A local elections republication portal and newsletter from the Institute for Nonprofit News
The INN Network produces hundreds of stories covering developments in local elections and politics in their communities. Most of the nonprofit newsrooms that produce these stories allow their work to be freely republished as part of their mission to provide high-quality journalism to as many people as possible.
To help elevate the visibility of small newsrooms and elections coverage during 2024 elections and beyond, INN has developed On the Ground. This INN-produced newsletter and online portal will offer a curated weekly digest that showcases local elections stories from INN members and packages stories so they can be easily republished by national or regional news outlets. Through On the Ground, these outlets gain high-quality, local content that serves their audiences. This leads to broader reach and greater visibility for INN member news organizations — and increases the potential for real-world impact.
On the Ground is an opt-in service from INN.
If your newsroom is an INN member and you’d like to share your content as part of On the Ground, fill out this form.
The stories we include in On the Ground are meant to be republished, freely, with some constraints, which are listed here (much of the following was copied directly from ProPublica and The City’s republication guidelines). If you have any questions, contact INN Network Product Manager Andrew Haeg.
License type:
Content is made available under the BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons license. This means the content can be freely republished in any medium or format, so long as it’s attributed, and not remixed or altered — except for the headline, which can be rewritten.
Republication process and terms:
Copy and paste the supplied plain text into your Content Management System (CMS).
Credit the publishing news organization and any co-reporting partners. In the byline, “Author Name, Publication(s)” is preferred. At the top of the text of the republished story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by {news organization}.”
If republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on the publishing news organization’s website, including all of the links from the original story.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the publisher’s URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
You cannot edit the material, except to adjust the headline, and align with your in-house style (e.g. % vs. “percent,” honorifics, etc). You can also rewrite to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
It’s OK to republish stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against the publishing news organization’s stories. You can’t state or imply that donations to your organization support the publishing news organization’s work.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of the material to any third parties.
This means that you cannot actively publish or submit republished work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. It is understood that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish the material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You can’t use the publishing news organization’s work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
Translation of stories into another language. Is generally not permitted.
Any website the publishing news organization’s stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.
If you share republished stories on social media, tagging the publishing news organization is appreciated.
Images
You have full rights to offer republication permissions of images submitted, free of royalties of other licensing payments
Images can be republished with the provided attribution and captioning terms
Images may not be altered besides cropping for size
Questions? Meet the INN staff member who can help.
Network Product Manager
Andrew Haeg
Andrew Haeg creates digital products that broaden the reach of the INN Network, increase impact and diversify revenue streams. He works with the collaborations and network teams to identify opportunities for developing products or services that leverage the scale and quality of member journalism to reach new audiences or tap into new revenue streams.
