“We are not a journalism company. We are a transformation platform.”

Two years ago, SUCCESS asked me to become a contributor, based on my experience writing about small business. I sent pitches via an online form. Several were accepted, including one on assessing the value of a college degree.

Suddenly, my editors vanished. I was redirected to a different form and stopped by the words above, and then these:

“We're looking for practitioner-writers — people who have discovered something powerful through their own experience and want to share that discovery. We want the source of the idea, not coverage of someone else's idea.”

No more reporter coverage. Just first-person experience.

While this might sound good on the surface, it doesn’t bode well for researched stories supported by third-party experts and an objective narrator. These are the kind that I prefer and assume millions of others do, too. Not to mention it narrows the already claustrophobic field of freelance writing opportunities.

I’m not looking for more things to be worried about, but wondered if this is a whole new practice of journalism/not journalism that I did not see coming.