Essential information for all GroundUp freelancers
Here is our ethics and style guide. Please take a few minutes to read it, especially the ethics section at the top:
https://groundup.org.za/media/
Our unbreakable rules are: no fabrication, no plagiarism and no favours for stories.
GroundUp has an intense editing process and we fact check articles. You have to be willing to cooperate and accept this process if you write for us.
There is no guarantee we will publish an article you submit. We only pay for articles we publish. If we commissioned you to write an article and we don’t end up publishing it for reasons beyond your control we pay a small cancellation fee.
The choice to publish an article is with the GroundUp editors and our decision is final. The length of your article is determined by the GroundUp editors.
We don’t pay per word. Instead we have the following content categories for which we pay different rates. It is solely the GroundUp editors’ decision which category the final published article fits into, and it is for the final published article only that we pay.
Brief: <= 400 words. Generally a quickly constructed straight-up news story.
Article: > 400 words. Generally a straight-up news story but one that takes about a day’s worth of work.
Simple feature: We rarely publish these by freelancers. This is a substantial amount of work, at least a couple of days.
Complex feature: We rarely publish these by freelancers. This is a substantial amount of work, involving at least several days of work, maybe a lot more.
We expect you to take a usable landscape orientation photo for the article. We pay a separate fee for this if we use it. We also pay for any additional photos inside the article that you take and that we publish. Again, if we don’t use it we don’t pay for it.
We jointly hold copyright with you on the news articles and photos we publish and pay for. All GroundUp articles and photos are published under this Creative Commons licence. In a nutshell this means that anyone may republish your article or photo so long as they credit you and GroundUp and don’t make any substantive changes to the article or photo. A creative commons licence cannot be revoked and we frequently reuse photos after they have been published; there is no further payment for reuse of photos or articles.
All articles published by GroundUp are original. Please don’t publish your story with anyone else, with any newspaper, or on any website, blog or social media platform (including Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter etc) before the article is published on our website.
We expect journalists who write for us to act politely, fairly, honestly and reasonably to their sources and to members of the public with whom they engage about their work, as well as on social media.
We don’t want you to be out of pocket reporting a story for us. If the story will incur transport expenses let us know in advance and we will discuss a reasonable reimbursement with you.