TCDP Editorial Guidelines

The Twin Cities Daily Planet is designed as a tool for citizens who want to share information, create community, hold the powerful accountable and work together for the common good. We strive for high standards of fairness, accuracy, and accountability. If you share those values, you are welcome to contribute articles, photographs, audio or video reporting. Here are some guidelines for publication of articles in the Twin Cities Daily Planet. The guidelines are a work-in-progress, and we welcome your suggestions and comments.

1. We look for news stories with a local angle. That may mean stories of global events, but with a local connection. For examples, see the Global/Local section. The exceptions to this general rule about local angle are blogs and the Free Speech Zone.

2. Accuracy is essential. Check and double-check facts and quotations. Identify the sources of your information.

3. We care about fairness and transparency. Personal perspective is good-but please identify your relationship with the story. For example: if you are writing a restaurant review, and the restaurant is owned by your cousin, say so. If you worked on Representative X's campaign in the past, disclose that.

4. While we publish some opinion articles, we are primarily interested in news reporting that does not contain the writers' commentary or analysis. We look for news, rather than philosophical argument or history. Sometimes historical background is necessary to clarify or situate a news story, but this is secondary to the news.

5. Good news is news, too! If you know of a great restaurant, play, book ... tell us about it!

6. Shorter is generally better. Yes, there's unlimited space on-line, but readers do not continue to read unlimited words.

7. If we publish your article as a TC Daily Planet original, we will edit it. We don't expect you to produce perfect content, but we care about clean copy. Check spelling, grammar, punctuation. Use your word-processing program's tools. Double-check the spelling of names, the exact names of organizations, addresses, URLs, etc.

8. We have limited resources (editorial time), so we cannot publish all articles in the news pages, but we do publish unedited articles in the Free Speech Zone.

If you are interested in freelance assignments for the TC Daily Planet, please see Information for freelance writers.