Feature Storytelling at The Guardian US

A candid conversation with editor Jessica Reed

I’ve been on the road this week, but I'm jumping on here to share this conversation I recently had with Jessica Reed, features editor at The Guardian US, who loves getting pitches for great narratives, features, and reported essays.

Reed recently posted this guide for freelancers on Substack: “You write, I edit: what I'm commissioning in 2025,” which offers examples of the kinds of stories she looks for. Our conversation went deeper into her journey into editing, and her thoughts on story ideas, writing, and structure. I also love that she decided to relocate away from the center of the media universe, which has helped her as an editor.

If you do want to pitch Reed, hold off for another month. She said yes to so many pitches after that recent Substack post that she can’t take any more right now. Maybe take this time to sharpen your idea, read through this interview and the links to stories, and try her in early April. On rates: “We usually pay around $0.70 per word for essays and around $1 per word for narrative,” Reed says. “We pay for travel. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Sometimes, a flat fee makes more sense.”

I also want to give a shout-out to Kim Cross, who was recently named a contributing editor to The Sunday Long Read. Cross, who talked to The Reported Essay in November about interviewing for narrative, will be spotting and recommending stories to the main newsletter, and editing its monthly SLR Spotlight: True Crime newsletter.

So if you have a great story to send along, do connect with Cross, who is a kind and generous narrative nonfiction teacher and freelance writer. “Getting a story included in the newsletter helps get you on the radar of editors at national magazines and newspapers, who read it,” she tells her students. “And it helps your story get traffic, which helps the publication, which helps give them another reason to assign you another story.”

Cross also has a couple of workshops coming up this year that would be of interest to narrative writers, including this one in May: Feature Writing: The Reconstructed Narrative, a workshop in Archer City, Texas. Maybe you live in Texas. Maybe you want a little writing getaway. It is a “a cool place—a one-stoplight town in Texas that inspired Larry McMurtry's work,” Cross said, where his Booked Up bookstore is becoming the Larry McMurtry Literary Center.

Also a belated congratulations to Mark Armstrong, recently named editor of Nieman Storyboard. I first became familiar with Armstrong when he founded Longreads in 2009. I had just started teaching in the Literary Journalism Program at UC Irvine, and the site—which started as a Twitter hashtag and account dedicated to sharing essays and magazine-length stories—became an invaluable resource I still love, consistently recommending great stories over the years, which often end up being discussed in my classrooms.

Armstrong plans to continue Storyboard’s rich legacy of being a resource for craft, storytelling and narrative nonfiction, adding more multimedia and audio into the mix. If you have stories to share, you can send them to Armstrong at editor@niemanstoryboard.org.

I also appreciate this blog post that Armstrong wrote on “creating a joyful mission,” about the time he met with a career coach and discovered his own mantra: “I make art that inspires other people to make art.”