artefatica

ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom led by Paul Steiger, the former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Based in New York, ProPublica works like this:

We have a newsroom of 32 working journalists, all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact.

Each story we publish is distributed in a manner designed to maximize its impact. Many of our “deep dive” stories are offered exclusively to a traditional news organization, free of charge, for publication or broadcast. (After an appropriate period of exclusivity, each story is also published on this site. This site also features outstanding investigative reporting produced by others, sometimes with our annotation and follow-up, thus making our site both more of a destination and a tool to promote more good work in this field.)

We support each story we publish with an active and aggressive communications effort of our own, including regularly contacting reporters, editors and bloggers, encouraging them to follow-up on our reporting, and to link to our site and our work. 

But the news that caught my attention — they want us to steal their stories:

Steal Our Stories

You can republish our articles and graphics for free, so long as you credit us, link to us, and don’t edit our material or sell it separately.

We’re licensed under Creative Commons, which provides the legal details. (The license says “no commercial use.” We’re fine with ads appearing on the same page as republished stories, but you can’t resell the stories or sell ads specifically targeted to them.)

Hmmmmm. I’d prefer a more open license, but may be a good source for my newspaper idea.

(Thanks to Simon Law for the tip.)