TLDR: Tell us your stories! We are making an open call for EA stories that might be a good fit for a variety of media projects, including: a written profile series on EA websites, video interview series, podcast interviews, or coverage in newspapers and magazines.
Submit your stories at: https://airtable.com/shrX8xU2zB1uExbsb or email [email protected].
Every day, people in the effective altruism movement do an incredible amount of impactful work, directly helping to make the world a better place. As part of our communications strategy, we’d like to find those stories—and share them with the world. The goal is to have a wide variety of media that shows lots of examples of what effective altruism looks like in practice, rather than in theory. Especially with the recent launch of “What We Owe The Future”, there has been a lot of mainstream media discussion of the theoretical and philosophical ideas behind effective altruism and longtermism. Our goal is to also encourage more coverage and discussion of the practical work that people in, or inspired by, the effective altruism community are doing in the real world, and the kinds of impact they are creating.
We’d like your suggestions of stories that we should try to share. We’re interested in a wide range of stories, including personal career journeys, stories of failure, big successes that have been accomplished and potential big successes that are in the works. These could be stories about individuals, or organizations. Ideally, we would love stories across a wide range of cause areas. You can either share your own story, or nominate other people/stories that you think we should consider (but ideally these would be people and projects that are comfortable with being more widely known).
Some examples of what these stories could be used for include: a written profile series on EA websites, video interview series, interviews on EA and non-EA podcasts, or coverage in newspapers and magazines.
We will reach out to some of the people/organizations whose stories seem like a good fit and help them move forward with sharing their stories more widely. Examples of how we will help include: connecting them with resources like media training, connecting them with journalists, and/or helping to develop a communications strategy.
The stories we’re most likely to find exciting probably have some combination of the following qualities:
If you’re unsure about your story, we encourage you to have a low bar for submission!
The project is still early right now and we’d appreciate any feedback in the comments on how you think we can best approach this, or what you’d like to see us do with these stories. You can also reach out to [email protected] with any feedback, questions, or story submissions.
Go forth and send us your stories!
Will the IP rights to submitted stories and any output derived from them be owned by CEA or the people who submit them? Under US and UK law, a transfer of copyright to CEA needs to be in writing, so this would have to be explicitly stated on the form.
Hi — thanks for asking! No, CEA does not intend to take IP rights in these stories, and we would also discuss how these stories would be used with you before publishing them (or doing anything else with them) in any way.
Not sure if you're looking for dead people, but Tetsu Nakamura is a good story. Has the benefit of not looking so insular. I can't vouch for the 600,000 figure, that's on Wikipedia linking to an archive I can't load. I think they repeat the figure in the documentary, not sure. There are many more sources on him in Japanese.
Nice, I will look into him and read your post -- thanks!
Just flagging that this sounds pretty intimidating to me, so it might be worth clarifying how confident you are that only this level of support will be provided:
We will reach out to some of the people/organizations whose stories seem like a good fit and help them move forward with sharing their stories more widely. Examples of how we will help include: connecting them with resources like media training, connecting them with journalists, and/or helping to develop a communications strategy.
I'd personally be much more likely to submit a story if I thought that a decent proportion of chosen entrants would, for example, be offered a written interview with an EA-sympathetic writer (which sounds like it might be the case from your tldr?), as opposed to all chosen entrants just being offered support to lead their own self-promotion projects with potentially hostile journalists.
This would be a good fit for a prize competition! and then you can stick it on Superlinear which aggregates EA competitions.
I have a list of stories that I had on a google doc that may contain some relevant ones.
Origin Stories
Career Choices
Jobs
Mistakes
Donating Stories
Events
Motivation and Challenges of EA
Other
This is very very helpful, thank you!