Adam Rogers top-edits the print magazine’s front-of-book sections — "Alpha," "Ultra," "Q," and "Gadget Lab." He also edits feature stories, primarily on science but also on geek pop culture, and is the edit lead for WIRED’s video programming. Rogers’ feature "The Angels’ Share," a detective story about a mysterious fungus that lives on whiskey fumes, won the 2011 AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for magazine writing. Rogers was a writer and correspondent for WIRED Science, which aired on PBS in 2007. Prior to joining WIRED, Rogers was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and before that he was a writer and reporter at Newsweek. Rogers is the author of the New York Times best seller Proof: The Science of Booze.

Pitch Guidelines

Wired covers technology, science, and business...but also space, gardening, sports, fashion, outdoor adventure, indoor adventure, sex, war, and politics. In every case, our stories are specifically about how technology and science are changing those other beats. We're looking for upwellings of the future, stories and narratives that sound like science fiction except they're true. You can tell those stories as narrative tales from the front lines of something, as profiles of people trying to make some difficult goal come true, as looks behind the curtain of the familiar. The tricky bit: They have to be stories, not topics. Answers, not questions. A pitch suggesting that you'd like to know what's really going on with the patent war over CRISPR genome editing will not fly. I'd like to know that, too. A pitch that says you're going to tell the story of that patent war through the eyes of the people fighting it? Yup. A pitch about how awful deforestation in the Amazon is? Nope. A pitch about the people who are implementing the one good idea for how to fight it? Maybe yes. We're especially looking for stories where the main characters reflect the diversity of the world of science and adventure---race, gender, ideas.

The really tricky bit: the section of the story where you explain why it's a Wired story. You have to explain to an assigning editor (and to a reader) what makes this one ours--probably in a way that other magazines don't. Engineers trying to save the world, scientists redefining humanity's place in nature, places in the world that are secret testbeds for other planets...what aspect of the future does the story you want to tell shine a light on? Whatever you want to pitch has to be real. It has to exist as more than a render. The rocket engine has to ignite; the genetically modified organism has to have a pulse. But even then, what does it mean? That's the key to the pitch.

You can pitch any section, from the front of the book--Alpha stories ranging from 250 words to about 1,000 for a well-argued essay--to the feature well. (Features run anywhere from 2,500 words to 8,000.)

Cristine Russell is an award-winning journalist and educator who writes​ about science, health and the environment. ​She​ is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and an adjunct lecturer in public policy, focusing on media, energy, and environment. She writes on science and the media as a Columbia Journalism Review contributing editor​.​​ Formerly a Washington Post national science and health reporter, Russell​ is ​a past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and the National Association of Science Writers​. She is ​also active in the World Federation of Science Journalists. ​She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary member of Sigma Xi who graduated with honors in biology from Mills College.

David Schenkein has been a hematologist and medical oncologist for more than 20 years. He currently serves as an adjunct attending physician in hematology at Tufts Medical Center and is a member of the board of directors for the Biotechnology Industry Organization, the world’s largest biotechnology trade association, a position he has held since 2012. Prior to joining Agios as CEO in 2009, he was the senior vice president, clinical hematology/oncology, at Genentech, Inc., where he was responsible for numerous successful oncology drug approvals and leading the medical and scientific strategies for their BioOncology portfolio. While at Genentech, he served as an adjunct clinical professor of medical oncology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Earlier he served as senior vice president of clinical research at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, overseeing the clinical development and worldwide approval of the cancer therapy Velcade. Schenkein holds a BA in chemistry from Wesleyan University and an MD from the State University of New York Upstate Medical School. Twitter: @schenkein

Brad Scriber is the deputy research director for National Geographic magazine, where he helps ensure the accuracy of the magazine’s worldwide reporting. During his decade on staff at the magazine, he has fact-checked more than 50 feature articles and scores of departments pieces set on six continents and covering countless topics. Recent fact-checking work has included cover stories on marijuana, Spinosaurus, black holes, and rising seas. He was a Knight Science Journalism Energy and Climate Boot Camp Fellow, and has researched a variety of energy features looking at nuclear power, solar energy, methane, coal, and a comprehensive supplement map on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. He was a contributing editor for a National Geographic special issue on energy. He has also written for the magazine and for National Geographic News on topics such as how experts estimate the extent of the African elephant poaching crisis and the failed launch of an Antares rocket that exploded just above the launch pad in 2014. He holds a master’s degree in geography from the University of Georgia and a master’s degree in nonfiction writing from Johns Hopkins University. Before joining National Geographic, he did definitive research on the extent of inaccuracies in credit reports that helped reshape federal credit reporting laws.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist and planetary scientist whose research focuses on theory, computation, and data analysis of exoplanets. Her work led to the first detection of an exoplanet atmosphere and has introduced many new ideas to the field of exoplanet characterization. Her space instrumentation group is focusing on "ExoplanetSat," a nanosatellite capable of high-precision pointing for discovering transiting exoplanets. She is a co-investigator on TESS, a NASA Explorer Mission to be launched in 2017, and chairs the NASA Science and Technology Definition Team for a "Probe-class" starshade and telescope system for direct imaging discovery and characterization of Earth analogs. After earning her Ph.D. at Harvard in 1999 and before joining MIT in 2007, Seager spent four years on the senior research staff at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, preceded by three years at the Institute for Advanced Study. She is a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, the 2012 recipient of the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and the 2007 recipient of the American Astronomical Society's Helen B. Warner Prize. Sometimes called an "astronomical Indiana Jones," she was also included in Time magazine's 25 Most Influential in Space in 2012. Twitter: @ProfSaraSeager