Welcome, and thank you for your interest in writing for the Jordan Center Blog. Below are some guidelines for crafting and submitting your piece or pitch to Maya Vinokour at jordan.center.blog@gmail.com. Please paste your pitch into the body of your email, or send completed drafts as .docx, .rtf, or Google drive files along with a one-line bio (with a hyperlink to your website, if applicable). We look forward to reading your work!
Content
We welcome submissions on a wide variety of topics. Broadly speaking, anything that relates to the politics, culture, or history of Russian, East European, Eurasian, and/or post-Soviet spaces is fair game for a Jordan Center Blog post. Please note that if your piece has already been published elsewhere, we can only run it with permission from that publisher—particularly if you would like it to appear verbatim.
We publish posts in a panoply of genres, including but not limited to…
Cultural criticism
Well-informed, relatively non-polemical political analysis or commentary
Reviews of…
…recently released or upcoming films or books, fictional or non-;
…ongoing or upcoming exhibitions, performances, or events
Exposés of your own recent research within Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, broadly defined
Essays on disciplinary matters or phenomena
“Explainers” — pieces offering insight into perplexing contemporary cultural phenomena or current events
Style
The Jordan Center Blog favors layperson-accessible, non-technical, and preferably sparkling prose. Once your pitch or submission is accepted, we will help you get there! However, the editing process will be greatly simplified through careful attention to the style guidelines below.
Good posts are generally structured around a single idea or argument, which is foregrounded early in the piece. Be mindful of journalism’s 5W1H, especially the “why” part, and get to that information early — by sentence 3 at the very latest.
Try to keep throat-clearing and background to a minimum. Provide the information that is necessary for the reader to understand your point, and to understand why it is important — that’s all you really need.
Your contribution should be 750-1200 words in length. We do occasionally publish posts that go over this limit, but we try not to. If you are above this limit, we will edit the post or ask you to shorten it. If it approaches 1400 or 1500 words and cannot be edited further, think about whether it should be two (or more) posts.
Do not use footnotes, endnotes or bibliographies. If you want to refer to another source, embed a hyperlink in a word or a few words like this (Ctrl+K on a PC, Cmd+K on a Mac).
Use clear, declarative sentences, with a minimum of academic jargon. For example, “Oedipus complex” is OK. “A Freudian novella of the inferential dynamic of paternity” is not.
Paragraphs should be 2-3 sentences long, as long paragraphs are difficult to read online.
Use one space between sentences, not two.
If you would like to include graphics (assuming you have permission to use them or they are in the common domain), please send them as separate .png or .jpg attachments. Please do not embed them in the body of your draft. Do note clearly in the text of the post where the figure should go, and please include a caption and any necessary credits. For example:
Insert [Figure] here
Caption: Konstantin Korovin, “Winter in Lapland,” 1894
Source: Wikipedia