Submission Guidelines

Truthout welcomes submissions from both well-known and emerging writers, video and audio reporters, photographers and artists. We regret that we are only able to publish a small portion of these submissions and, in general, only respond to those we plan to use. Any submission that does not conform to the formatting and substantive guidelines below will be rejected.

Truthout is a small nonprofit organization and unless otherwise stated, it will be assumed that submissions are offered gratis.

Please familiarize yourself with Truthout’s content before sending us your work. We look for original news stories and news analysis pieces with broad national appeal. We’re especially interested in coverage of issues that slip under the radar of the mainstream media.

NO SIMULTANEOUS SUBMISSIONS

Please DO NOT submit to Truthout simultaneously with a number of outlets: We want either original and exclusive submissions or reprints. Articles posted to any other site — including your own personal site — must be submitted as reprints. Articles submitted to Truthout should be wholly unique. It is fine to quote and cite your previously published material, but please do not incorporate material you have published elsewhere into your piece without proper attribution.

SOURCES

Human sources must be named (by first and last name) and contextualized. If a source does not agree to be named in print, their name must be provided to the editor, and the article must provide a compelling explanation for the source’s anonymity.

Citations (see below) must be from reliable sources. When citing lengthy source material, please provide page numbers specifying where supporting documentation is located to expedite our fact-checking process.

We strongly encourage including external links to substantiate assertions.

• Please submit this supporting material as embedded hyperlinks in your word processing document (i.e. Microsoft Word document).
• If for some reason you cannot embed the hyperlinks, please list the URL BOLDED AND IN BRACKETS immediately following pertinent words intended to be hyperlinked. Use [ ] for brackets, never < >. DO NOT INCLUDE ANY HTML CODING.
• Please highlight two to five words or a key phrase related to the linked content when you hyperlink. (i.e. “the ACLU report”; “an article in The New York Times”; “dozens of people were arrested” etc.) Please do not repeat links unless there is some distance between them and there is NO alternative link available.

We expect secondary sources to be cited via the seamless embedding of hyperlinks within the body text wherever possible. If that is not possible, please work a casual reference to the source into the body text rather than using footnotes or more formal parenthetical citations. For example, for a non-digitized source, you may need to say, “As evidenced by a diary written by Jane Doe in 1920 that is accessible within such-and-such archive at such-and-such archive …” Or if you are referencing a book, you could simply say, “As [author’s name] shows in [Title] …” (and hyperlink the title of the page to the publisher’s page for it, if you want).

BLOCKQUOTES

It is important that material intended for block quoting be clearly designated. For example, type BLOCKQUOTE in BOLD CAPS above and below the relevant text.

HTML Coding

Please do not use HTML coding in your submission.

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

• Please use subheadlines to break up longer pieces.
• Please list at least four suggested tags, separated by commas, between your byline and your suggested story summary, above the body of your story.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

Submissions devoted primarily to unsubstantiated opinion are strongly discouraged.

Open letters, signed public statements, press releases and rebuttals of original Truthout articles will not be published.

Truthout eschews submissions that employ ableist language. Please see this glossary of ableist terms compiled by author Lydia Brown.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE SUBMISSIONS

Please send your clean final submission to editor[at]truthout[dot]org in a .doc file — as well as copied into the body of your email. Include your name; contact information; your submission’s word count; and a brief (one to two-line) biography, with embedded hyperlinks to your website, Twitter account, etc., if you would like them included; and a JPEG of a headshot photo, if you would like that included.

The subject line of your email should begin with “SUBMISSION:” followed by your last name and the article title.

All submissions are subject to an editorial review process, proofing and possible headline change. Final headlines are chosen by the editors. Writers will be consulted if major editing is required. The review and publication process may take as long as three weeks, or exceptionally, even longer if the topic is not time sensitive. If there is a stale-by date or other critical time element to your submission, please indicate that prominently in your submission email.

Keep It Short

For writers not previously published by Truthout, we suggest opinion submissions be limited to 750 words, news analysis to 1,200 words and straight news stories to 2,000 words. Please send final drafts only. Our staff is small and revisions are time-consuming. If intervening events between submission and publication necessitate revisions, please resubmit your original text with revisions highlighted or in bold text.

Format Appropriately

• Place only a single space between sentences.
• Place only a single line break between paragraphs.
• Do not indent paragraphs.
• In your word-processing program, turn off “word wrap.”
• All dates, times and months must be spelled out, i.e. December 10, 2010, never “last Tuesday,” “next week,” “tomorrow” etc. Since time of publication may be significantly later than time of submission, this is essential for the story to remain accurate and usable.
• Please spell-check your work.
• Please submit all copy in Times New Roman, 14-point font, single-spaced.
• Please avoid pasting photos, tables or other visuals directly into Word documents with text. Instead, mark in the text where photos should be placed (i.e. “Photo 1 and Caption text and photo credit”) and attach visuals as separate files, with corresponding file names. Please only submit original photos, images under fair use, creative commons licenses or images for which you own the publishing rights.
• References must appear as embedded hyperlinks. In rare instances, they can appear as manually created (not auto-formatted) footnotes, as described at length above.
• Please note that any work published by Truthout will be licensed under Creative Commons, unless specifically requested. Other outlets will be allowed to republish our original pieces as long as they comply with our republishing guidelines. Our choice to copyright our original material this way reflects our desire to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas.

See an example of a correctly formatted original submission.

(Your submission should be submitted as a Word .doc file.)

MULTIMEDIA SUBMISSIONS

Truthout is on the lookout for online video content, photographs and images that highlight news topics with national appeal.

We are open to republishing work that has appeared elsewhere, as long as you currently hold the rights to reprint your work.

When sending your multimedia content, do not include any attachments. Send us a link — private or password protected if necessary — to your content. For example, Flickr offers privacy settings, and Blip.tv allows videos to be password protected.

If we determine that we wish to use your content, we will email you with more information on how to send it to us.

Please use this format to submit content:

• Videos should not be longer than 10 minutes and should be non-compressed and in .MOV or .FLV format.
• Photos and images should be minimum 490×300 pixels and can be in .PDF, .JPEG, .GIF, .PNG or .TIFF format.
• Audio files should be in .MOV, .FLV, .MPEG-4 or MP3 format.

Send your submissions to the multimedia editors via editor[at]truthout[dot]org with the link and password information to your work. Please include your name, contact information, a brief bio, and proper credits and captions for photos.

Place “Multimedia Submission:” in the subject line of your email, followed by the title of your work. You must be the sole copyright holder of your submissions, including any images that appear in your videos.

REPRINT SUBMISSIONS

We are occasionally open to republishing work that has appeared elsewhere, as long as you currently hold the rights to reprint your work and have permission from the outlet where it has first appeared. If you are submitting an article for republication, please follow the formatting suggestions below for reprints.

• Please send the original URL with the text of the article in the body of the email to editor[at]truthout[dot]org.
• The subject line of your email should begin with “REPRINT:” followed by your last name, the name of the publication in which your work originally appeared and the article title.

See an example of a correctly formatted reprint submission.

(Your submission should be copied and pasted in the body of an email.)

Publication on Truthout is voluntary, and both parties shall hold one another harmless from any damages resulting from said publication.

Please do not submit items that:

• Are not yours (by rights) to submit, post, disseminate or transmit;
• Are unlawful, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, obscene, harmful, tortuous, libelous or invasive of another’s privacy;
• Infringe or violate any party’s copyright, trademark, trade secret, patent or other proprietary right;
• Contain any viruses, worms or other harmful, disruptive or destructive files, code or programs;
• Include any unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, chain letters, spam, junk mail or any other type of unsolicited mass email to people or entities that have not agreed to be part of such mailings.