Cut the bullshit. Elevate civic knowledge and responsibility.
Open call for content contributors!
Cut the bullshit. Elevate civic knowledge and responsibility.
Help us cut the bullshit and become an informant by contributing to back-end discussion in the /newsroom. Participating in the /newsroom helps determine the content of this community, informs the arguments it makes, and provides the context in which it’s presented to the audience.
Becoming an informant is the first step in becoming an approved contributor.
Becoming an Informant
There are a number of ways to participate as an informant. First, request an invite to the /newsroom. A good informant will then ideally engage in most or all of these activities:
- Pitch links to outside sources. Try to explain the thought behind it so that other informants and editors can find the best possible angle to cover.
- Submit ideas for original content, recurring features, and special series. Again, explain your thoughts. Pitching content doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to write it, but it does give someone a shot at becoming a writing contributor.
- Participate in back-end discussions in the /newsroom. Healthy discussion will help fast track the progression of the community and develop great content that engages an audience. Research topics and add information on a thread whenever possible.
- Ask questions. Lots of questions. Ask them in your pitches, ask them in discussions, ask them of commenters. If we’re going to call bullshit, we need to question everything, find relevant perspectives, and focus on finding and presenting solutions.
- Cover a beat. Any relevant beat will do at this point.
Becoming an approved contributor
The second step is to have a pitched accepted, either a link or original content. Then, a writer will accept a posted assignment, develop a draft and submit it for feedback/editing in the /newsroom by the due date, and then post it on a scheduled day.
The bar is set so that almost anyone can become an approved contributor, but there is a one strike and you are out rule. Approved contributors that post content in /knowshit that don’t go through the editorial process will be unceremoniously ejected as an approved contributor. As you might expect, there is no room for bullshit.
Immediate content goals
We’d like to quickly get to about three quality links per day, so if there are a couple additional people pitching outside articles and discussing merits, angles, etc., that would be a significant help.
There are already several pitches for original content in the /newsroom so let's work on developing those and putting our first assignments up for grabs. For original content, let's shoot for a consistent once per week to start, and then ramp up as we gain more contributors. A longer-term goal would be to consistently publish one original article per day.





I like the idea of this community but need to find the right level of contribution. Creating good content takes more time than I ever expected. And I have already at times over-promised and under-delivered when I've tried to help out in other communities.
What is a good way for me to work up to contributing more?
You can continue commenting on posts like you have been. That helps us cultivate discussion on the front-end and attract/retain an audience.
If you want to go beyond that, it can be as simple as posting a link in the /newsroom. That way an editor or contributor can take a look and consider posting it.
Ideally informants would discuss and add supporting links to detrmine why and how it should be posted on the back-end before it's published to /knowshit (on the front-end). Writing content is a lot less work when a community has helped with the research process. The more discussion and thought that goes into the back-end, the better the content comes out on the front-end.