Editorial Independence Policy
We subscribe to standards of editorial independence adopted by the Institute for Nonprofit News:
Our organization retains full authority over editorial content to protect the best journalistic and business interests of our organization. We maintain a firewall between news coverage decisions and sources of all revenue. Acceptance of financial support does not constitute implied or actual endorsement of donors or their products, services, or opinions.
We accept gifts, grants, and sponsorships from individuals and organizations for the general support of our activities, but our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support.
Our organization may consider donations to support the coverage of particular topics, but our organization maintains editorial control of the coverage. We will cede no right of review or influence of editorial content, nor of unauthorized distribution of editorial content.
Our organization will make public all donors who give a total of $5,000 or more per year. We will accept anonymous donations for general support only if it is clear that sufficient safeguards have been put into place that the expenditure of that donation is made independently by our organization and in compliance with INN’s Membership Standards.
Republishing
The Shoestring is committed to bringing our powerful investigative reporting and deeply researched writing about western Massachusetts to readers wherever they might be. Unless otherwise noted, other news outlets can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s how:
If you’re going to republish one of our pieces, please just let us know at info [at] theshoestring.org so we can track who is reprinting our work!
You have to credit The Shoestring and any co-reporting partners. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication(s).”
If published online, at the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by The Shoestring.” You must link the words “The Shoestring” to the original URL of the story.
If published in print, at the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by the independent news outlet The Shoestring.”
You must include all of the links from our story.
Editing or substantially changing the content of our reporting is not allowed, except to reflect relative changes in time and location. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Springfield” to “Springfield, Mass.” or some other more locally appropriate language.) If you need to cut a story for length or want to make significant changes, please secure our permission in advance of publication. Contact us at info [at] theshoestring.org to request permission.
You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. Contact us at info [at] theshoestring.org to request permission.
It’s OK to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. You cannot state or imply that donations to your organization support The Shoestring’s work.
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. The Shoestring understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarize or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
You can’t use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language. Contact us at info [at] theshoestring.org to inquire further about this possibility.
Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.
If you share republished stories on social media, you must tag The Shoestring’s accounts in your posts. We have official accounts on X, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky.
If you have any other questions, contact info [at] theshoestring.org.
Donor & Financial Transparency
We are committed to transparency in every aspect of funding our organization.
Accepting financial support does not mean we endorse donors or their products, services, or opinions.
We accept gifts, grants, and sponsorships from individuals, organizations and foundations to help with our general operations, coverage of specific topics, and special projects. As a fiscally sponsored project of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that operates as a public trust, we do not pay certain taxes. We may receive funds from standard government programs offered to nonprofits or similar businesses.
Our news judgments are made independently – not based on or influenced by donors or any revenue source. We do not give supporters the rights to assign, review, or edit content.
We make public all revenue sources and donors who give $5,000 or more per year. As a news nonprofit, we avoid accepting charitable donations from anonymous sources, government entities, and political parties. Elected officials or candidates seeking public office in our coverage area (Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin counties) may not donate more than $350 per calendar year. We will not accept donations from sources who, deemed by our advisors, present a conflict of interest with our work or compromise our independence.
Corrections Policy
The Shoestring strives for accuracy and clarity in our reporting.
We address online errors and clarifications as well as substantial story updates directly in the story, by updating and adding an editor’s note that explains the error and what was corrected/clarified.
Smaller typos and grammatical errors will often be corrected without issuing a correction.
Conflict of interest policy
We disclose any conflicts of interest between our staff, writers and any story should they arise. We defer to the INN conflict of interest policy for guidance.
Donor Transparency
The Shoestring discloses any donors who give more than $5,000 in a one-year period. These donors are:
Ivan Oransky, Norbert Goldfield, the Google News Initiative, the Fund for Nonprofit News at The Miami Foundation, the Scripps Howard Fund, the Barr Foundation via NewsMatch, and the Homestead Foundation.