The Playlist Is Looking For A Few Good People

The Playlist can't do everything by ourselves. We have many comrades, but the day-to-day can sometimes be a one-man operation. People understandably become busy and preoccupied and more allies is always a plus.

*We run zero ads so we can't pay you, proceed no further if that's your endgame. If you are still interested, please read this entire post before emailing us.*

So yes, we need some contributors. So if you're seriously interested — and only seriously — please email us. Beggars cannot be choosers obviously, but we don't enjoy wasting our time on flakes and we've had many, many a flake-contributor stick around for two posts and then disappear entirely.

Or worse, people writing us interested in contributing and then never following-up or responding once we write them back (Seriously, what sense does this make?).

We'd like to avoid that whenever possible and you can understand why. It actually takes time and effort to get people up to speed and we'd rather not waste that investment. We're looking for a decent time commitment of posting at least once a day or every other day (generally during the hours of 9-5 EST). If you can't find that time, please spare us both the hassle. i.e., if you've already written in saying you can only contribute twice a week, you're clearly not reading this email.

A few things we're looking for:
1. Copy-editors (generally during the hours of 9-5 EST).
2. Writers in L.A., the U.K. or N.Y. (but see comments about non-location bias below, generally during the hours of 9-5 EST)
3. A features writer (this is for those that can only write sporadically and certainly not within the hours of 9-5).
4. You must know blogger, wordpress or some type of blog platform. Teaching people blogger has become far too time consuming. Unless you're a fantastic writer that can easily write 2-3 stories a day, this rule is hard and fast.
5. You're fast. If you're writing a longterm feature that's different, but if you're writing a regular news item it should take you know more than 30 minutes max to finish.

*It's astonishing how people write in and yet have zero idea what blogging encompasses on a whole. If you don't have a strong of what blogging entails on our site, please refrain from writing us.

Now that that's out of the way, what are we looking for? Lots of things. Someone to help cover and write every day news is always first and foremost (especially in the early mornings), someone to do trailer reviews and or someone to try and tackle all of the above plus the regular movie/music news and stories we do. But whatever area of expertise yours is, is what you should be writing about preferably. That said, there's enough information available on the web that you should be able to write about any assignment you're given, even if you're not an expert.

You are ideally detail-oriented, meticulous, thorough, include links to all your sources and have a working understanding of blogger (and if not you're willing to learn). Quality writing, analysis and understanding of cinema and movie culture is key, but quickness and volume are certainly a bonus. If you can produce a lot, you will be favored.

Features writer/editor: We'd also love anyone who wants to do more evergreen, long-term feature-y type pieces where one looks back, for example, on a certain director's history with music or a certain old film that had many affiliations to music or genres, etc., etc. (we've done some stuff like that in the past, but never as often as we want — would love to have someone spearhead this front). Here's a recent example of a feature we wrote that I personally thought was excellent and would love to see more of.

We're also ideally looking for people in the U.K., New York and Los Angeles, ideally, but we're not location-biased. If you have expertise in conducting interviews, this is also a plus. We get invited to do a lot of interviews with directors, actors, etc., but rarely have the time to do so. If you live in one of these major cities, you could capitalize on these types of opportunities, plus many movie screenings as well. We also get a boat-load of scripts and would love to pass along to those wishing to write script reviews.

Before you write us though, please keep in mind: The Playlist is first and foremost a movies site with — obviously — a strong connection to music — but we don't just simply cover music news that has no tie-in to movies (and yes, conversely we will cover movie stories that aren't tethered to music because that's where our focus is primarily). That said, we've slipped with our music-movie coverage of late so if you'd like to pick up that ball and run with it as the New Music/Movies writer, we'd be more than happy to have you.

Also, we desperately need new copy-editors for the Playlist, lord knows our "sense of grammar," excessive typos and spelling mistakes could use some major assistance (yes, most of us juggle 10 other projects, we're acutely aware this is a deficit in our blogging, it's a compromise we unfortunately have to make; perhaps you can rectify it instead of bitching and be constructive for once). We'd love you more than anything, really. All our current folks have moved to Malaysia and parts unknown (btw, this was a joke, people from Malaysia).

If you'd like to recommend suggestions for further installments of the Playlist Soundtrack series, we'd be down with that too. Thanks for your continued patronage of our site. Now that you've read all this, we haven't dissuaded you against the idea and you're still interested? Cool, now email us. Hopefully you've been reading us for a few months now and have a good understanding of what we do and our tone. Insightful and incisive humor that is not ad-hominem attacks or broad strokes is a strong plus. Basically we're looking for more allies. Got what it takes to join the gang?