Hemispheres Writer Guidelines
Hemispheres, the inflight magazine of United Airlines, reaches more than 11 million readers every month.
The magazine is aimed at affluent business and leisure travelers. United’s international route system means that the magazine is read around the world. We are a truly international magazine, not just a U.S. magazine that’s read by other nationalities. We want insider articles by writers with expert credentials and global perspectives.
We prefer to receive queries by email. We encourage and value your proposals, but please do not call to check on your submission; instead, send a follow up email a few weeks after sending the pitch if you haven’t gotten a reply. Please include clips as attached PDF or Word files, or provide links to recent examples of your work. We do not accept editorial queries over the telephone. If a query is accepted, our editors will contact the author, and an assignment will be finalized with a contract. Note that we have a three-month lead time.
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Editor-in-Chief: Ellen Carpenter
Deputy Editor: Justin Goldman
Digital Editor: Celia Almeida
The following sections are open to freelancers:
Features
The Hemispheres feature should be a substantial read. We’re not interested in boilerplate travel stories (a faraway resort, whether it’s eco-conscious or not, does not in itself make for a story). Instead, we’re after a great narrative that will immerse our readers. The story should have a strong sense of place or destination, though traveling itself does not necessarily need be its focus. The stories can be profiles of newsmakers and cultural figures, personal narratives, or adventurous general-interest stories. Above all, the featured locations should be United Airlines destinations.
Recent successful profile stories include a trip to Hawaii’s Kilauea with pioneering NASA volcano scientist Rosaly Lopes and a visit to celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson’s new restaurant in Newark, New Jersey. Our favorite personal narratives include a writer’s journey to New Zealand with his cancer-survivor mother to research the healing powers of manuka honey and a whiskey-loving writer’s Lost in Translation–inspired pilgrimage to the distilleries of Japan. And our recent general-interest stories have included a night at a Rio de Janeiro samba school as its musicians and dancers rehearse for Carnaval and a river cruise deep into the heart of the Amazon rainforest. What these stories all share is the ability to hold a reader’s interest; each of them is something that would fit as comfortably in a quality general-interest magazine as it would in a travel title.
Note: We do not accept pitches for the “Three Perfect Days” feature.
Navigator
Navigator is our travel-oriented front-of-the-book section. It focuses on hotels, food and drink, up-and-coming neighborhoods and cities, automobiles, and more. A piece in Navigator should have a news peg or be related to an identifiable trend. Once again, above all, the featured locations should be United Airlines destinations.
Diversions
Diversions is our front-of-the-book culture section. It includes date-pegged coverage of gallery, film, and theater openings, book and music releases, television premieres, and sporting events. Additionally, it features interviews and profiles of up-and-coming actors and designers both new and established.
To see e-reader versions of full issues, click here.
