Jalopnik wants to find America's next top car blogger. The winner, as chosen by readers, gets a six-month contract, worth $10,000 if fulfilled, as the site's new weekend contributing editor. Do you think you have what it takes?
Being a Jalopnik editor means finding content that hits the sweet spot of awesome. It's the type of stories that feed the needs of the high-brow auto-obsessed while simultaneously being open enough to attract a traffic beast-feeding general audience for us to corrupt with our love of cars.
And since you commenters seem to think it's so easy, we figure a newly vacant weekend editor position is a great opportunity for you to find out just how truly cruel that dual-headed mistress is. Can you thread the needle to get both unique visitors and the love of our readers? If you can, then you've got what it takes to work here.
Here's how our very own reality show will work.
To enter, write a 750-1000 word feature on an automotive (or an off-topic but awesome tangentially automotive) topic of your choice, and email it to weekend-at-jalopnik-dot-com as a text file attachment (This is important as we're expecting a lot of entries, so you'll be immediately disqualified if you attach it as a Word file or an html file or a WordPerfect for DOS file) and give it the subject line of "I Want To Be America's Next Top Car Blogger". Include as added attachments any relevant graphics (make sure they're either your images or that you have the rights to the images you're sending us) or YouTube links you'd like in the piece (If you don't send any, it won't have any). We'll be accepting entries from now until Friday at 6:00 PM EST (A reminder that all standard contest rules apply and all materials and any writing samples submitted become the exclusive property of Gawker Media).
UPDATE: Also, include a headline and make sure your first paragraph is no more than 40 words long — it's a content management system thing.
Then comes the weekend and the really fun part. This Saturday and Sunday we will publish every entry we receive that follows the above instructions (and isn't racially, ethnically or sexually disparaging. But you can swear if you want to. Just realize it might cut into your potential readers because it'll get the dreaded NSFW tag!). Then, at 7:00 AM EST on Thursday, October 7th, we'll check every post and pull out the ten (10) finalists with the highest new unique visitors (mouse over the flame next to each post on the front page to see the new unique visitors) and send all ten writer finalists a topic to write 250-300 words on due back to us by midnight of that day (hey, a blogger's got to be quick on their toes, right?). We'll publish the finalist responses the weekend of October 9th and 10th and let the Jalopnik readers vote on which two (2) they like best at 7:00 PM EST Sunday, October 10th.
The next two weekends, October 16th and 17th, and October 23rd and 24th, we'll have a final face-off to determine who will be America's next top car blogger. Each writer will run the site for one weekend. The writer with the most new unique visitors by the next Monday morning at 8:00 AM gets an offer of a six-month contract as Jalopnik's weekend contributing editor — worth $10,000 if fulfilled.
Legal Note: If the winning writer accepts the freelance offer, the contract pays out $10,000 spread out equally over six months pre-tax — it's not a lump sum payment of $10,000, nor is the contract redeemable for cash or other equivalent.
Video Credit: TangentVector