Next Week is Reader Submission Week at TTAC

TTAC’s Best and Brightest continually displays its talent time and time again in our comments section. It’s one of the main reasons why TTAC is such a fantastic and eye-opening place to work. Your diverse knowledge and opinions, combined with some truly impressive writing chops, makes it one of the best comment communities in the business.

However, some of you are wasting that talent below the fold. This is your chance to, quite literally, rise above it.

Over the past few months, we haven’t published many reader submissions, and there’s a reason for that: it’s a helluva lot of work.

Considering the number of people who work for TTAC as their primary job (that’s two, if you’re counting), and the diminutive size of our budget, we struggle to bring you 10 articles each day. As a result of this effort, many of our reader submissions are gathering digital dust in our virtual inboxes, waiting for attention.

Next week, Steph and I will be going through all the unpublished submissions to date, plopping the good ones into WordPress, and queuing them up as needed. If you’ve submitted something in the past that’s gone unpublished and you wish to give your submission a fresh polish, drop us an email. For the rest of you who’ve been sitting on the fence, this is your chance to grab your literary or journalistic future by the horns.

Interested? Here’s what to do:

1) Write: This seems obvious, but it isn’t. We aren’t looking for pitches. We want to see you write about something that interests you.

2) Photos: Try to source some supporting images, whether they’re your own or taken from a source that allows redistribution. (Wikipedia is great for this.)

3) Package It: Put your submission in a Word document and attach it, along with photos, in an email.

4) Send It In: Send your emails to mstevenson@ttac.com. You may not hear from us right away, but — I promise you — we will review each and every submission. Not all will be published. Regardless, you will hear from us.

We can’t wait to see what you write!