Guide To Publishing

Q1. Who Can Publish?

A. Anybody can.

Indymedia is an open publishing news site. This means that anybody can publish news, opinions and events to the site, simply by clicking on the publish link shown on the right, which can be found in the left column on every page, and filling in the simple publish form.

Q2. What is Published?

A. Original news stories, opinion pieces, press releases, event notices and summaries of interesting material elsewhere on the internet

Indymedia relies on the people who publish to the open newswire to present their information in a thorough, honest and accurate manner. A group of newswire moderators keep track of what is being posted and apply our basic editorial guidelines to keep the newswire free of spam and other abusive material. Indymedia.ie is primarily a news site and we aim to publish material that is original and newsworthy for a primarily Irish audience.

Originality. The Web allows people to link to related material rather than copying it and creating multiple copies of the same material pollutes the web, making it more difficult to find original material. Therefore, we generally only publish original material (although there are some exceptions mentioned below). If you want to publish news on your own website as well as on indymedia, we ask that you publish it here first and wait 12 hours before publishing it yourself. We also ask that you note that the article was "originally published on www.indymedia.ie".

Newsworthiness Indymedia aims to be a news service for a large and broad audience. Therefore we ask people only to publish material that has some news value and is of public interest. We have nothing against your poetry, personal musings, holiday snaps or idle banter, but there are many other sites on the internet which are much more suited to publish this type of material - blogs, bulletin boards or your own homepage.

Story Types

The following descriptions explain the various typees of articles that are published on indymedia. Please try to choose the right type when publishing your material that is published in the wrong type may be removed.

Feature

Features appear on the front page of the site. They are almost always based upon stories that are published on the open newswire. Anybody can propose that any article published on the site should be turned into a front page feature. If 3 or more members of the indymedia collective vote for it, it goes straight onto the front page. If an article is well-written, contains good, original research, is particularly newsworthy or comes from a perspective that is underepresented in the media, it has a high chance of getting featured.

News Report

News reports should, wherever possible, be original, first-hand accounts of news-worthy events.

Opinion / Analysis

Opinion pieces must be original. We ask authors to put a reasonable amount of effort into making their arguments clearly and backing them up with evidence. We are particularly keen on articles which show evidence of original research or a fresh angle of analysis about an issue. If you just want to have a rant off the top of your head, a blog is a better bet.

Press Release

Press Releases should be statements published by a named individual or organisation. Press Releases should relate to a current event, of public interest and have genuine news value. Press releases which serve primarily to advertise a particular organisation or politician or any other statement that simply says "look at me" without any news value may be removed. Organisations should also ensure that they do not swamp the site with press releases.

Event Notice

Event Notices should be notices about non-commercial events that are open to the public and are located in Ireland. If you select the Event Notice type when you are publishing, you will be able to specify the date of the event and it will automatically appear in our event calendar.

Other Press

If you come across an article elsewhere on the internet that you think is particularly interesting to readers of indymedia.ie, you can use the Other Press type to post links to articles from other sites. However for other press stories we ask that you provide a link and an original introduction. Do not cut and paste entire articles - they will be removed and you may find yourself banned from publishing if you repeatedly publish non-original material.

Comments

Readers of Indymedia can publish comments on all stories published on Indymedia. In general, publishers are encouraged to respond to comments which do not break our editorial guidelines. Even if you feel that a comment is unfair, a clear response to any points raised can make the story stronger - people are more likely to view articles which generate debate. If somebody publishes an abusive comment in response to your story, you can notify us by clicking on the exclamation mark icon beside the comment and filling in the report form to let us know why you think the comment should be removed.

All readers are encourged to add comments to stories if they feel that they have pertinent information to add.

Q3. Why Should You Publish?

A. Your story will reach a large audience and you'll be contributing to the free, democratic media

Although Indymedia is run on a shoe-string by a bunch of volunteers, it is a very busy website and its audience continues to grow. In November 2006 the site got an average of a half million hits a day. Over 6 million pages were downloaded and roughly 300,000 different people dropped in to have a look. By publishing your story on Indymedia, you can talk to this audience in your own words, without the presence of media-professionals to interpret and filter your words.

Every time that somebody publishes a newsworthy and original article to indymedia, it helps the site to get better. Indymedia is a large-scale experiment in free, transparent, democratic media. Almost all of the material published here is published under a 'copyleft' licence that makes it free for non-commercial re-use. The material on the site serves as a public resource for non-commercial projects. Anybody can take part in discussions about editorial policy or join our voluntary collective and all of our debates and decisions are publically archived on the Internet. This is a radical vision of how media could be organised differently. By publishing here, you are contributing to the success of this experiment.