WRITE FOR US
Unite The Divided is opening its doors to writers, researchers, and citizen journalists across Southern Indiana. This page is our deal with you, and yours with us. Read it before you write for us, because everything we publish stands on it.
What we promise you
Your work will never be killed or softened because it offends an advertiser, a politician, a donor, or a power broker. We take no money that buys influence over our questions. If your story is verified and fair, it runs, no matter who it makes uncomfortable. That is the entire point of this place.
What we ask of you
Independence from power is not freedom from standards. It is the opposite: because nobody above us checks our work, we check it harder ourselves. Everything published here meets the house standard:
- Verify before you publish. Every factual claim traces to a source you can show: a document, a record, a named person, a dataset. If you cannot source it, you say so plainly or you leave it out.
- Steelman the other side. Every piece presents the strongest honest version of the opposing view, not a cartoon of it. If your argument only survives against a strawman, it is not ready.
- Grade actions and records, not people. We criticize what officials and institutions do, on the evidence. We do not smear, speculate about motives we cannot prove, or attack families and private lives.
- Separate reporting from opinion. Both are welcome here. Mixing them without labels is not.
- Predictions go on the record. If you claim to know where something is heading, we will help you pre-register that prediction publicly, with a date and a way to be proven wrong. We grade ourselves in the open, wins and losses alike.
- Corrections are public and fast. When we get something wrong, we say so in the piece itself, visibly. Getting it right matters more than looking right.
How publishing works
Every piece is audited before it runs. Not censored, audited. An editor reads for sourcing, fairness, and accuracy, and pushes back where the piece is weak. You will sometimes disagree with the pushback. Good. Disagreement between honest people, in the open, is how a community gets closer to the truth. Where an editor and writer see it differently and both positions are defensible, we can publish the disagreement alongside the piece. What we will not publish is the unverified, the unfair, or the reckless, because one careless piece under this banner damages every honest writer who shares it.
Who we are looking for
Not credentials, character. People who are curious before they are certain. People willing to file a records request, sit through a meeting, read the actual document, and change their mind in public when the evidence says to. If you have ever been more interested in what is true than in being right, you will fit here.
The bigger idea
No single writer, editor, or outlet sees the whole truth. But a community of honest people, auditing each other’s work in good faith, converges on it. That is what we are building: a decentralized truth-seeking effort for Southern Indiana, owned by no one, accountable to everyone, and controlled only by the standard you just read.
Ready to write? Use the form below. Tell us who you are, what you want to cover, and one story you think Southern Indiana needs. We read everything.
HOW PUBLISHING WORKS
Pen names, the Franklin tradition
Some truths in a small community carry a price the writer should not have to pay: the teacher, the county employee, the business owner who knows something worth saying but cannot afford the retaliation. In the tradition of Franklin’s Silence Dogood and the Federalist Papers’ Publius, we publish work under pen names.
One rule makes this honest: anonymous to the public, never anonymous to us. Every pen name belongs to a real, known writer whose identity we hold in confidence and whose work passes the same audit as everyone else’s, and a higher evidence bar wherever it criticizes named people. The mask protects the writer from retaliation. It does not protect the writing from the standard. Readers can trust that no voice here, named or masked, publishes unverified claims under our banner.