Submissions

To join our volunteer staff, click here.

Please review the terms below carefully and in their entirety. Last updated: June 10, 2022

Content and Compensation

Important note: Please be advised that we are now publishing our content under a Creative Commons Attribution/No Derivatives license (CC BY-ND). This means other publications are welcome to republish for free any of our articles published under these terms, so long as they adhere to the guidelines on our site.  Published work before 2022 that is not marked as Creative Commons remains under traditional copyright. See below for more details.

We are looking for writers and artists who can contribute original pieces in the categories described below. Generally speaking, feature articles are in the range of 1,000 to 4,000 words. Photo essays and other visual works feature five to twenty images; video essays can be of any length. Blog posts are 1,000 words or shorter.

We prefer pieces with a strong connection to the magazine’s themes of understanding other people and cultures, encouraging empathy and compassion, and defying categories and conventions. Review essays must concern works of relevance to the magazine’s themes and discuss those issues at length.

The types of pieces we publish, and the honorariums we pay, are described below. As of 2022, we are publishing short stories and poetry once again.

  • News (in-depth profiles and other reportage): $60-120
  • Commentary (personal essays, op-eds, and travel writing): $40-80
  • Art (photo essays, artwork, videos, multimedia projects, and accompanying photos/art): $40-80
  • Interviews (Q&As): $40-80
  • Reviews (reviews of books, film, music, and art): $30-70 (plus copy of book, event admission, etc., when possible)
  • Fiction (short stories and poetry) : $30-70
  • Blog (shorter pieces, in any genre): $25

We will make a determination after reviewing your first draft whether a piece will be published as a feature article or a blog post.

New Copyright Policy

(This policy is effective for content published in 2022 and later; please see the archived guidelines below for our earlier policy.)

By submitting your work to In The Fray, you (the contributor) grant us permission to reproduce and distribute your work under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-ND 4.0). This means that you retain the copyright, but the public may copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially, so long as they credit you for the original creation and do not remix, transform, or build upon the material.

You must currently hold the copyright to the work, or obtain the permission of the copyright holder. You must tell us if your submission, or portions or other versions of it, have been published elsewhere, online or in print, in any form or medium. We prefer work that has not appeared elsewhere. In certain cases, we will make explicit exceptions to this rule, but we generally do not pay compensation for pieces that we republish.

We retain the right to keep your work on our site indefinitely. We also retain the right to publish your work in our email newsletters, on our social networking sites, and in our nonprofit organization’s publicity materials.

We will contact you whenever we hear that a piece of yours was republished. Unless otherwise noted, work published before 2022 falls under our traditional copyright policy, which is archived below. For guidance on how the republishing process works, visit our Republishing page. If you wish to apply Creative Commons licensing to any piece of yours that we published under the traditional copyright policy, please let us know at submissions@inthefray.org. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: We do not honor requests to remove your content from our site after publication. Please think carefully about whether you want your work to be accessible on the Internet.

Payment

Payment is made by PayPal in any of the currencies that PayPal supports. You should set up a free personal account at paypal.com if you do not have one. You are responsible for any fees charged, such as PayPal transaction fees. Please note that In The Fray is a small nonprofit organization, and our funding comes almost entirely from individual donors.

The Submission Process

Please send queries to the email addresses listed below:

In your email, please include: (1) a brief (no more than one paragraph) description of your piece; and, if possible, (2) the draft of the piece as an attachment. Written pieces should be provided as Microsoft Word (.docx) or OpenDocument (.odt) files; you can attach any photographs or other images to your email, or send us a link to a cloud service (Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.) where the files have been uploaded.

We prefer to consider completed drafts. If you are querying us about an idea for a piece but do not yet have a draft, you should also include three samples of your previous work in your query email (links are preferred). Please note that In The Fray magazine considers all pieces on spec, except for rare exceptions. This means that even if you have submitted multiple drafts, we will not guarantee payment unless the Editor in Chief signs off on the piece’s publication.

Our volunteer staff regretfully cannot respond to all pitches. If you do not hear from us in a month, we likely have decided your piece was not a good fit for the magazine, but sometimes we fall behind in our email—if you want to be sure, email us again.

We reserve the right to edit all pieces, including those we republish. Feature articles often go through at least two rounds of edits, including one with the Editor in Chief. Expect lots of editing but also lots of feedback.

We automatically discard simultaneous submissions. Do not bother sending us a query email addressed to multiple publications.

Contributors Mailing List

At times we may need someone to write a piece or contribute photography or artwork. If you wish to be considered for assignments, please send an email (a separate email from any article query) to submissions@inthefray.org and ask to join our contributors mailing list.

In your email, please provide us with the following information:

  1. Where you are located (New York, Hong Kong, etc.);
  2. The topics you are interested in (pop culture, economic issues, politics, etc.);
  3. A few of the publications or media organizations where your work has appeared;
  4. Up to three links to what you consider to be the best of your work;
  5. Other relevant experiences or skills you have (video/photography/design skills, legal training, language proficiency, etc.).

We send general announcements, including our occasional calls for submission, to the contributors mailing list. We also send targeted emails to specific contributors on the lists whose locations, interest areas, and experiences/skills match our content needs.

If you are already on the mailing list, but need to update your information, feel free to email us at submissions@inthefray.org.

Traditional Copyright Policy

(This policy is effective for content published before 2022 unless otherwise noted.)

By submitting your work to In The Fray, you (the contributor) grant us exclusive first Electronic Publishing Rights in the English Language.

You must currently hold the copyright to the work, or obtain the permission of the copyright holder. You retain your copyright to the work.

You must tell us if your submission, or portions or other versions of it, have been published elsewhere, online or in print, in any form or medium. We prefer work that has not appeared elsewhere. In certain cases, we will make explicit exceptions to this rule, but we do not pay compensation for pieces that we republish.

We reserve the right to republish your article in other publications. We do this to publicize your work and expand our magazine’s reach. If your work is republished, it must be properly credited with your byline, a note that In The Fray is the original publisher, and a link to the article on our site.

For a sixty-day period, beginning on the date of publication, any other publication (print or online, blog or news organization, etc.) that wishes to republish the piece will need to obtain the permission of In The Fray and provide proper credit. Any payment for republication in the first sixty days will be split fifty-fifty between you and In The Fray.

Sixty days after publication, you are free to publish your piece elsewhere without our permission, and to keep any money you make from republication. However, you must provide proper credit and let us know when and where it is being republished.

We retain the right to keep your work on our site indefinitely. We also retain the right to publish your work in our email newsletters, on our social networking sites, and in our nonprofit organization’s publicity materials.

We do not honor requests to remove your content from our site after publication. Please think carefully about whether you want your work to be accessible on the Internet.

personal stories. global issues.