Editor’s Report: PursuitMag 3.0

HEAR THE BEARD: Welcome to PursuitMag 3.0! We’ve got a whole new look.

You may have noticed that we haven’t been updating Pursuit quite as frequently this spring. Now you know why: We’ve been working on a new design.

And now it’s here!

First of all, HUGE thanks to Ruben Roel and his team at Investigator Marketing for their great work, long hours, and late-night troubleshooting to get this site up and running. It was a long-overdue update, our first since we bought the business in 2012 and redesigned the original site — which was really more of a newsletter or e-zine.

For a little context, here’s a snapshot (via the Wayback Machine) of Pursuit 1.0, in early 2012:



In early 2013, we (the new owners/editors) got the keys to the site and turned Ruben and our graphic designer loose on it. Pursuit 2.0 had a new logo, new color scheme, and some new contributors from the worlds of investigations and journalism. Our goal was to make it look a little more like a magazine. Here’s our launch announcement from Jan. 7, 2013:

Beginnings, Launches, Firsts,” by Hal Humphreys

Here’s a snapshot of the page the month we launched 2.0:

And that, essentially, is the same outfit PursuitMag has been wearing for the past eight years.

At first glance, Pursuit 3.0 doesn’t look so radically different. Same logo, similar colors, some of the same departments we’ve always had: The Business. The Life. The Pitch. But you’ll see a few differences. First of all, the template (with all that fancy parallax scrolling) looks a little less 2010, a little more 2020. You’ll see more articles featured on the landing page, a revamped The Life section with more focus on personal essays and “Investigator’s Notebook” stories, and a whole new section that focuses on books by PIs and the crime lit genre. We’re also making our YouTube videos and podcast episodes easier to find. Look in the sidebar for weekly briefing and monthly webinar videos and in the footer for the latest podcast episode.

We are sure there will be glitches as we transition to the new template. A few archived articles may have old code lurking there in the text. If you’re a contributor and see problems or nonsense characters in your article, email Kim and let her know — she’ll fix it.

Coming up later this summer: In September, we’re publishing stories on innocence investigations. If you have stories to share about helping (or trying) to overturn a wrongful conviction, pitch us. And sometime within the next month or two, we’ll be announcing an essay contest, topic TBA.

What would you like to see in Pursuit for the rest of 2021? What do you want to read? What do you need to learn more about? Share your ideas with us on Twitter, Facebook, or in the comments thread of this article.

We hope you like PursuitMag 3.0! We welcome your feedback. —Hal