(Un)Successful Assignment Proposals

I could/should have included this in my pre­vi­ous post on Baum, but I believe these merit sep­a­rate mention:

• Suc­cess­ful assign­ment pro­pos­als for pub­li­ca­tions such as Play­boy, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
• Unsuc­cess­ful assign­ment pro­pos­als for Gourmet, The New Yorker, and more.

As Jason points out, New Yorker edi­tor John Ben­net called Baum’s pro­posal for a story about a Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cial (pdf) “the best pro­posal he’d ever read”. Some facts from that story:

One Mex­i­can in ten lives in the United States, about half ille­gally. The wages they send home are Mexico’s third-biggest source of income after tourism and oil. In the demo­graphic under­tow of that tidal wave are 90 Mex­i­can microre­gions that have been drained of men. Migra­tion to the U.S. is as cen­tral to Mexico’s cul­ture as it is to its economy.

Update: Dan Baum now offers a proposal-writing ser­vice and as such his col­lec­tion of pro­pos­als have been removed. A real loss. Luck­ily for us, the pro­posal above (for a story about a Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment offi­cial) is still available.