Contributor Terms
The Massachusetts Times · Published by The Massachusetts Times Company · massachusettstimes.us/terms/contributor · Effective October 16, 2026
In plain terms. If your work appears in The Massachusetts Times, it stays yours. We take a license to publish it, keep it in the record, and administer it under the terms we give readers — never a silent transfer of everything you made. Commissioned work is paid in full when we accept it, not months later and not less because we chose not to run it. Your byline is your right, your independence is intact, and after our own verification we stand behind what we publish — your warranty to us is honesty, not insurance against our editorial judgment. We drafted these terms, so ambiguity in them is read against us, never against you. This summary is part of the terms and binds us like any article below.
Article 1 — The Compact
1.1. These terms govern everyone whose work enters the pages of The Massachusetts Times: contributors we commission, contributors who offer work we accept, and readers whose letters we publish.
1.2. They are The Massachusetts Times Company's standing offer. A commission formed, or an offered work accepted, in reliance on them is an agreement, enforceable by you under the Dispute Terms like any term we publish.
1.3. Where a written commission and this page both speak, the commission controls what it states and this page controls everything it does not — and a commission term worse for you than this page is effective only if it names this page and says plainly that it departs from it.
Article 2 — Your Work Stays Yours
2.1. You keep your copyright. Publication here is not a confiscation, and we do not take all-rights transfers or work-for-hire assignments as a default of doing business with us.
2.2. What you grant us is enumerated: first publication of the work in The Massachusetts Times; its permanent place in our served record under the Archive and Permanence Terms; and its administration under the standing grants we make the world — the Access Terms, the Citation and Quotation Terms, and the Machine Terms — which protect your work with the same walls that protect our own.
2.3. The archive license is perpetual, because our promise to readers that the record stays is one we may only make with your work if you make it to us. Everything else returns to your control as these terms and your commission state.
Article 3 — The Commission
3.1. A commission states its scope, its fee, its deadline, its clock for payment, and any rights sought beyond Article 2 — in plain words, before the work begins.
3.2. We do not bury rights grabs in commissioning paperwork. Anything beyond Article 2's license must be asked for by name and agreed to by you, separately priced where it has a price.
3.3. We drafted the forms, so what a commission fails to say is read against us, and what it says ambiguously is read in your favor.
Article 4 — Payment
4.1. Payment is owed on acceptance, not on publication. The industry habit of paying when a work finally runs — or never, because it never ran — is renounced here in writing.
4.2. Commissioned work we decline to publish is paid in full. There is no kill fee discounting the work you delivered to the scope we set; the decision not to run it is our editorial act and our cost.
4.3. Absent a stated clock, payment lands within thirty days of acceptance. A payment that misses its clock is our breach, cured under the notice-and-cure article of the Terms of Use — and the cure is payment, not apology.
4.4. Acceptance is not withheld to dodge the clock. Work delivered to the commission's scope is accepted or declined within a reasonable time, and silence past that time is treated as acceptance for payment's purposes.
Article 5 — Credit
5.1. The byline is yours by right. Published work carries your name as you give it to us.
5.2. Where naming you would endanger you, the protections of the Source Terms extend to you as a contributor: an agreed pseudonym or a withheld byline, with the reason handled as the Source Terms handle it, and the promise kept as the Source Terms keep it.
5.3. Credit is never removed as punishment or leverage. If the relationship ends badly, the record still says who wrote what, because the record's accuracy outranks anyone's grudge, ours included.
Article 6 — Editing
6.1. We edit. Clarity, length, house style, headlines, display, and placement are the publication's craft and the publication's call.
6.2. Substantive changes — anything that alters what your work asserts or how your judgment reads — are put to you before publication where time allows, and where it does not, you are told what changed and why as soon as the work is out.
6.3. If an edit makes the work say something you refuse to stand under, you may withdraw your byline before publication and the commission is still paid under Article 4. Your name is never conscripted.
Article 7 — We Stand Behind What We Publish
7.1. Once we have verified and published your work, defending it is our job. We do not pass the publication's legal risk back down to the contributor as the price of a byline, and we do not demand that freelancers insure our editorial decisions.
7.2. Your exposure under these terms is bounded by your warranties in Article 8 — what you told us and whether it was honest — never by the fact that we published it, which was our act.
7.3. A claim arising from material we added, cut, or altered over your objection is ours alone.
Article 8 — The Contributor's Warranties
8.1. You warrant four things: the work is yours and not another's; it is true to your knowledge, with its facts checked as a professional checks them; your sources are real and are what the work says they are; and any interest you hold that bears on the work is disclosed to us before publication.
8.2. Your tools are your business; your name on the work and the truth of it are what you answer for. Whatever stands under your byline is yours to warrant under this article, however it was made.
8.3. These warranties are the whole of them. We do not stack boilerplate representations past what honesty requires.
Article 9 — The Boundary
9.1. The compact is broken by fabrication or plagiarism: knowingly placing false or stolen work in our pages under your name.
9.2. The break is handled as the Source Terms handle theirs: verified first to the standard of the Correction Terms, then remedied toward the record — correction or retraction, the ledger entry, and the end of the relationship — and no further than the record requires.
9.3. Honest error breaks nothing. A contributor who got it wrong in good faith gets the Correction Terms, not the door.
Article 10 — Offered Work
10.1. Submitting work to us costs you nothing and grants us nothing. No license forms on submission, no rights pass in silence, and an unaccepted submission leaves your hands exactly as full as they were.
10.2. Acceptance is explicit — our stated yes, in writing. Silence is never acceptance of your work, just as it is never your consent to our terms.
10.3. We do not harvest what we decline. A rejected submission's expression stays yours; and while no publication can promise your idea will never independently occur to its newsroom, taking your pages and running their substance without you is conduct these terms call what it is — a violation.
Article 11 — Letters to the Editor
11.1. Published letters carry their writers' names and stand in the record like everything else we publish, under the Archive and Permanence Terms.
11.2. Letters are edited for length and clarity, never for allegiance. Selection is editorial judgment; alteration of a letter's meaning is a correction matter like any other.
11.3. Submitting a letter grants us, on publication, the license of Article 2 for that letter, and nothing before publication.
Article 12 — Onward Licensing of Your Work
12.1. The License Desk licenses your work to third parties only as your commission provides. The default, absent agreement, is that we license our own expression and the collective work — not your separately owned contribution standing alone.
12.2. Where your commission does put your work in the Desk's catalog, the commission states your share in plain terms before the first license is sold, and corrections chase licensed copies of your work exactly as the Correction Terms require.
Article 13 — Independence
13.1. A contributor is not an employee, and we keep that truth honest in both directions: we do not direct your methods, and your voice, your archive of your own work, and your market remain yours.
13.2. There is no exclusivity and no non-compete by default. You may write for anyone, including our rivals, before, during, and after working with us; a commission may buy a stated window of first publication for a specific work, and nothing broader without naming its price.
13.3. Nothing in these terms restrains what you may say about us. Criticism of this publication by its contributors is answered the way we answer everyone — with speech, not clauses.
Article 14 — Changes to These Terms
14.1. Any narrowing of these commitments is a material adverse change and takes effect no earlier than thirty days after we publish a dated notice, as the Terms of Use require.
14.2. No change reaches backward. A commission formed, a work accepted, or a letter published under any edition of this page is governed by that edition for as long as the obligation lives — and the archive license and our duties to you travel whole to any successor under the assignment article of the Terms of Use.
Article 15 — The Spine These Terms Share
15.1. These Contributor Terms incorporate the Open Covenant and the general articles of the Terms of Use: the reader's canon, one-way severance, assignment to successors, the record of versions, and the governing law and open courts carried by the Dispute Terms.
15.2. Where these terms, a commission, or any other page we publish could be read to conflict about a contributor's rights, the reading that leaves more with the contributor governs.
Article 16 — The Record of These Terms
16.1. The current text of these Contributor Terms lives at massachusettstimes.us/terms/contributor, with its effective date at the head. Prior versions and their dates are kept and published alongside it, so every contributor can see exactly what governed the day their work entered our pages.
These terms are part of the Terms that govern this publication.