Proto.life Freelance Market Guide
Created April 25, 2022; checked for accuracy June 2, 2023.
Fees: This online magazine, formerly called NEO.LIFE, runs features that are typically between 1,000 and 3,500 words in length and cover how digital tools are being used to understand and engineer human biology. It also runs quick reviews of scientific papers, called dispatches, that are between 100 and 150 words long. Fees range between $1,000 and $3,000 for a feature story.
Submit to: Jason Bardi, editorial director, jason@proto.life
Website: https://proto.life
Owner: Founder and CEO Jane Metcalfe, who is the former president and co-founder of Wired magazine. proto.life currently has no outside investors. Metcalfe intends to build proto.life “into a self-sustaining business by bringing on sponsors, introducing a paid subscription option, and producing events,” according to its website.
Readership target: The audience includes scientists and researchers, “who read proto.life because, while they may know a lot about molecular biology, they may not know much about the future of food or biodesign or psychedelics as a treatment,” Metcalfe said.In addition, readers include entrepreneurs, investors in relevant companies and so-called aging hackers “who want to be living their best lives and want to use whatever technology that’s out there. And a large component of our audience is media, design and trend hunters,” she said.
Frequency of publication: The website is updated weekly.
What editors looks for in a pitch: The magazine is interested in “how science and technology alter the world within us — our own brains, genomes, and microbiomes. How will our newfound abilities transform our species and our society?” according to its website. Feature categories include genetics, the brain, biohacking, the microbiome, synthetic biology, longevity, food, wellness and sex. Bardi said the magazine is always interested in the business angle of stories.
“Basically, we’re looking for surprise and delight,” Metcalfe said.“We assume that people involved in our community know a lot about a lot of things and about technology. So what we’re looking for writers to tell us something that we don’t know, and tell it in a way that is going to be entertaining and surprising and inspiring.”
In terms of format, the magazine is looking for features, interviews, Q&As and profiles.
Pitches can run from a few paragraphs to a page and include a nut graph and potential sources. “But the main thing is we want to have a clear idea of what the story they’re proposing to write is and how they’re going to write it. And so if it’s essential, if it helps to list who they’re talking to, obviously they could do that. I don’t want to set such a high bar that somebody is going to have to spend a day working on the pitch if it’s not the right story for us,” Bardi said.
Do editors welcome pre-pitches?: “I’m open to that,” said Bardi. “I think that Jane and I meet often enough that we can consider some things, and often, even with a really long pitch, we’ll go back and ask for more information. So I think it’s fine to have a few sentences or a few paragraphs as long as it gives us a good idea of what the actual story is about.” Writers should be careful not to pre-pitch a general topic. “I don’t want somebody to just say, ‘I’d like to do a story about transplantation.’ I want to actually know what the story is about,” he said.
What editors look for in a writer: “We love people who have experience, who have worked with excellent editors and deliver clean copy, and we’re much more likely to work with them than people who need a lot of hand holding or a fact checking or what have you,” Metcalfe said. “But having said that, we are always looking for fresh, new voices.”
Most common mistakes editors see with pitches: Not looking at the website and researching past coverage. “We’ve done a lot of coverage, for instance, on psychedelic medicine and a lot on microbiome, and so we don’t want a pitch that is ignorant of what we’ve already done,” Bardi said.“We want something to build on what we’ve already done. And we want to see that in the pitch.”
Lead time for pitching: The magazine will get back to writers in a few days to a week. In general, writers have two to three weeks to deliver the story, more if they need it.