I had wanted to write for a Madrid magazine since I moved to the city four years before.
They were a serious publication, long-form, properly edited, careful with facts, and they paid their writers, which is rare. I read every issue I could find for a year before I did anything about it. When I started looking for a job, it did not go well. I sent thirty applications in three months, mostly for content roles at SaaS companies that wanted "blog posts" and not journalism. I got two interviews. One of them was the most depressing forty-five minutes of the whole search. A content marketing manager told me directly that the job was producing SEO content with an LLM, and that the human writer was there to "make it sound better". That night I went home and decided to stop applying for content jobs. Instead I would write the kind of article I wanted to be paid for. I chose two ideas that I thought the magazine would really publish. One was about a small Madrid neighbourhood that remote workers had slowly changed. The other was an interview with a local food cooperative. I wrote a pitch of three paragraphs for each one and emailed them to the editor. She answered about one of them, the neighbourhood article. She liked the idea, she had ↓