The Mix by Hearst is a newish “contributor network,” a way for freelance writers to break into the many wonderful websites that make up the Hearst Corporation, among them ELLE.com, Cosmopolitan.com, TownandCountryMag.com, Seventeen.com, and MarieClaire.com. Contributors are paid $100 per post, according to someone who’s submitted pieces there, plus a bonus if they go viral.
There’s an interesting twist, however, to the way The Mix works: every day, contributors are given a list of headlines, and asked to write stories to match them. If a contributor’s story is selected, she makes that $100; most everyone else who submitted a story under the same headline gets zip. They are, however, free to pitch those stories elsewhere, and according to the Mix’s informational website, more than one piece from the same headline prompt can be published in different places:
“We’ll publish the submissions that best fit our sites. When you submit a story, you are not claiming that assignment. We will have multiple submissions for each assignment and will publish all of those that best match our editorial needs.”
The headlines themselves are reminiscent of xoJane’s It Happened to Me series (Fun fact and full disclosure: I wrote one in 2013), or possibly a really bonkers episode of MTV’s True Life. They’re a catalogue of various relationship woes, medical mishaps, and family tragedies, interspersed with the occasional piece about fun decorating ideas.
We’ve collected close to 100 headines for Mix pieces, which are below. Together, they’re an interesting glimpse into what Hearst thinks women want to read about—the vast majority of the pieces are directed at a female audience—as well as the kind of intensely personal subjects young writers are encouraged to discuss, for the princely sum of 100 bucks.
Another fun thing to do is to pretend that all these pieces are written by the same woman, who’s just having a terrible time.
Recent Mix Headlines:
We Repurposed Our Child’s Room After She Left For College
I Was/Am A Serial Cheater
I’m Jealous Of The Relationship My Children Have With Their Other Parent
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
