What a lens is
A lens is one country plus one focused insight (about 50 to 80 words) that makes the country more legible. It's not a fact ("Egypt's capital is Cairo"). It's not a summary ("Egypt has 100 million people, the Nile, the pyramids…"). It's a frame: a single, sharp angle a curious reader will hold on to.
"Africa on one side, Asia on the other. Egypt straddles two continents, mainland Africa and the Sinai Peninsula in Asia, and controls the Suez Canal, the shortest sea route between Europe and Asia. Roughly 12% of global trade passes through."
That's the entire piece. Eight of those make a daily session. Every lens carries exactly one tag: PLACE, STORY, NOW, or THREAD.
The four tags
- PLACE: geographic positioning, terrain, climate, capital cities, what makes the physical country what it is.
- STORY: cultural and historical identity. A founding moment, a long shadow, a self-perception.
- NOW: current affairs of lasting weight. Not today's headline; this decade's.
- THREAD: connection between two or more countries. Supply chains, languages, watersheds, diasporas. Dashed border in the UI.
What we look for
- Writers with depth in a region. Lived there. Reported from there. Studied it. We don't commission generalists.
- Editorial discipline. Comfortable being told "good idea, half the words." We rewrite to a 50–80 word target.
- Calm voice. Sentence case, em-dashes, no exclamation points, no exhortations. Closer to The Economist than a tech blog.
- Accuracy obsession. Every claim must be sourceable. We won't publish a number you can't defend.
- No AI drafts. You can use LLMs for fact-checking. You can't use them to write. We can tell. So can readers.
Rates
- Per accepted lens
- $120 to 175 USD
- Editor (per session)
- $60 to 90 USD
- Kill fee
- 50% of agreed rate
- Pay cadence
- Monthly · Wise / direct deposit
We pay on acceptance, not on publication. If we commission a lens and don't run it, you still get half. We do not commission speculatively; if we ask, we mean it.
How to pitch
Email geography@supportu.ai with:
- Three lens ideas, one or two sentences each, with the tag in front.
- Two writing samples (links are fine; PDFs are fine).
- One line on what region you'd own. Geography is editorially divided by region; we want one or two specialists per region rather than generalists.
If your pitch lands, you'll get a paid trial of one lens within two weeks, edited end-to-end. If it works, we set up a monthly cadence, usually four to eight lenses, occasionally a THREAD.
What we won't publish
- "Top 10" lists.
- Headline summarization. If it could be a NYT push notification, it's not a lens.
- Trivia (capitals, currencies, populations) without a reason for being there.
- Anything sourced primarily from Wikipedia. Use Wikipedia like a librarian's index, not a quotebook.
- Anything that flatters or attacks a country wholesale. Lenses are observations, not opinions.
A note on AI
Some of you will ask. We use AI tools the way working newsrooms do: copy-editing, fact-cross-referencing, occasionally as a fast index. We don't draft with them. We won't accept drafts written with them. This isn't a moral stance about the technology, it's a product position. Readers can tell, and what makes Geography work is that you can feel a person behind every line.
Editorial: geography@supportu.ai · We answer every pitch, usually within five business days.