What we publish, what we ask of you, and the rights you grant Insider Wire when you send us work.
Insider Wire takes four kinds of submission from readers: opinion articles, letters to the newsroom, confidential news tips, and photographs or video from people who were there. Each has its own channel and its own terms, and all four are set out below.
Read this page before you send us anything. Submitting an opinion article, a letter, or an image means you accept the terms on this page. If you do not agree to them, do not submit.
Opinion Articles
Our Opinion section runs argument: a clear case, made in the writer's own voice, about something that matters now. We choose pieces for the strength of the case they make rather than for agreement with any editorial line, and we publish writers we disagree with. What we will not run is a press release with a byline on it.
You do not need a title, an institution, or a publishing record. A first-time writer with direct knowledge of a subject beats a familiar name with a general opinion about it.
What We Require
750 to 1500 words
Shorter is usually stronger. Open with the argument, not with background. If your case genuinely needs more room, say why in the comments field instead of sending it long.
Exclusive to Insider Wire
The piece must not have been published or posted anywhere else, including your own site, newsletter, Substack, LinkedIn, or social accounts. Do not offer it to another publication while we are considering it. Simultaneous submissions are declined.
Your real name
We do not publish anonymous or pseudonymous opinion. Give us the name you want in the byline, your location, and a short line on the experience that qualifies you to write this piece. Material you cannot put your name to belongs in a confidential news tip, not an op-ed.
Plain text, in the form
Paste the article as plain text. No HTML, no brackets, no attachments, and no links to a document we have to open. Additional authors and anything else we should know go in the comments field.
Written by you
The words have to be yours. We do not accept text produced by an AI model, pieces ghostwritten under a public figure's name, or work placed on a client's behalf by an agency or communications firm. Quotations must be accurate and every source attributed.
Disclosed interests
Tell us about any financial stake, employer, board seat, client relationship, or political role connected to your subject. We publish the relevant ones alongside your byline. An interest we discover after publication is grounds for a correction and for declining your future work.
We consider submissions on any topic. The strongest ones tend to be the pieces only you could have written: the thing you did, saw, ran, sued over, or lived through, argued out to a conclusion a reader can act on.
Submit an op-ed.
One form, plain text, no attachments. Read the terms on this page before you send it, because submitting means you accept them.
Open the submission formWhat Happens Next
We read everything that arrives. If we want your piece, an editor contacts you within three days. If you have not heard from us within a week, it is safe to assume we cannot use it, and at that point the piece is yours to take anywhere. The volume of submissions means we cannot give feedback on the ones we turn down.
If we accept, we edit. We cut for length, correct errors of fact, and bring the piece into house style. We may come back to you for revisions or for the evidence behind a claim, and factual claims are checked before publication in the same way as our reporting. Headlines, standfirsts, and display copy are written by the desk rather than the author. Where the schedule allows, you will see the edited text before it runs.
Acceptance is not a guarantee of publication. A piece can be held, cut, or dropped if the news moves or a claim does not stand up.
Payment
Insider Wire does not pay for opinion submissions. No fee, expense, or royalty is due for a piece published from this form, and none becomes due later. On the rare occasion we commission a piece for a fee, that fee is agreed in writing before you write it.
The Rights You Grant Us
This is the part that matters legally, and it is written in plain English on purpose. It covers opinion articles and letters. Images are dealt with separately below, and news tips are not covered by it at all.
While We Are Considering It
From the moment you submit until we decline it or a week passes without a reply, the piece is ours to consider exclusively. Do not offer it elsewhere in that window. If we decline, or if the week runs out in silence, that exclusivity ends and the work is entirely yours again, with nothing owed to us.
If We Publish It
If Insider Wire publishes your submission, you grant InsiderWire Inc. an exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, edit, reproduce, publish, republish, translate, adapt, excerpt, syndicate, sub-license, distribute, display, broadcast, and archive the work, in whole or in part, in every medium and format now known or later developed.
In plain terms: once we publish your piece, Insider Wire is the only outlet that may publish it. You may not run it again anywhere else, and that includes your own website, newsletter, and social accounts. Link to our version instead. You are welcome to quote a short extract of your own work when you do.
We May Earn Money From It
We may earn revenue from work you submit and we publish. That includes advertising sold against it, paid and subscription access, syndication and licensing to other publishers, aggregators, databases and archives, and any other commercial use of the piece. You are not entitled to a share of that revenue, and none of it becomes payable to you. By submitting, you agree to this.
What You Keep
You remain the author. Your byline goes on the piece, we never publish your work under someone else's name, and your right to be identified as its author is untouched. You keep the copyright in the underlying work. What you have granted us is the exclusive right to publish and exploit it, which for as long as that license runs means you cannot grant those same rights to anyone else, including yourself.
The facts and the ideas in your piece are not ours. You are free to go on making the same argument, in fresh words, anywhere you like. What is licensed to us exclusively is this article, as written.
What You Are Promising Us
By submitting, you confirm all of the following.
It is yours
You wrote it, you own it, and you have the right to grant the license above. No employer, client, publisher, or co-author holds a claim that would stop you.
It is unpublished
It has not appeared anywhere else, in print or online, and it is not under consideration at another publication.
It is accurate
Its factual claims are true to the best of your knowledge, its quotations are accurate, and its sources are properly attributed.
It is lawful
Nothing in it defames anyone, invades anyone's privacy, breaches a confidentiality or non-disclosure obligation you are under, or infringes anyone's copyright, trademark, or other rights.
You have disclosed
You have told us about any financial, professional, or political interest a reader would want to know about when weighing your argument.
If one of those statements turns out to be untrue, you agree to cover the loss Insider Wire suffers as a result.
Editing, Corrections, and Removal
We may edit your work before and after publication. When a published piece is found to contain an error, we correct it on the record and date the change; we do not quietly rewrite or delete published work. See our corrections policy.
We may decline any submission for any reason and are not obliged to explain why. We may also unpublish a piece if we conclude it should not have run, saying so on the page in line with that policy. Withdrawing a published piece is at our discretion, not a right you keep.
Where These Terms Sit
These guidelines apply alongside our Terms & Conditions and our Privacy Policy. The contact details you give us are used to reach you about your submission and to publish the byline and location you provide. Where these guidelines and our Terms & Conditions differ on a submission, these guidelines govern.
Letters to the Newsroom
A letter is a short response to something we published: a challenge, a fact we missed, or a view we did not represent. Letters are not op-eds, and they do not go through the submission form.
Where
Email [email protected] with "Letter" in the subject line. Paste it into the body of the email. Please do not send attachments.
Length
Up to 250 words. Name the story you are responding to and include the link.
Identity
Give your full name plus your city and state. We publish letters with the writer's name and location, and we verify both before running one.
Editing
We edit letters for length, clarity, and accuracy. We do not publish every letter we receive, and we cannot reply to all of them.
If we publish your letter, the terms in the rights you grant us apply to it exactly as they do to an opinion article.
If your point is simply that we got a fact wrong, you do not need to write a letter. Send the sentence and the evidence to [email protected] and an editor replies within 48 hours. That is our corrections process, and it is faster.
News Tips
A tip is not a submission, and nothing on this page applies to one. Tips are confidential. We do not publish them as reader contributions, we never attach your name to anything without your explicit permission, and we protect our sources.
Never use the op-ed form for confidential material. It is an ordinary web form, not a secure channel. For documents, leaks, or anything that could expose you, use Signal.
Every channel we run, including Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, and encrypted email, is listed on Send a Secure Tip, with instructions if you have never used a secure messenger. If your safety depends on staying anonymous, do not contact us from a device, account, or network your employer controls.
Photographs and Video
If you witnessed a news event and have footage or photographs of it, we want to see them. Reader imagery is often the only record of the first minutes of a story.
How to Send It
Email [email protected], or use one of the channels on Send a Secure Tip if the material is sensitive. Send the original file rather than a screenshot or a re-upload: the original carries the data that lets us verify it.
What We Need With It
When and where
The date, the time, and the location, as precisely as you can give them.
Who recorded it
Whether you shot it yourself. We do not publish material forwarded from someone else without reaching the person who recorded it.
Who else has it
Whether you have posted it publicly or sent it to another outlet, and whether anyone else holds a copy.
How to credit you
The name you want on the credit line, or a note that you would rather not be named.
We verify before we publish. Expect a reporter to ask you questions about the material, and expect us to decline it if we cannot establish where it came from.
The Rights You Grant in Images
If we publish a photograph or video you send us, you grant InsiderWire Inc. a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use, edit, crop, reproduce, publish, distribute, display, syndicate, sub-license, and archive it, in every medium now known or later developed, alongside our reporting and in material about that reporting, and to earn revenue from doing so. You confirm that you recorded it, that you have the right to grant that license, and that publishing it infringes nobody's rights.
Non-exclusive means you keep the right to license the same image to someone else. Where we want exclusive rights to a photograph or a video, we will say so and agree the terms with you in writing first.
We do not pay for unsolicited reader images. Where we commission or license material, the fee is agreed in writing beforehand.
What We Do Not Publish
Knowing this in advance saves everyone time.
- Anything published or posted elsewhere first, including on your own accounts.
- Anonymous or pseudonymous opinion, and pieces filed under a name that did not write them.
- Text generated by an AI model.
- Press releases, company announcements, product promotion, and pieces placed by an agency for a client.
- Submissions offered in exchange for payment, or written to plant a link. We do not sell placement in the Opinion section, and every paid item on this site is labeled. See our editorial standards.
- Open letters, petitions, and pieces signed by an organization rather than a person.
- Personal attacks, and serious allegations about a named individual that you cannot evidence.
- Poetry, fiction, and creative writing. We are a newsroom.
Questions
Anything this page does not answer goes to [email protected]. Please do not use that address to check on the status of a submission; if we want your piece, we will be in touch inside three days.
Policy
Editorial Standards & Ethics
How we source, verify, and correct, and the line we hold between reporting and opinion.
Policy
Terms & Conditions
The terms governing use of insiderwire.com, which apply alongside this page.
Policy
Privacy Policy
What we collect from you when you submit, and what we do with it.