We are hiring for a Managing Editor.
About Asterisk
The world of magazines is based in New York, but the future is happening in the San Francisco Bay Area. Asterisk is a longform magazine about AI, science, culture, policy, and methodological issues in social science research — but mostly it’s a magazine that tries to put the scene and subcultures of America’s West Coast in conversation with themselves, each other, and everybody else. We consider this to be a fairly high stakes project.
Even we, the editors, struggle to fully sum up what we do. We’re the only magazine that has published both Aella and Lyman Stone, the sort of place you are as likely to read an in-depth debate about whether AI will lead to economic growth as a personal exploration of Bay Area cults, or an agenda for Africa’s YIMBY movement. It will help if you already know us; if not, we recommend reading a few pieces before you apply.
With all that said: We’re hiring a Managing Editor. That, at least, is the job title, but again, this is a unique role, at a unique magazine, with the opportunity to heavily shape the feel and direction of Asterisk moving forward, working side-by-side with our Editor in Chief, Clara Collier.
We’re likely to tailor this role to the candidate, but here’s a preliminary list of things we hope you can take on.
What you'll do
•Identify stories and recruit writers. You should be, first and foremost, a voracious reader.
•Edit long-form journalism. This job is at least 50% editing. You will work with writers from pitch to publication through developmental and line-editing. Sometimes that means holding their hand. Something that means quibbling. Sometimes that means translating an academic or researcher who hasn’t ever written for a popular audience. Sometimes it means removing ~100 em-dashes. Sometimes it means doing almost nothing at all. Usually it’s a mix of all of these — you should have an intuition for how stories work, how sentences want to sound, and how to manage relationships with authors to lead them in the direction you want.
•Manage Asterisk’s (new!) monthly columnists. We’re about to bring on 4-5 columnists across global health, economics, AI, and culture. You’ll work with them to field story ideas and make sure they publish under deadline.
•Lead the production workflow for our quarterly publication, which means supervising a team of freelance fact-checkers and copyeditors to ensure stories are accurate and and polished, on time.
•Design and write weekly Asterisk’s weekly newsletter (we use Mailchimp).
•Coordinate online sales and print distribution (this involves assorted Shopify tasks).
•Tweet. And also post to Substack notes.
•Innovate. Help us figure out how best to reach more readers, run more events, and establish Asterisk as the Bay Area’s most famous niche publication.
Who we're looking for
We think that the constellation of talent and experience that can succeed in this role can likely come from a wide variety of backgrounds. The guy who did this before was a consultant who with zero editing experience, but who apparently harbored a lifelong ambition to be in media
Realistically, things that will pique our interest when we read your resume include:
• A background (research, technical, or writing) in at least one of: AI, global health, economics, or another social science
• Demonstrated ability to write well for a popular audience
• Strong opinions on what is good and relevant in the broader media landscape
• Familiarity with the [waves hands] Bay Area cultural and intellectual scene, and in particular Effective Altruism, rationalism, and/or Abundance. (You don't have to live here, though – the role can be remote.)
• Being weird and interesting, although we leave it up to you how to express this
But we mean it when we say: there is no perfect profile, and we’ll know it when we see it. If the style of this job posting doesn’t turn you off, you should probably apply.
One archetype of a successful candidate will look like a traditional writer/researcher/editor
Another is a bit outside the box: maybe you come from a growth marketing background in the media industry, and/or are excited to run events and creative campaigns, and/or have strong ops capacity
Ideally, you’re something of a generalist who can do a bit of both
More details and how to apply
We don’t expect any one person to fit this background completely. A lot can be learned on the job. This role wears many hats, and you should feel comfortable owning multiple projects at once, and confident in your ability to get up to speed across various platforms and systems.
Selected candidates will be invited to a short interview, and following that a paid work trial.
Expected salary: $90,000-120,000, depending on experience.
Benefits: We offer health, vision, and dental insurance; an unconditional 401(k) grant of 10% of your salary; 25 days of paid time off per year, and more.
Please apply here. Applications will reviewed on a rolling basis.