With the mission to educate as well as entertain, our scope is broadly cast on the best of pop culture, and we are the world’s largest site bridging academic and popular writing.
PopMatters welcomes reviews (600-plus words), essays (min. 1,200 words), interviews (min. 1,200 words), and list features on a broad range of topics in popular culture, past and present.
PopMatters publishes for posterity. Rooted in academia and built to educate and entertain, we’ve been doing this since 1999. Our articles live on, indexed and archived in library databases via ProQuest. That sense of place on the cultural and historical continuum is the matters in PopMatters, and it’s what sets us apart from your average “pop culture website”. Smart readers come to us for writing that meets their intellectual calibre.
We welcome pitches on cultural subjects from around the globe — past, present, and (for the bold) speculative future. Our writers and readers are sharp, worldly, and pop-culture-literate; they know their history and bring it to everything they read and write. If you’ve got intelligence, creativity, and passion to spare, we’d love to hear from you.
To pitch us: submit your article and application through PopMatters’ Submittable portal, and include links to samples of your published work.
One note: previously published pieces can be linked as writing samples only — not submitted for consideration. Every application must include an original, unpublished article that we can evaluate for publication.
Read more about our mission here.
A note on the practicals: PopMatters is by and for people — fiercely independent, run entirely by volunteers, and committed to educating readers while documenting our moment on the cultural timeline. We publish for posterity, and we’re well-respected for it, thanks to our ideals and the sharp writers and editors who bring them to life.
However, ideals don’t pay the bills in today’s publishing climate. So while we can offer you a respected platform, an engaged audience, and real social-media muscle behind your work, we can’t offer a paycheck. Every dollar of ad revenue goes straight back into keeping the lights on.
The upside: writers keep full copyright on their articles, free to repurpose them for books or other projects down the line. Because our mission is educational, your work is indexed in ProQuest, which means it lives on in perpetuity.