Republish our work

Original reporting published by Memory Hole is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-ND 4.0). Take it, commercial outlets included. The terms below are the whole of what we ask.

The terms

Credit us, in the byline. “By Brian Nuckols, Memory Hole” or, where a piece was co-published, the credit line the piece itself carries. Not a link buried at the foot.

Keep the links. All internal links in the piece stay live, including the links to the archive, the receipts, and the standards pages. Those links are the reason the piece can be checked, and a copy that strips them is a copy that has removed the thing the reporting is for.

Don’t edit it. The ND term is the point rather than a formality. Every claim in a Memory Hole piece is bound to a grade and a receipt. An edit that changes a sentence while leaving its grade attached misattributes a judgment to us that we did not make. Trims for length, house style, and time references are fine; changes to what a claim says are not.

Point the canonical at us, please. If you use canonical metadata, we ask that it point to the piece’s URL on this site. This is a request rather than a condition of the license, and it is the same request ProPublica makes of anyone republishing them.

No photo rights. Image rights are almost never ours to grant. Unless the piece says otherwise, the license covers the text and nothing else.

No automated or wholesale republication. Republish pieces because you read them and wanted them. Scraping the feed into an automated pipeline is outside what this license is for.

If you republish

Tell us. It is useful for us to know where the work travels, and a republication is often the beginning of the kind of working relationship that turns into a co-publication later.

The other direction

We occasionally carry full pieces from outlets that publish under Creative Commons and show their evidence, under each outlet’s own terms, re-read the day it runs. Those pages carry a canonical link to the source and a noindex directive: they earn us no search traffic, deliberately. See what we republish.