The Art of Pitching: How I Got Published in The Atlantic
There&#x27;s more to this story. I was the first person to be interviewed by this journalist (Michael Thomas @curious_founder). He approached me on Twitter to ask questions about digital nomad and remote work life (as I founded Nomad List and have been doing it for years).<p>I told him it&#x27;d be great to see more honest depictions as most articles are heavily idealized making it sound all great, when it&#x27;s not necessarily. It&#x27;s ups and downs (just like regular life really).<p>What happened next may surprise you. He wrote a hit piece on me changing my entire story that I told him over Skype into a clickbait article of how digital nomadism doesn&#x27;t work and one of the main people doing it for awhile (en public) even settled down and gave up altogether.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;775751&#x2F;digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-remoteok-founder-pieter-levels-explains-why-he-has-quit-the-nomadic-lifestyle&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;775751&#x2F;digital-nomad-problems-nomadlist-and-re...</a><p>I didn&#x27;t settle down. I spent the summer in Amsterdam. Cause you know, it&#x27;s a nice place! But he needed to say this to make a polarized hit piece with an angle. And that piece became viral. Resulting in me having to tell people daily that I didn&#x27;t and getting lots of flack. You may understand it doesn&#x27;t help if your entire startup is about something and a journalist writes a viral piece how you yourself don&#x27;t even believe in that anymore. I contacted the journalist and Quartz but they didn&#x27;t change a thing.<p>It&#x27;s great this meant his journalistic breakthrough but it hurt me in the process.<p>I&#x27;d argue journalists like this are the whole problem we have these days. The articles they write can&#x27;t be balanced because they need to get pageviews. Every potential to write something interesting quickly turns into clickbait. It turned me off from being interviewed ever again. Doing my own PR by posting comment sections of Hacker News or Reddit seems like a better idea (also see how Elon Musk does exactly this, seems smarter).<p>So yes, I&#x27;d argue don&#x27;t follow this guy&#x27;s path, instead be nice, honest and write interesting articles. It might take longer but you&#x27;ll have more karma and long-term more success. And maybe you can convince me to do interviews again, some day :)