Subscribe to the Virginia News Service

The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism invites news publishers in Virginia to subscribe to VCIJ’s Virginia News Service, a platform for distributing stories produced by VCIJ.org and student journalists. 

The Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism is an independent, nonprofit news startup. Our core mission is to produce stories covering underserved communities in Virginian, and distribute these stories to local news outlets for free.

VCIJ practices open and transparent journalism, allowing citizens deep insight into the reporting process. We enforce a clear ethics policy, based on the high standards and practices of ProPublica and the Institute for Nonprofit News. Our policy denotes clear rules for corrections, use of anonymous sources, and a firewall between donors and editorial decisions. 

We aim to reach every community in the commonwealth with our reporting. We also plan to create content in a variety of forms -- print, radio and video -- to reach Virginians where they get their news. We have several decades of experience in Virginia creating long- and short-form stories, photojournalism, video and documentary films and that content will be made available for your news organization to use under a rights managed license.*

A central part of the VCIJ mission is to share content and collaborate with legacy and new media partners. Local news organizations remain vital and we aim to supplement the great reporting that already exists, not compete with it. 

Due to the nature of investigative reporting, we will be sharing our content infrequently. But we will give ample advance of upcoming stories and content, giving news organizations opportunities to plan and potentially work with us. 

We take a detailed and thoughtful approach to producing our journalism, some of which is done in collaboration with colleges and universities around the state. 

We also welcome other Virginia news organizations to share their work through this distribution service. 

VCIJ believes that with collaboration among all the news organizations around the state, we can provide citizens with the information they need to be engaged. 

Questions or ideas on how to improve the VNS? Feel free to reach out: [email protected], [email protected].

We look forward to working with you, and supporting local journalism throughout our commonwealth.

These rules for publishing VNS content are adopted from ProPublica and apply to any stories created by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism and/or our publishing partners.

*Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:

•You have to credit the organization creating the content. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, name of publication that created the story.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by the NAME OF THE ORGANIZATION.” You must link the name of the organization to the original URL of the story. 

•If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on the organization's website, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link.

•You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)

•All photographic images, illustrations, data visualization, video and audio are copyrighted by the organization that created the content. The organizations give one time rights to publish the content with the corresponding story. 

•It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. You can’t state or imply that donations to your organization support the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism work.

•You can’t sell our material separately or syndicate it. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc. 

•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 without our approval.

•Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.

•If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate the organization being tagged in your posts.