My pitch and essay: I'm addicted to Google news alerts

Read my successful pitch and full essay all about my alerts on "Paris Hilton," "babies," and thousands of other topics

This post is a follow-up to my recent roundup of 20 of my favorite personal essays. I’m experimenting with adding content for paying subscribers only, as a way of providing value to paying subscribers and subsidizing the time it takes me to write this newsletter. If you want to learn about writing and selling your own personal essays, you can take my next Essay Writing 101 Zoom class.

My essay, “I’m addicted to Google news alerts,” originally ran in 2015 in The Kernel, a publication by The Daily Dot. My editor was the wonderful Nico Lang, who told me in a later email, “I unabashedly loved your essay for the Kernel.”

This was my original pitch (note that I have a spelling error here; “disposable” should be “disposal”):