When I was a magazine editor-in-chief in the ’90s to mid-aughts, first-person pieces were often more like ruminations than carefully crafted pieces. That has changed. My Estelle’s Edge (aka pro tip) is to include heart and narrative arc (the story has a beginning, middle, and end), leaving the reader with some sort of gift, transformation, or takeaway.
That leads me to Noah Michelson, head of Huff Post Personal (now part of BuzzFeed), a global publication that runs six personal essays a week and has 65 million readers in the U.S. alone. Michelson, working with Deputy Editor Emily McCombs, gets 200 pitches a week (and reads all of them).
CAN YOU DESCRIBE YOUR ROLE?
We are dedicated to telling personal stories from around the world. I evaluate pitches, assign pieces to freelance
