Please refer to our Contributor Welcome Guide and Editorial Style Guide for further guidance on submitting content.

How To Contribute Content to Empoword Journalism

  1. You can head over to our Contributors’ Facebook Group, where our editors post regular content call-outs with various ideas that they’d love to see written for their sections. You can comment on any post that appeals to you and express your interest in writing an article. A section editor will get back to you to confirm that you can go ahead and upload it to WordPress. Editors will provide deadlines and word counts in the call-outs but will happily cooperate with you if your vision takes you in a slightly different direction.
  2. Alternatively, you can send an email to the relevant section editors, with a brief pitch. An editor will get back to you as soon as possible. If your pitch is urgent, put Time Sensitive into the subject line and we will do our best to prioritise your work.

1. Pitch Your Idea To The Relevant Section

When you’re pitching to us, we just want the basic information:

  • What’s your story idea?
  • What are the key points you’d like to make in the story?
  • Is there anyone you’re going to interview? What data will you include?
  • Why would you like to write it for us?
  • Why are you the best person to write it?
  • If you have a portfolio or examples of previous work, it’s nice to include this, too!

We expect pitches to be concise, generally 2-3 short paragraphs is sufficient, depending on the nature of the piece.

The section email addresses can be found here:

If you’re unsure which section is best for your idea, have a chat with our Editors-in-Chief or our Admin Team!

If you are approaching Empoword with a PR enquiry, please email our PR manager(s).

If the pitch is on a topic of a timely nature, please specify this in the subject line so that our editors know to prioritise it. If there’s a certain date that the article needs to be uploaded by, please let us know as soon as possible.

Please don’t send us complete articles. Our editors prefer to work with you to create articles that align with our website. We need to ensure that there isn’t any overlap with articles we’ve already published, and that it matches our publication’s style.

Please note that for similar reasons, we’re unable to publish anything that has already been published elsewhere – for example, your university newspaper, or a local newspaper where you did some work experience. 

2. Receive Your Feedback

The editors will respond to your pitch and provide relevant feedback on your article idea. 

3. Create a WordPress Account

If your pitch is accepted and you’re new to Empoword, you’ll need to create a WordPress account. You can do that here. 

4. Get Writing!

The next step is writing your article. When it’s done, you can upload it to WordPress. You can find explainers on how to do this and how to format your article in our Editorial Style Guide. Please carefully read through this handbook before submitting.

5. The Editing Process

As you’ll see in the handbook, when you’ve saved your article as Pending Review, we’ll need you to email the relevant editors to let them know your article is ready to be edited.

In this email, please confirm your full name, age, location, and social media handles. This is so that we can promote you alongside your work on our social media. You don’t have to provide any information you aren’t comfortable with sharing, but we think it’s nice to properly showcase our contributors. 

Each article goes through at least two stages of editing. We might come back to you to check facts or ask you to change some parts around, but any feedback we provide will be productive. We aim to guide, encourage, and inspire our contributors at every stage possible.

If you have any more questions, please feel free to reach out to the Editors in Chief or our Admin Editor.

You can find some more explainer videos on uploading content to our site here: