All work produced by the Flatwater Free Press — articles, videos, photos and other media — is available for publication at no cost.
We do this under a Creative Commons license, which prohibits commercial use. Photography rights are retained, separately, by the photographers and Flatwater Free Press in any context outside of original publication. They are available for one-time use to accompany the piece with which they are originally published.
TO PUBLISH A STORY
Any story on our site will have a “Publish this piece” link below the headline. Click that to download a .zip folder containing the distribution license, any photos, and as many as three versions of the story at different lengths — full, medium (roughly 20 column inches), and a short stub that teases to the longer story.
Any publication is allowed to make additional edits to accommodate space considerations or style. You may not include additional reporting without first consulting with Free Press editorial staff. Direct any questions about altering our work to mhansen@flatwaterfreepress.org. You may run different versions. For example, a newspaper may run the stub in print, but the full story in their online edition.
REQUIREMENTS
We ask only two things for publication partners.
- If your publication’s style is to list the outlet in the byline, (eg; Mary Jones, Associated Press), we ask that you list the Free Press reporter and outlet the same way. For example, “Matt Wynn, Flatwater Free Press.”
- Then, at the end of the story, we ask that you include this tagline:
[ IN PRINT ]
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter. Learn more at flatwaterfreepress.org[ ONLINE (include link) ]
The Flatwater Free Press is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.[ BROADCAST ]
Credit us however fits the piece, but you must mention the website flatwaterfreepress.org.
There are two more asks that we don’t require, but do appreciate:
- If your CMS allows it, we ask that you add a noindex meta tag to prevent search engines from indexing the version on your site. Many content systems can add this tag without editing any code. Example noindex tag:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">- Lastly, please let us know if you use our work! We want to see all the ways our stories go into the world and would love to check it out ourselves.