Let your voice define an Important Media site – and get paid for it!

Are you looking for the next big thing to throw yourself into? Our Site Editors are always happy to hear from people who are interested in joining the editoral board.

Editors are the people who take primary responsibility over the daily editorial operations of each of our sites. They’re charged with creating each site’s voice, picking and managing their contributor mix, and and generally owning the process of setting and meeting goals. However, by no means are editors alone in the process. Although they enable their site’s editorial process to function autonomously, Editors are constantly engaged with other Site Editors, allowing the entire ed. board to benefit from individual mistakes and innovations. They’re also encouraged to provide feedback and input on the platform we’re building for growing the Important Media network.

This arrangement is generally best suited to:

• recent journalism grads looking to use new media models for the purpose of social good
• topic experts in the offline world who want to start their own blog, but don’t want to do it alone
• professional (and aspiring) freelance journalists
• refugees from old media with some new media experience
• experienced online freelancers currently maintaining one or more niche blog sites
• authors in the process of writing a book on an important niche topic (a research aide that pays)

Does that sound like you? Read on.

Site Editor Guidelines and Benefits

For which sites and topics are you looking for Editors?

Currently, Important Media recruiting founding Editors for 3 of our 10 existing sites. Editor positions are available on Ecolocalizer.com and Ecoscraps.com. Once our founding editorial team is in place, with a dedicated editor and an engaged content team on each site, we’ll start launch sites in new verticals once again.

What does it take to be an Important Media Site Editor?

Mostly, we’re looking for people who have an interesting perspective and compelling narratives to contribute to our mission and niche focus. Getting one’s point out has its rewards. But, it does come with significant responsibilities:

• Complete responsibility for the blog’s unique success:
  • Oversee/edit/assign paid writers
  • Coordinate/edit postings by relevant experts and other unpaid contributions
  • Create unique editorial voice and identity for the title
  • Moderate user-submitted content
  • Set commenting policies
  • Moderate social features we may add to blogs (via buddypress)
  • Know your blog’s vitals and reader demographics, set and track metrics and review performance
  • Coordinate content marketing strategy, including Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, SU and those channels unique to your blog’s niche (digg, reddit, niche forums, fark, etc.)
• As a freelance contractor, editor is free to subcontract for editorial and social media assistance, take research or ‘important contributor concierge’ interns – it’s an editor’s decision how they scale themselves
• Share best practices with peers on the editorial board
• Adhere to those standards set network-wide

Sounds like a lot of work. What’s in it for me?

Because Site Editors are the key individual stakeholder in any IM site’s long-term success, they benefit from the revshare system most directly. Simply put, they receive a fixed percentage of the total revenue the blog makes (deposits) each month. Depending on conditions, that percentage will probably vary between 20-35%. Of course, the process of bringing a site to a level that can support a the monthly equivalent of a full-time salary takes multiple months, and in some cases never will. However, much of the satisfaction most of our Editors get out of their experience tends to be the process of building a blog itself, along with a supportive team of people who are in the same situation.

What is the “editorial community” like?

We maintain both realtime and asynchronous communication among editors in different forms on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. These include persistent team Skype rooms, scheduled meetings, and special projects. We want to provide the tools for smart, passionate people to succeed together. The seed is planted. Time to water it.

This sounds awesome. How do I apply?

Glad you’re still with us! Please fill out our editorial application, indicating your interest as a Site Editor.

I’m more interested in continuing a blog I’ve already started, or starting a new blog, in a niche you don’t cover yet. What should I do?

Contact David Anderson (firstname AT importantmedia DOT org) and let’s talk about it. Some examples of sites that could be candidates are infrastructurist.com, homesteadwoman.com, and www.env-econ.net.