Write for Field Notes
The reading around the record, by someone who did the reading.
Most notes here are written by the person who makes Witness. Some should not be. If you have spent time with a species, a survey, a court file, a protected area, or an idea about how much of the planet should be left to everything else, this is the brief.
What a note is
- One species and one verifiable thing about it, or one question a person actually types into a search box, or one term explained properly, or one strategy examined. Not a survey of a topic.
- Between 350 and 950 words. The first paragraph stands on its own: a reader who stops there has the answer.
- Every checkable claim, meaning a year, a count, a percentage, a measurement, or a formal status category, carries at least two independent sources. Sources are URLs a reader can open.
- Where the species has a record in the archive, the note links to it and does not retell it.
- It fits one section: Species, Numbers, Half the Earth, Policy, Dispatches, Attention. Argument is welcome in all of them, as long as the argument is sourced the way a count is.
What will not be published
- Lists. No rankings, no ten cutest anything.
- Daily or hourly extinction figures. The numbers in circulation trace back to an estimate nobody can source cleanly.
- Exact nests, dens, roosts, or coordinates, even when a source prints them. Ranges stay generalised.
- Any claim that using Witness, sharing a note, or reading one produces a conservation outcome. It does not, and the site says so.
- Pieces whose real purpose is a donation link or a product. A citation is not an endorsement, and a note is not an advertisement.
Every note, guest or house, passes the same gate before it goes live: prohibited phrases, unsupported claims, sensitive locations, dead links. The gate is the editor. The standard behind it is on the atlas under Method.
The terms
- Your name on the note, and one link of your choosing under it. The words stay yours to publish elsewhere afterwards.
- Edits are for the gate and for length, not for voice. You see the final text before it ships.
- There is no payment for a guest note at present. That is stated here so nobody has to ask.
- A published note appears on this site, in the RSS feed, and in the email that rounds up new notes.
How to pitch
Send two sentences and the sources you would use to albertovillalpando@gmail.com with the subject line “Field note pitch”. A draft is welcome but not required. Every pitch is read by the person who makes Witness.