We're hiring a daily newsletter writer

Join us and document the scientific, technological and economic progress happening around the world.

As well as the newsletter writer job below, which can be fully remote, we’re recruiting for a growth marketing lead based in London. Find out more and apply for that here.

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Works in Progress is looking for someone to run a new daily newsletter that aggregates and links to news stories, essays, podcasts, videos, and other ‘content’ for people who are interested in scientific and technological progress, economic growth, YIMBYism, beautiful cities, global health, clean energy, artificial intelligence, the politics of ‘abundance’, and other things we and our readers care about.

We want to make this newsletter the go-to daily briefing for people interested in the Progress Studies / abundance world – a Morning Brew or 1440 for people who want to know about Vietnam building a high-speed rail line in record speed, or a new programme launching to eradicate malarial mosquitoes in Cape Verde, or a new bill that would legalise dense housing in Oklahoma City, or a new article that’s out about mapping nematode brains. We aren’t aware of a service aggregating news and writing in these areas, so we are starting one.

What you’ll do

Your role will be to browse the internet all day looking for things that people will want to read and listen to, and write a newsletter each weekday rounding up the most interesting links, sent out early morning US time. The newsletter will be focused on links with brief commentary on each, rather than primarily being content you have written yourself. We’ll probably start with one issue every two or three days and build up to once a day (on weekdays) once you’ve gotten the hang of it.

Who you should be

You should be someone who spends an awful lot of time on the internet already, reading and listening to things in the areas we’re interested in. (If you could imagine a Works in Progress article about it, it’s probably relevant.) You should already be someone who is alert to interesting news around the world, and read a lot of good, obscure websites that other people will be pleased to get the best of from you. You should also be capable of setting up Google Alerts and using AI, and other tools to stay on top of things. If the thought of being paid to trawl the internet all day for interesting news and essays appeals to you, then you might be a good fit. You must be extremely familiar with at least some of the subject areas we’re interested in and excited about learning more about the others.

You must be a capable writer, who can read and write in English as well as a native speaker, and not need to use Grammarly or other software to produce clean copy. You can be based anywhere in the world, but you must be willing to write the newsletter so that it is up to date and ready to send at 6 or 7am Pacific Time. (If you are in the Americas, that will mean working early in the morning; if you are in Asia, it could mean working late at night.) Prior experience doing something like this isn’t necessary, although if you have done a regular aggregator newsletter like this before, that could help.

Salary and contract length

We will pay between $50,000–80,000/year (USD) for this role and we will initially offer a one year contract for it, with a view to extending if we decide the project is worth continuing. This is a fully remote role and you may be based anywhere to do it, as long as we can legally contract with and pay you.

How to apply

To apply, send us the following:

• An up-to-date resume.

• Up to 300 words about yourself and your suitability for the role.

• A pre-existing sample of your writing.

• Five of your favourite ‘content sources’ (newsletters, blogs, podcasts, Youtube channels, etc) that you consider to be underrated, with a couple of sentences about why. Show us that you are able to dig into the lesser-known corners of the internet where great work is being produced.

• Up to ten links from the seven days prior to sending that you could imagine including in a newsletter, plus one sentence each explaining why. Ideally this will include a mixture of news stories, essays, podcasts and videos, as well as anything else you might expect to include in the daily newsletter.

Please send this to wip-hiring@stripe.com before August 16th. You may use AI to help with your submission, but if you do, you must tell us and briefly explain how you used it. (This includes the writing sample.) We will not respond to applications that we suspect have used AI without saying so.