Submission guidelines for the Saker blog.

The Saker blog is not a news aggregation website, at least not as a rule. While I have special arrangements made with two authors, I do not, as a rule, re-post materials already posted elsewhere on the Internet. I try to post exclusively original materials, at least in the ‘analyses’ and the ‘guest posts’ sections (the “war news” and “watch list” sections are specifically designed to repost external videos or documents which we find on the Internet, but not specifically submitted to us).

You are welcome to write under your name or under a pen name/aliasIf you want, you can add a recent photo of you.  If you rather not, then I encourage you to chose any image/symbol/photo/picture/drawing “representing” you or which are dear to you.  It could be anything, from an abstract drawing, to a landscape, to a photo of your personal hero to a photo of your pet.  If you want you can add a short biography.  You can say anything you want about yourself as long as it is true.  You can say very few things (such as “I love spinach, I listen to Bach and I live in Japan”) as long as it is all true.

If we accept your contribution, and unless you specifically say otherwise, it will be posted under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 4.0 International license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). This means that once it is posted here, everybody will be free to not only re-post/share it elsewhere in any medium or format but also to adapt/modify it for any purpose, even commercially. In other words, as long as I am first to publish it, once it is published it belongs to you and everybody else. My goal is not to make money or seek personal fame or recognition, but to promote alternative ideas/views. That is called “copyleft“, the exact opposite of “copyright”, which I like to call “copywrong” and which I loathe.

In terms of length, I prefer longer articles, no less than 1500-2000 words. One of the few advantages the blogosphere has over the corporate media is that it is not limited by space. We also like to believe that we address a non-TV-lobotomized public, people who like to take their time to read and think. I therefore encourage you to go on a tangent, list examples, detail your references, etc. Of course, there is no need to make a text artificially long, but do take all the space you need to make your point and make your argument. FYI – the current record for the longest piece ever published here is over 25’000 words (the Special Report on Srebrenica).

Please assume that the target audience has a graduate-level college education or equivalent. I am fairly sure that most of my readers are over 40 years old, most of them are well read and well-traveled.

However, please do not worry too much about your knowledge of the English language. English is my 3rd or 4th language (out of six) and I make tons of mistakes: grammar, typos, verb coordination, etc. Contents are far more important than form, so worry first about contents and second about form. After all, this blog is about ideas, not language. Try to make your text clear and understandable, but don’t try to sound like Shakespeare (it won’t work anyway).

Be as technical as you want or as you need.  If something is complicated, explain it.  Or indicate where the reader can find more info.  Do not dumb down or make your text more “accessible”.  People reading this blog want to learn – they actually enjoy learning.

Do not use classified info.  However, feel free to use open source info which you know is correct :-)

Please do not send me any copyrighted materials (photos, images, texts, logos, etc.)!

Ignore political correctness.  You present *your* opinion.  What others make of it is their problem, not yours.

Please do not send me texts in PDF format as they are hard to repost and reformat. I prefer the OpenOffice file format ODT, but the following also work: DOC, DOCX, RTF, TXT, HTML.

Finally, please do not use the comments section to submit article.  Email me instead.

That’s it.  If you have any further questions or want to submit a text, please email me at vineyardsaker@gmail.com

The Saker