Truthout welcomes submissions from both well-known and beginning authors, 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 subject to summary rejection.
Please familiarize yourself with Truthout's content before sending us your work. We are looking 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. We strongly suggest including external links and/or footnotes throughout your written work to provide both context and support for your assertions.
Submissions devoted primarily to unsubstantiated opinion are strongly discouraged. Truthout also eschews "open letters" and straight calls to activism.
Article Submissions
We are open to republishing work that has appeared elsewhere, as long as you currently hold the rights to reprint your work. If you are submitting an article for republication, please follow the formatting suggestions below.
For writers not previously published by Truthout, we suggest opinion submissions be limited to 750 words; news analysis to 1200 words and straight news stories to 2000 words. Please send final drafts only.
Now, a couple of format-related notes:
Place only a single space between sentences
Place only a single line break between paragraphs
Do not indent paragraphs
Turn off "word wrap" and turn off "smart quotes"
All dates and times and months must be spelled out, i.e. Tuesday, 10 December 2010, never "last Tuesday," "next week," "tomorrow," etc. Since time of publication may vary significantly from time of submission, this is essential for the story to remain accurate and usable.
For Truthout original submissions: Please send your clean final submission to editor[AT]truthout.org as plain text with a txt. file attached and also copied into the body of your email. Include your name, contact information and a brief bio.
Place "Submission:" followed by your last name and the article title in the subject line of your email.
All submissions are subject to an editorial review process, proofing, and possible headline change. 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. Truthout is a small non-profit organization and unless otherwise stated, it will be assumed that submissions are offered gratis and that Truthout's editors may choose to publish them on either Truthout or our sister site, Buzzflash.
Please note that any work published by Truthout will be licensed under a Creative Commons license, which means other outlets may reprint your material, with attribution, for noncommercial purposes. Our choice to license our original material under Creative Commons reflects our commitment to harness the expanding power of the Internet to spread reliable information, critical thought and progressive ideas in cooperation with others that share our goals.
For Reprints: Please send the original url with the text of the article to editor[AT]truthout.org.
Place "REPRINT:" followed by your last name/ the name of the original publication in which your work appeared and the article title in the subject line of your email.
Publication on Truthout is voluntary, and both parties shall hold one another harmless from any damages resulting from said publication.
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 private links to send 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 then ten minutes, and should be non-compressed and in .MOV or .FLV format.
Photos and images should be minimum 490 x 300 pixels and can be in .PDF, .JPEG, .GIF or .TIFF format.
Audio files should be in .MOV, .FLV, .MPEG-4 or MP3 format.
To send your submissions to the multimedia editors, email editor[AT]truthout.org with the link and password information to your work. Please include your name, contact information, a brief bio and proper credits.
Place "Multimedia Submission:" in the subject headline 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.
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; or
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.
