar out of every article until it meets a certain standard of quality, I might be able to help ;-)