The three agreements

These are long enough to need their own pages.

Reprints and permissions

The short answer for most people who ask is yes. We would rather this work travel than sit still. But we want to be asked, because we need to know where our work ends up, because some of the photographs are not ours to give away, and because part of this site is open only to members.

• Link to anything on this site, from anywhere, including a commercial site. Linking to a members-only article is fine. It is the link we mind about, not the wall.
• Quote a short passage with credit and a link back to the original story.
• Share a story on social media using the normal share tools.
• Print a copy for yourself, your family, your classroom, or your bulletin board.
• Pass your copy of the paper along to a neighbor. We’d like that, actually.

• Republish a full story, or most of one, anywhere else.
• Reprint a page of the print edition.
• Use one of our photographs outside this site or the paper.
• Reprint anything in a publication that is sold, or in advertising or promotional material.
• Include our work in a newsletter, aggregator, or feed that you monetize.

Usually yes, at no charge, for nonprofits, schools, churches, libraries, tribal programs, government agencies, and other small news outlets, on three conditions: run it unaltered, credit us, and link to the original. Commercial republishing and syndication are a separate conversation and may involve a fee.

Articles tagged Featured, and articles that have moved into the member archive after six days, are not covered by the usual yes. Republishing one outside the wall gives away what members paid for. Ask and we will often still say yes, but it is a separate decision and we need to make it deliberately rather than by default.

Online, the credit line should link to the original story. Do not present our work as your own reporting, and do not put your own byline on it.

Photographs are handled separately from text, always. Some are ours, some are licensed from a service under terms we cannot pass along, and some belong to the person who took them and are used here with their permission. Permission to reprint a story is never automatically permission to reprint the photograph that ran with it. Ask about the image specifically.

Ads in the paper and on the site belong to the businesses that placed them, or to us if we designed them. Permission to reprint a page is not permission to reprint the ads on it.

Permission to republish does not include permission to use our work to train, fine-tune, or evaluate machine learning models, or to build a dataset, index, or corpus for that purpose. That requires separate written agreement.

We apply the same rule to ourselves. When we build on reporting somebody else did first, we say whose it was and we link to it. If you think we have used your work without proper credit, write to us and we will correct it.

Permission requests go to editor@minnesotanicenews.com. Tell us what you want to use, where it will appear, and whether money is involved. Most answers come back the same week.

If you believe something published here infringes a copyright you own, that procedure is in the Terms and Conditions.

Cookies

A cookie is a small file a website asks your browser to keep, so that it can recognize the browser later. Some are necessary for a site to work at all. Others exist to count visitors or to make embedded content from other companies function. This section says which ones are here and what they are for. The paper, happily, has none.

Set by WordPress and by our hosting. These keep members logged in, remember what you chose in the cookie banner so we do not ask again on every page, and protect forms against abuse. The site does not work without them and they cannot be switched off here.

When you join or place an ad, our membership and form tools set cookies to keep you logged in and to carry your order from one step to the next. Card payments are handled by Stripe, which sets its own cookies on the checkout page to prevent fraud. We never see or store your full card number.

We use Google Analytics, through the Site Kit plugin, to count how many people read a story, which stories they read, roughly where in the world they are, and whether they arrived from search or from Facebook. We look at this in aggregate. We are not trying to identify you and we do not attempt to.

The Landing goes to members by email. Our email provider may use a tracking pixel to tell us how many people opened an issue, in aggregate. Your email address sits in our member list and nowhere else.

When a story includes a Facebook post, an Instagram photo, or a video player, that content is delivered by the company that hosts it and can set its own cookies once it loads. Those cookies are governed by that company’s policies, not by ours. We have no ability to read them and no ability to switch them off from our end.

There is no programmatic advertising on this site, so there are no auction or ad-exchange cookies, no retargeting pixels placed for advertisers, and no data broker tags. Every advertisement here, and in the paper, was sold directly to a business by a person. We do not sell personal information to anybody, and we do not sell sensitive personal information under any circumstances.

The cookie banner records your choice the first time you visit. You can reopen it and change that choice at any time using the cookie settings control on this site. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, and your browser or an extension may send a global privacy signal, which we honor. Blocking necessary cookies may stop parts of the site from working, including logging in as a member.

If we add a tool that sets a new cookie, this section gets updated and the effective date at the top of this page changes with it.

Accessibility

A local news site is not worth much if part of the community cannot read it. We build this site to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.1, at Level AA, which is the standard most widely used in the United States, and we are working toward version 2.2 at the same level.

• Photographs carry alternative text describing what is in them.
• Text meets contrast requirements against its background, and the site can be enlarged without breaking.
• Everything that can be clicked can also be reached with a keyboard, with a visible indicator of where you are.
• Headings are structured in order so a screen reader can move through a story.
• Links say where they go rather than saying “click here.”
• Video carries captions.
• The current print issue is free to read online, so anyone who can’t read small print on newsprint can enlarge it or use a screen reader.

We would rather name these than claim they do not exist.

• Older photographs in the archive may be missing alternative text. We add it as we find it.
• Live broadcasts do not have real-time captions. Replays get captions afterward.
• Some embedded players and social media posts come from other companies and we do not control how accessible they are.
• Documents we receive from other organizations and post as PDFs are not always tagged properly. Ask and we will get you the contents another way.
• The online e-edition is a picture of the printed page. Every story in it also runs as a regular article on the site, which is the better way to read it with assistive technology.

Tell us. Say what page you were on, what you were trying to do, and what device or assistive technology you were using if you know. We will fix it if we can and tell you honestly if we cannot.

We will also read a story to you over the phone, send you a plain text version, or get you the information another way. There is no form to fill out and no reason you need to give.

Write to Reach the Newsroom, or to publisher@minnesotanicenews.com if you would rather it go straight to the publisher.

We review the site against this standard once a year and after any significant redesign.

Elsewhere

Formal notice

Legal notices, service of process, copyright complaints, and anything a lawyer sends on behalf of a client go to the publisher rather than to the newsroom, so that they reach somebody who can act on them.