Write For Us
We are looking for talented local reporters and writers to contribute to The Surrey Post.
There’s no minimum experience level required and no need for a star-studded CV, all we’re looking for are writers with a passion for high-quality journalism, quality prose, and a willingness to investigate to bring readers the context behind the headline.
We have a small budget each month for commissioning articles by freelancers. We want to pay every writer the equivalent of a fair wage for their work, and this means that we have to strictly limit the number of articles we are able to accept each month.
As our income from subscribers grow we will up the rate we pay (we want to break even as a publication, not make a high profit), and in the medium-term, once we are financially sustainable, our goal is to configure ourselves as a co-operative, with all profits being re-invested into the publication and our writers.
At the moment we are offering the following rates:
- £90 for up to 500 words
- £180 for up to 1,000 words
These rates are based on an assumption that a 500 word story will take around 3 hours of work, and a 1,000 word story will take around 6 hours of work. £30 for an hour of work is significantly less than we would like to pay freelance writers, but should still represent the equivalent of a living wage even after tax and NI are taken into account.
A reader subscription to The Surrey Post will be £5 a month as the standard rate. This means that 40 subscribers are needed to pay for every 1,000 word article we publish a month once our operating costs are taken into account.
What we need from you
Please do not write an article for us until you have discussed your pitch with us. What we will want to know from you is the outline concept of what you want to write about and what research you plan on doing for the article. If we like your pitch then we will agree a length, price and deadline for the piece.
If you're interested, please contact our editorial collective: editor@thesurreypost.co.uk
If you have examples of writing you have done previously that we can see then that would be helpful, but if not then we will need to ask you to submit an early sample of your progress on the article to ensure that the writing is up to our standards.
If we decide, for whatever reason, not to go ahead with publishing an article which we have mutually agreed that you will write for us, then we will negotiate a kill-fee based on the work you have already done.
Please be aware that we will want to work with you to edit your article for quality, readability, clarity and accuracy. We will also ask you to provide or source at least one accompanying image for your article - this image must either be your own work or otherwise licensed in a way which enables us to use it.
We will not ask you to sign away on-sale rights to your article. We will ask you to give and guarantee us exclusive rights to publish your article in the form in which it was written for us.
This does not mean that you cannot write further about the topic in question for other publications, nor does it mean you cannot have written about the issue for other publications previously, but it does mean that we expect to be able to publish and profit from the individual article on our website and via our email newsletter without competition from the same article elsewhere.
You will also, in all cases, be entitled to use the article as an example of your work or to link back to it from other locations or in future articles.
If you do any follow-up work based on an article that we have published then we ask, but cannot require, that you let us know and link back to the original article on our website.
In summary, if we commission you to write for us then we will pay you for your writing, we will give you credit for your writing, we will use your writing to build our readership and generate income for our publication, but we will not restrict you from undertaking further paid work for others, or for yourself, based upon (but not copying) your writing for us.