At the eight-year mark and expanding, we need help. Lots of help with our expat lifestyle website, and now more than ever as a whole new generation of American expats, not to mention Digital Nomads, head to Europe to join the highly skilled internationals already here.
Dispatches Europe was founded in 2016 as part of Dispatches Media, a multi-faceted communications company and consultancy by and for expats. We know the world’s most valuable demographic is the 30 million-plus English-speaking, highly skilled internationals sought by every tech company in every industrialized country … countries that don’t have the population trends to sustain tech companies, Unicorns and SMEs.
Dispatches Media’s mission is connecting the smartest people in the world. Our contributors and staff across Europe document the expat lifestyle while helping startups, scale-ups, multinationals and economic development clients tap into the global mobility of talent.
Since our founding, we’ve had dozens of talented and inspired contributors, many of whom have gone off to graduate school or to the next stage of their careers. (Someday we’ll able to lure you back from high finance, Pauline.)
First things first: Yes, we pay, unlike so many of the expat sites and even big media companies such as HuffPost, which only started paying contributors after arguing for years they got “exposure” on a high-profile platform. Try paying your rent with exposure.
One big change is, now we pay more because working with global clients provides sufficient capital to hire emerging talent, and we negotiate on a case-by-case basis.
Further, we will never use generative AI to “write” posts. We want your voice and personality to come through.
That said, the reality is that FAANG companies completely gutted the conventional media. So, we’re tweaking our business model as we go, with AI-enhanced tools under development.
We’re still a scale-up, with investors in Singapore and the United States. So, we have to watch our burn rate. That said, our business groups generate the revenue to pay our contributors. If you have an idea for a great post or series that will take extra resources, or you want to contribute to ambitious projects such as our Best Cities for Expats lists, we’ll find the money.
Also, we have client projects, and we pay a premium for those. Finally, with our first pure-play digital media company, the best contributors became staffers when we jumped to the next level of funding … which is coming soon.
We try to cover all categories relevant to the expat lifestyle including:
• tips on careers and the digital nomad lifestyle
• shopping, entertainment and dining
• housing
• visas, immigration
• education and child care
Dispatches Europe tracks the tech scene – startups, scale-ups and mature companies – in Europe because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers, physicists and developers who aspire to be part of the new new thing. And that’s where our emphasis is now as we move into new markets such as Lisbon.
By and large, this should be fun, because Dispatches needs more contributors writing about the best of the expat lifestyle – EDM festivals in Croatia, restaurants in Paris, techno clubs in Zurich, Christmas markets in Germany, undiscovered beaches in Madeira.
And speaking of fun, we give contributors the freedom to use their own judgement about posts. We learned a long time ago (well, a few years ago, anyway) to trust your instincts because you’re living the life … so, we leave a lot up to you to decide what you think is important enough to share with readers.
We currently have regular contributors in the Netherlands, our HQ country, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Greece and other countries. But we must find talent in other cities attracting Americans and other English-speaking expats.
As of early 2024, we need contributors in strategic expat centers including:
• Paris
• Düsseldorf
• Frankfurt
• Hamburg
• Munich
• Stockholm
• Copenhagen
We’re off to a good start, reaching millions of readers and every country in the world with the exception of North Korea. But we can be better … with your help.
If you want to know more, ping us at: [email protected]
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
