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Not on the Wires is a journalistic organisation - and one of a very few - that genuinely believes in treating the web as its own medium, and our community is made up of people all around the world who appreciate good digital storytelling or who have stories to tell.

That means that our priority is twofold: (1) To find the most interesting and engaging stories, and (2) to discover how the technologies of the web can deliver the most engaging way of telling those stories electronically.

In other words, what does the web do best, and how can we push it further? This is a big experiment!

If you have a piece of digital journalism or a story you’d like to build and present in a particular way, please consider submitting it and if our editors decide it’s a good fit we’ll be happy to work with you to produce an amazing final product.

Learn more about our editorial approach.

Image 1 is CC-Attr Beacon Radio (Flickr).

Editorial

Our editorial focus is for some people the most elusive part of our mission, however for us it has always been completely clear.

Our overriding belief is that the world, right now, in all its complexity, is fascinating. We also like to believe that that world itself would be a better place if everybody knew more about what is happening there.

For us, geography is no barrier to relevance. People everywhere can and should learn from each other and about the world we all inhabit together, and that - editorially - is where we start.

Another defining feature is that we don't like to divide our content according to conventional categories. For example, rather than sport stories or politics stories, we're far more interested in getting a sport angle on a politics story, or vice versa.

Read on for a bit of technical info on formatting and presentation.

Technology

The specifics of how your story is presented are a creative process, but as far as a vague specification as to format, we are open to video, photography, audio (with photography), articles (max 850 words - must include photography) and interactive features (javascript only - no flash). We do not usually publish audio-only pieces as they have very poor interactivity, but if it’s amazing we’ll certainly try to figure out a way to make it happen.

All our stories are served on our website using the Smartest content management system. Each one can use our various templates for videos or articles, or can even be an entire HTML template with its own CSS and Javascript if you are really thinking big.

Videos must be no longer than 5 minutes, with 2 minutes an optimal length, must be uploaded to Vimeo or YouTube, and you can even design a special template for displaying them if you like. Any HTML/CSS/Javascript you submit must be compatible with all browsers (IE 8/7; Firefox 4/3; Safari 5/4; Chrome - Opera is not officially supported)

Contact info

If you'd like to get in touch about contributing, you should write to us at submissions@notonthewires.com - if you like what's on this page, we'd love to hear from you.

We also need to be upfront about one more thing: We don’t currently pay anybody - including ourselves.

Contributing to Not on the Wires is a chance to do something incredible, with state-of-the-art technical assistance, and have hundreds of thousands of people see it - all with your name attached. We provide a space for people to tell interesting stories in interesting ways and educate each other. For us, for now, that is enough. This is about something more important than money.

If we publish your story, we'll promote it, but as well as a byline and the exposure you'll get to our growing community, you'll usually also retain 50% of the copyright of the final presentation as it appears on the web as a whole (that means if you publish a version of your work in a book or journal, it’s all yours).

This, we think, is a fair proposition, and our many existing contributors agree. We hope you will too.