Submissions

The basics:

Writers are welcome to send pitches to our editors at seyward@atavist.com and/or jonah@atavist.com. We accept ideas on a rolling basis. We’ll post a note here if we ever hit the pause button. 

We try to respond to every submission we get. We request two weeks to do so. If you haven’t heard from us by then, feel free to nudge us, or to move on. We prefer that you not submit a pitch simultaneously to other publications, but if you do and get an offer that you decide to accept, just follow up to let us know. We know freelancing is hard, and the most important thing is getting your work published and paid for. 

Who can pitch: 

Anyone, anywhere! Early-career journalists, seasoned pros, Americans, writers from other countries—our door is wide open. We’re always seeking to diversify our pool of contributors, as well as the stories we tell. 

What we are looking for: 

The best way to understand our approach to storytelling is to read some of our most recent stories and the award-winning pieces in our archive. Atavist stories can be historical or current; they can be about crime or science, adventure or romance; they can be rooted in investigative reporting or in first-person experiences. What unites them is their narrative approach—our stories are plot- and character-driven, cinematic, the kind of yarns you don’t want to stop reading because you can’t wait to see what happens next. This isn’t to say that every story needs gasp-worthy moments. For instance, here’s a beautiful Atavist feature about the monarch butterfly migration, in which the narrative is about whether or not a butterfly named Flamingo will survive his flight south.

In 2020, the Nieman Foundation published an essay about the nature of cinematic writing. The whole piece is worth a read because it encapsulates what Atavist does as a magazine, but this part in particular resonates:

A story is a graceful line rather than a staggered inverted pyramid; it has an arc, a beginning-middle-end, a graceful spine with limbs attached in just the right places.

In a pitch, tell us the story you want to write as if you were telling it to friends over dinner—be compelling and demonstrate that you have a strong grasp on the narrative. Also, show us why you are the person to write the story: How are you uniquely situated to tackle the material? Do you have the cooperation of key sources? What other legwork have you done on the reporting front?

There is no minimum or maximum length for pitches. Use your judgment.

What we are not looking for:

News dispatches or analyses, think pieces, trend pieces, reviews, round-ups on a subject, profiles of well-known figures, and most any other topic-driven feature. Also, blog posts, op-eds, and academic papers. Our stories are deeply researched and carefully crafted, so fast takes aren’t our thing. Most importantly, if an idea doesn’t have a narrative arc, it almost certainly isn’t for us.

A note about AI:

We will not consider pitches or accept story drafts that have been written, assisted, or edited using generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Words and dollars*:

We’re looking for stories that need to be longer than a typical magazine feature, anywhere from 8,000 to 30,000 words. Payment rates vary by project. We offer a story fee plus, if applicable, a budget for expenses. Our baseline story fee is $6,000. We guarantee 25 percent payment for all assigned stories, because that’s the equivalent of our kill fee (an industry phrase we hate, by the way). We also pay quarterly royalties to our authors, based on traffic to paywalled versions of their stories (e.g. the version on this site and the version on Apple News+).

*Our word count and payment terms are different for our Revived series, which is described below.

If you’re not a writer:

Most of our stories are told primarily in text, but we’ve also won awards for our documentary video projects, and we run photography and audio stories so long as they fit the criteria described above. We welcome submissions and questions about commissions from illustrators, photographers, and other creatives. Please send them to our art director. 

Our Revived series:

Revived is an Atavist project breathing new life into old stories. Periodically, the magazine releases previously published features that can no longer be found online. We collaborate with authors on edits and updates we deem appropriate, but our goal is to celebrate existing work otherwise lost to dead outlets and dead links, not to remake it into something new. 

Here’s what to know about Revived:  

• Eligible stories run about 5,000 words or more. They have a strong narrative arc, in keeping with The Atavist’s mission. 
• They must be accessible only via The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, if that. We don’t re-publish work from publications that have shuttered but are still readily accessible and searchable online—for instance, BuzzFeed News or The California Sunday Magazine. (We love their stuff, by the way.)  
• We also consider stories that were available only in print from outlets that have since ceased publication.
• Writers must own the rights to their stories or be able to obtain them prior to publishing with The Atavist. 
• Even if stories were fact-checked previously, we do it again. (We really love fact-checking.) 
• Authors receive a fee of $2,500. 

Want to pitch a Revived story? Reach out to our editors!