The New Stack is an editorial publication. We run original reporting, analysis, and opinion for the people building with AI, cloud native, and open source. The work we publish has a point of view and a reason to exist this week. If that’s what you’ve got, pitch us.

If what you’ve got is a strong tutorial or a technical deep dive, we’ll point you somewhere better. Towards Data Science is our partner publication. It’s built for that kind of writing, it reaches a bigger audience for it than we ever could, and it pays its authors. Most writers are a fit for one or the other. Here’s how to tell which.

Start here: which one is you?

I’m an individual writer with a tutorial, a project, or a technical deep dive. Go to Towards Data Science. That’s the home for hands-on data science, ML, AI, and programming writing, and it runs an Author Payment Program so you actually earn from the work. Write for TDS →

I’m an individual writer with a news angle, a real argument, or a story nobody’s told yet.That might be us. We’re selective and we move fast. Read “What we publish” below before you send anything. Pitch The New Stack →

I represent a brand and want to contribute expert content.Stay here. We work with sponsors and partners on contributed and sponsored content, and that program is alive and well. Contact the TNS team →

What we publish

We cover what developers are actually building with. AI dev tools, agents, the model and tooling launches that change how software ships, and the open source and cloud native shifts underneath all of it. The pieces that land with our readers usually do one of three things.

1. They carry a real news angle. Something happened, and you can explain why it matters to people who build. Speed and stakes count here, so being early is worth a lot.
2. They make an argument backed by evidence. A contrarian read, a case for where the stack is heading, a “we shipped this in production and here’s the verdict.” We want a point of view. We don’t want neutral thought leadership.
3. Or they tell a story we can’t get from the outside. The thing you learned the hard way. The decision behind the decision. Your firsthand experience is the part no reporter can recreate.

We write to CTOs, engineers, architects, and IT pros as the professionals they are. Clear, no jargon for its own sake, honest. We read pitches within about a week. We don’t run wholly AI-generated work, and we can tell.

One thing we’ve mostly stopped publishing: step-by-step tutorials, “what is X” explainers, framework walkthroughs, and beginner roadmaps. Not because they’re bad. Some of the most-read technical writing anywhere is exactly that. It just belongs somewhere built to feature it, which brings us to the next part.

What does well on Towards Data Science (and pays)

Towards Data Science is our partner publication and the better home for most contributed technical writing. If your piece is a tutorial, a build-along, a deep explainer, or a learning journey, it’ll find a bigger and more relevant audience there than it would as a one-off here. And TDS pays for it through its Author Payment Program.

The work that performs best there is pretty consistent. Hands-on tool tutorials, like How to Build a Production-Ready Claude Code Skill. Build-along engineering deep dives, like The Infrastructure Behind Making Local LLM Agents Actually Useful. First-person project write-ups, like I Built My First ETL Pipeline as a Complete Beginner. Learning paths and career roadmaps, like From Data Analyst to Data Engineer: My 12-Month Self-Study Roadmap. And concept explainers done well, on RAG, agents, and LLM engineering.

What you get out of it is real. You get paid. You reach the audience TDS has built: 675K-plus monthly clicks from Google Search, News, and Discover, a homepage seen more than 100K times a month, 950K-plus social followers, and 150K-plus newsletter subscribers. And because this kind of writing keeps earning readers for months, your work keeps working long after it runs.

Write for Towards Data Science →

Still think it’s a TNS piece?

Then reach out with the idea, not a finished draft. Tell us the hook or the argument in a sentence or two. Tell us why our readers should care, and why now. And tell us why you’re the one to write it, which usually comes down to something you’ve seen or done that we haven’t.

We read pitches within about a week. A specific stake or number in the idea helps. A personal angle we can’t get anywhere else helps more. Product promotion, vendor thought leadership, and anything an AI wrote for you do not.

Pitch The New Stack → |  Brand or sponsor? Contact our team →

Contributors have been part of The New Stack since 2014. The door’s still open. We’ve just made sure every kind of writer ends up where their work does best.