About us.
Creators Troupe is how a network of publications finds writers — and how people who want to write for a living get job-ready for the media industry as it actually works now.
Hiring writers usually means reading clips. Clips favour whoever has already been published, which means the people who most need a first break are the least able to prove they'd be good at it. And a clip tells you what someone wrote with an editor's help, on their own schedule — not what they can do against a deadline, which is the actual job.
So we stopped asking for clips. Everyone takes the same short test on a real news event from that week: five headlines against a silent clock, then one post with a visible one. No portfolio, no degree, no experience required.
- You take the test. One sitting, free, open to anyone.
- It gets scored against a written rubric — how well a headline would travel, whether the writing holds up as something worth publishing, and whether it meets the standards of the outlet you applied to. The rubric is the same for everyone who applies to that outlet.
- An editor reads it. Always. The scores are an input, never the decision.
- You get a course, whatever the result. Your score places you in a level and opens everything below it, so there is something useful waiting for you either way.
- Open roles unlock. Finish a course, or wait out the reply window, and you can see what every publication in the network is hiring for.
We use AI to score writing, and we say so plainly on every page where it happens. What we don't do is let it decide who gets hired. A named editor reads your work and makes the call, with the scores in front of them as one more piece of information — alongside how long you took, how much you pasted, and everything else the test recorded.
We also check whether a submission looks AI-generated rather than written live. That check is a signal a human weighs, not a verdict that acts on its own. We would rather see your real writing at whatever level it is at, because that is the thing we can actually train.
Your writing stays yours. We don't publish it, syndicate it, or use it for anything other than deciding whether to work with you — whether or not we do. That's in the privacy policy and the terms, and it's not fine print: it's the deal.
If you run a publication and you're tired of hiring writers from clips, the same pipeline can find yours: your own entry point, your own editorial standards in the rubric, your own openings board, and only your applicants in front of your editors.