A personal website for journalists

Open a journalist's clips page from three years ago and there is a decent chance a third of the links are dead. Not because the writer did anything wrong — because the outlet redesigned its site and broke every old URL, or got acquired and migrated to a new CMS that never bothered to preserve the archive, or simply closed. A photographer's portfolio from the same year still works perfectly, because a photographer hosts the work. A journalist, almost by definition, does not. The proof of what you did lives on someone else's domain, under someone else's editorial control, and that domain can vanish for reasons that have nothing to do with you.

That is the fact this piece starts from, and it changes what a journalist's personal site is for. For most professions covered in personal websites by profession, the page is mainly a presentation problem — get the right proof above the fold, in the right order, and the rest is styling. For a journalist the presentation problem is real but secondary. The primary problem is that the evidence itself is not stable, and a page built without accounting for that will be half-broken within a couple of years no matter how well it is designed today.

Where reach fits, and where it stops fitting

If the job in front of you is simply getting a clean page live — name, beat, ten links, a way to be reached — reach is the strongest answer for a single-person page like this. You upload a CV, answer a short form, and it produces a finished page in about twenty seconds; you can be live on a free yourname.joinreach.app subdomain in under two minutes. For a working journalist who wants a page today rather than a project for next month, that is a real advantage over opening a blank template and staring at it.

The honest limit is that reach makes one page — one index.html, no sub-pages, no navigation tree — and there is no CMS behind it. That is fine for the page itself, which this piece argues should stay short anyway, but it means reach is not where you archive full-text backups of your own work if an outlet's copyright terms allow you to keep one. That is a separate, plainer job — a folder, a private repository, cloud storage with a date on each file — and no page-building tool, reach included, replaces it. Treat the personal site as the storefront and treat your own backups, wherever you keep them, as the actual record.

Link rot is the core threat, not the design

Outlets close more often than the industry likes to advertise, and even the ones that survive migrate their content management systems every few years, which breaks old URLs as a side effect nobody upstream considers your problem. A masthead disappearing is the dramatic version. The quiet version is a redesign that moves every article from /2019/03/headline to a new structure and never sets up a redirect, so the piece still exists somewhere on the server but the link you have been sending editors for two years now returns a 404.

The only defence is treating your clips page as something that needs periodic maintenance, not something you publish once and leave. Check every outbound link a few times a year. When one breaks, look for the piece on the Wayback Machine before assuming it is gone entirely — archived snapshots often survive a redesign that the live site did not — and update the link to point there if the original truly will not resolve. This is not a design task and no template solves it. It is closer to the discipline covered in the old article about you that will not go away: once something is only reachable through someone else's server, you have given up control of whether it stays reachable at all, and the fix is not better design, it is checking.

What an editor sees without a subscription

A clip behind a hard paywall is a clip an editor evaluating you on a deadline will not read, because they are not going to create an account or pay for a day pass to assess one submission. This is worth being blunt about rather than hoping nobody notices: if your best work sits at an outlet with an aggressive paywall, link it anyway, because the byline and headline still carry some weight, but do not let it be your only proof of range. Pair it with work at outlets with metered or no paywalls, so at least some links open to the full piece for a stranger with no subscription.

Where the outlet's terms allow it — check the freelance agreement or ask the editor directly, because this varies by publication and by contract — a short excerpt on your own page, followed by a link to the original, gives a paywalled clip a second life. Two or three sentences quoted, credited, with a link out. That is not a workaround for the paywall; it is a legitimate use of a small portion of your own writing that lets a reader without access still judge the sentence-level quality of the work.

Ten clips, chosen for range

The instinct is to lead with the biggest outlet on the list, the one with the most name recognition. Resist it. An editor scanning a clips page is trying to answer a narrower question than "is this person impressive" — they are asking whether you can do the specific kind of piece they need, at the length and speed they need it. A page of ten clips from the same outlet, in the same register, answers that question worse than a page of ten clips that range across a beat: a breaking story filed on deadline, a longer investigative piece that took months, a profile, a piece that required data work, one written for a very different audience than the rest. Range is the actual credential here, the way a publication list is the credential for an academic — it demonstrates the thing a hiring editor cannot verify any other way, which is whether you can do more than one kind of story.

Ten is enough. More than that and nothing gets read carefully; fewer and you cannot show range at all. If you genuinely have only four or five pieces you would put in front of an editor, use those and stop — a page with five strong links reads better than one padded to ten with filler.

One line under each clip

Under every link, one sentence of context an editor cannot get from the headline: what the story required, what was hard about it, what happened as a result. "Filed within six hours of the verdict" tells an editor something a headline cannot. "First English-language interview with the plant's former safety officer" tells them something the outlet's own headline probably buried. This is the line that turns a list of links into evidence of process, which is what an editor actually wants to know before assigning you something with a real deadline attached to it.

Avoid the line that only restates the headline, and avoid the line that only says how you felt about the piece. Neither tells a stranger anything they could not already see.

Copyright limits what you can republish

Most freelance contracts assign first rights or exclusive rights to the outlet for some period, and staff work is almost always work for hire, owned outright by the employer. Read your own agreements before assuming you can repost full text anywhere, because the safe default — link plus short excerpt — is safe precisely because it does not test the boundary of a contract you may not remember signing. If you want to republish a full piece on your own site once the outlet's exclusivity window has passed, ask. Most editors will say yes to a credited, linked repost once the piece is no longer exclusive; very few will say yes if you never ask and they find it later.

Contact and pitch details, including a secure channel where it matters

The contact section of a journalist's page has a different job than most professions'. It is not just "how do I hire you" — it is also, for a working reporter, "how do I reach you if what I'm telling you could cost me something." That is close to the opposite of a teacher's page, where the entire point of the contact section is to close off informal, personal routes. A journalist's contact section exists to open exactly one: a route a source trusts enough to use.

A plain professional email covers most pitches and most editors. For a beat where sourcing carries real risk — investigative work, national security, corruption, anything where a source's exposure is a genuine concern — add a secure option next to it: a Signal number, a PGP key with its fingerprint, a SecureDrop link if your outlet runs one. State it plainly rather than burying it, because a source deciding whether to reach out is making that decision in seconds, and a secure channel that exists but is not visible does no more for them than one that does not exist at all. If your beat does not carry that kind of risk, do not add cryptography you will not maintain — an unmonitored PGP key is worse than none, because it signals security without providing it.

The recommendation, then, is narrow and practical: build the page fast, keep it to ten well-chosen clips with honest context lines, treat the links as something that needs checking rather than something that is finished once published, and put the actual archive — the part copyright allows you to keep — somewhere that is not the website at all.