Write for Us
Whether you’re a PI with writing chops or a PI with no writing experience whatsoever, please hit us up. If you’re an actual person with an actual story idea (and not a robot pitching generic “content”), our answer will probably be yes.
What we publish
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Tips and techniques for the work we do: investigative tools, tricks of the trade, ethical and legal issues, technology and innovation, internet resources, surveillance, criminal defense investigations, trash pulls, OSINT and everything in between.
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A glimpse behind the curtain into the investigator’s world: PI origin stories and insightful personal essays by investigators about the life and the work.
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Book reviews, excerpts, best-of lists and author Q&As related to crime fiction or true crime nonfiction.
Read the section →What we aren’t: a blog or an SEO factory. We don’t do outbound paid links or paid posts. That just feels gross to us. If your article is actually a sales pitch, please see our advertising page.
How it works
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Send Kim a brief email with your story idea to see if it’s a good fit, so you won’t have wasted your time writing about a topic we can’t use. Not sure what to write? Send an introduction: who you are and what your specialty is. She’ll brainstorm story ideas with you by phone or email.
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Keep it between 600 and 1,500 words (articles of exactly 879 words almost publish themselves). Send a Word document, not a PDF, as an attachment, without fancy formatting or images dropped into the file. Include your name, email and a short bio at the end. Images go as JPEG attachments, 3MB or smaller, and be sure you own the rights.
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If we accept your article we’ll fact-check it and do some editing. The editor is not mean, and you’ll always see a draft before we hit publish. We try to respond fast; if you don’t hear back in two weeks, send a gentle nudge.
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From the Pursuit submission guidelines
A brief FAQ
Still have a question? Email Kim Green, our managing editor.
We love well-written stories with personality and authority, on subjects relevant to the investigations industry. Teach us something! Tell us about an idea or technique that made your life easier or helped you make more money. Share your tech recs, business hacks for getting clients to pay on time, personal stories about cases that stymied you, and essays about why you love or hate this work sometimes. Our archive is free and deep: spend a rainy Sunday reading and get inspired by your colleagues’ ideas.
And if you’re up for doing some reporting on a controversial issue in PI land, we’ll drop everything just to publish it. You don’t have to be an experienced writer. If you’ve got expertise or a good story to share, we’ll work with you on style and structure.
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” — Blaise Pascal
You know how attention spans are. Keep the word count between 600 and 1,500. Longer stories can work if they’re truly fantastic, like this one. If your piece needs a lot of words, break it up into sections with simple sub-headers, add photos and pull quotes, and interrupt the long text with something interesting.
We want real stories written by real humans: your thoughts and ideas, experiences and hard-won lessons, arguments and positions. Please don’t send us articles that are wholly AI-generated.
Some use of AI is acceptable: copy-editing or smoothing your style, help with research and organization, or a first draft you then fact-checked and rewrote significantly. What we will reject is an article entirely written by AI. Simply disclose how you wrote the piece, to what extent you used AI, and whether you double-checked facts and sources. Details matter. Dates matter. Never trust that AI is telling you the truth. If we run a story with your byline, we expect you to have written it.
First, email Kim a brief note with your idea. When you do submit, send a Word document (not a PDF) as an attachment, without bullet points, boldface, numbering or images inside the document. Include your name and email in the document and a short bio at the end; we’ll happily link to your business site, blog or book in the bio. Images go as JPEG attachments, 3MB or smaller, and be sure you own all relevant rights and permissions.
Send a specific story idea, one so good you’d want to read it yourself. Make it interesting, succinct and information-packed, with a little personality and maybe some humor. Organize it with a beginning, middle and end; add a great title, tagline and sub-headings. Don’t worry if your spelling isn’t great, that’s what editing is for. Write in an informal, conversational style and let this guy’s writing be your guide.
Double-check your sources. If you cite facts and statistics, include the source, with links if possible, and attribute direct quotes. Don’t copy-paste from another article: quote it and cite it. The best way of all to get a byline is to read a ton of Pursuit articles, think about the subjects you know well that haven’t been fully explored, and read the Pursuit Magazine Style Manual.
Haha! Not much! Pursuit has no budget and can’t pay for articles, and we don’t have the Big Media street cred of the NYT or WSJ. But we’re feisty underdogs with big hearts and intellectual humility in spades, and we’ve been cited by the New York Times and linked to in the Washington Post.
With your article we’ll include a short author bio (1–3 sentences), a link to your website and any contact information you specify. We’ll promote your work in all our social feeds, and popular articles from our archive get good traffic over time. It’s a good way to get your name into the ether and establish yourself as a voice in your field.
We don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, so let us know if your story has been published elsewhere and whether we have permission to republish it. We’ll acknowledge the original version and link back. And if we decline your submission, don’t be mad: sometimes we just can’t figure out a way to make a story work.
Thanks in advance
We’re grateful to all our contributors who share their wisdom with colleagues. We literally would not exist without you.
Hal Humphreys · Executive Editor, Pursuit Magazine
