Elizabeth Spiers

One of my larger clients is launching a new lifestyle site and relaunching three others and I need new staffers for all of them. (We’re basically tearing them down and starting over—redesigning them, restructuring editorially and adding lots of new original content.)

Here are the positions available:

Editor-in Chief, women’s lifestyle and fashion site. (Full time.) The site targets women ages 25-40.  The site will be a smart online women’s magazine with a sense of humor.  Topics are standard women’s mag fare—relationships, beauty, fashion, etc.—but with unconventional takes. Less self-improvement, more escapism.

Editor-in-Chief, health and wellness site. (Full time.) The site targets women 25-50. This site skews a bit older and focuses on self-improvement, wellness, health, parenting and relationships. Tonally, it should be sophisticated, but sincere.

Contributors, men’s lifestyle site. (Part time.) Targets men ages 25-40. This site covers sex, relationships, health, recreation, fashion and gadgets, and offers original commentary and reportage on news, politics, sports and business. It combines original reported features with content aggregation, subject-specific blogs. I’m particularly looking for a relationship/sex columnist and people who can do fun stunt journalism pieces. I also need a few part time bloggers to do posts covering all of the topics above.
Contributors, young women’s lifestyle site. (Part time.) Targets women ages 15-29. This site covers celebrity news and entertainment, fashion and lifestyle issues. The tone will be smart, funny and appropriately skeptical, but never mean or cynical. I need contributors with some experience in entertainment coverage and people who’ve written for the teen market before.

Contributors can be located anywhere, but the full time positions are based in New York.
If you’re interested in any of these positions, please send me a cover letter and a resume. Some IMPORTANT guidelines:

1) Paste the cover letter and resume into the text of the email. Don’t send me attachments, or I’ll delete automatically—partly because attachments make it more difficult for me to organize responses, and partly because your inability to follow directions doesn’t bode well.

2) The cover letter is important. Don’t skip it. If you do skip it, I’ll assume you didn’t do it because you hate writing and would be terrible for any of these jobs anyway.

3) If you have a blog, mention it somewhere. It’ll be to your advantage because I’ll assume you already understand the basics of blogging and have a genuine interest in it.

4) Your cover letter will stand out more if you include some original ideas for any of these sites. For the editor jobs, story generation is a necessary skill set and if you’re applying for a contributor position, we’ll be assigning, but you’ll also need to pitch some stories. And if I can’t tell that you’ve had to generate story ideas historically from your resume, you need to demonstrate that you’re capable of it.

5) Apply for only one of these positions and note which one in the cover letter. I know a lot of people are unemployed and willing to work on anything, but I need to know which site you’re genuinely interested in. If you’re also appropriate for one of the other positions, I won’t rule you out.

That’s about it. If you’re interested, send cover letters and resumes to espiers AT gmail.  If I think you might be appropriate, you’ll hear from me in the next week with some additional questions.