Tag Archives: looking for bloggers

Looking for bloggers — we have enough ideas, we need writers

We have sought new bloggers two times, and been rewarded. Our contact form for new bloggers has remained active. But we recently made a minor change that’s worth announcing.

You may have noticed that our pace of posting on the blog has declined significantly since the peak rate around the middle of 2013, despite an increase in our number of bloggers. The reasons are manifold. Partly, it’s that the easy topics have been written about, so our new blog posts need to generally cover somewhat new ground, and therefore tend to take more time to write. However, we’re not short on ideas. We’ve got over 100 draft posts at this moment, and there are probably many more somewhere in the minds of our bloggers.

What we’re lacking is the person-hours needed to execute on ideas — either the ideas that we already have or new ones. Thus, we’re modifying our invitation. Whereas our original invitation was aimed at attracting people who would be able to come up with original ideas and then execute on them, we now extend our invitation to all people who’re willing to research and write up ideas, possibly in cooperation with another blogger who came up with the idea originally. In particular, if you’re a high school or college student with some writing skill (which you can demonstrate through samples of your writing or links to articles, blog posts, or comments that you have written), and you are passionate about the ideas surrounding open borders, this might be a good opportunity for you. The benefits:

  • Interaction with some people who have thought deeply about the subject.
  • Practice at (collaboratively) researching and writing issues related to policy analysis and moral philosophy.
  • Samples of published writing that you might be able to use later for jobs or internships at think tanks or magazines.
  • An Internet presence that you might be able to leverage in other ways.

In case you missed it above, our contact form is here.

Still looking for new bloggers and guest bloggers

Three months ago, we asked for new bloggers. As a result of that, we signed on a few occasional bloggers: Michael Carey, Paul Crider, and David Bennion all came to us through the contact form (Paul Crider has now been redesignated as a regular blogger for Open Borders). We also managed to get guest posts from Peter Hurley and Victoria Ferauge, both of whom made contact with us through the form.

We’re still looking for more bloggers, both people interested in occasional blogging and people interested in doing one-off guest posts or series of posts. There is a single contact form for all potentially interested individuals, and the contact form is here.

We welcome bloggers of all sorts. But here’s a list of some of the areas where we are specifically interested in expanding our coverage:

  • An examination of recent US immigration legislative attempts: While we generally avoid news, recent attempts at immigration-related legislation in the United States might provide a good opportunity for analysis of the types of political change that are feasible in the short run, and the roadblocks to moving towards more open borders. Unfortunately, most of our regular bloggers lack deeper insight into these issues.
  • Personal anecdotes related to migration that help shed light on the issue: These would be ideal for people who want to write guest posts for our site without long-term commitment. At the time of this writing, our personal anecdote post series has only had one post, but we’re hoping to expand considerably.
  • Migration in geographical areas that are often neglected from public discourse: This includes: migration between underdeveloped countries with huge relative differentials (such as migration from Bangladesh to India), migration to the Gulf States (the UAE’s keyhole solutions and their pros and cons are particularly worthy of discussion), migration to Singapore (similarly famous for its unorthodox keyhole solutions), and migration to Hong Kong. We’ve generally had a robust degree of global coverage on our blog, but we could do more in diversifying our coverage.
  • Discussion of open borders from, and in relation to, mainstream political and social groups and perspectives. For instance, how do people discuss open borders and migration-related issues in their social lives? In churches? How do mainstream political groups view migration? What might be some ways of getting them to think more about these issues?
  • More historical coverage of migration: We have a number of blog posts devoted to the history of borders, but this is an area where the more we expand, the better. Open borders would be a big step in the modern world, so in so far as it is possible to learn from the historical precedent of eras where migration was freer, we should make the most use of it.

In case you missed it from above: the contact form is here.

Looking for new bloggers

Open Borders: The Case started out (in March 2012) as mostly a reference website, with an occasionally updated blog. Over the last 14 months, however, we have grown our blog section considerably and it is now one of the main draws of the site. Our team of regular, occasional, and guest bloggers has been growing gradually and currently includes people who currently live or have lived in the past in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. We blog about migration-related issues around the world.

The article about us by Shaun Raviv for The Atlantic (April 26, 2013) brought a lot of media attention our way. Our readership, Facebook likes, and Twitter follows all seem to have roughly doubled since Shaun’s piece was published, and much of our external coverage has been in the aftermath of Shaun’s piece.

In light of the increased traffic and attention to the site, we are looking for more people who might be interested in blogging (guest-blogging, occasional blogging, or regular blogging) for our site.

If you’re interested, please fill in the potential guest blogger contact form. It’s called a “potential guest blogger contact form” in light of the fact that we expect most respondents to be interested in writing one-off guest posts or series of posts rather than taking on a commitment to write for the site on an ongoing basis. However, if you express interest and there is sufficient congruence between you and the site, we might work out an arrangement for you to be on occasional or even a regular blogger.