Our Santa Monica Local Accountability Journalism

REPUBLISHING

Republish our work

Reporting here is licensed for republication. We would rather it were read than owned.

The licence

Articles are published under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-ND 4.0) unless an individual piece says otherwise. You may republish in full, in any medium, commercially or not, provided you credit Our Santa Monica and link to the original.

NoDerivatives means republish the text as it stands. You may not edit the piece to change its meaning, cut it into an extract that misrepresents it, or run it under a different framing. Ordinary editorial housekeeping is fine: adjusting to your house style for headings and punctuation, adding your own standfirst, and trimming for length with a clear note that the piece has been shortened.

What you must do

  • Credit Our Santa Monica at the top of the piece.
  • Include a canonical link back to the original article URL. This matters for search engines and it matters for readers who want to check the underlying records.
  • Keep any corrections block attached to the article.
  • Where a correction is issued after you republish, carry it too.

What you must not do

  • Do not sell the article as a standalone product.
  • Do not imply that Our Santa Monica endorses your publication, campaign or candidate.
  • Do not republish our charts detached from the article, or redraw them from the images. The source series are in Data & method — use those.
  • Do not use our name or wordmark as if you were us.

Photographs — read this part

Photographs are licensed separately from the text, and some of them carry obligations you inherit. Each photograph's own licence, creator and source are printed in its caption. That credit line is part of the article markup, so it travels automatically with the Copy HTML output — do not strip it.

Several photographs are licensed CC BY-SA (ShareAlike). Running one unmodified alongside our text is a collection, not an adaptation, so it does not place your whole page under ShareAlike. But if you modify such a photograph — crop it, recolour it, composite it — your modified version must itself be released under the same ShareAlike licence. Straight scaling for delivery is not a modification. If you would rather not deal with this, drop the photographs; the text stands without them.

Charts and diagrams produced by Our Santa Monica are covered by the article licence and need no separate handling.

The easy way

Every published article carries a Copy HTML button. It gives you clean, self-contained markup — the article, an attribution line and the canonical link, with no site navigation, no stylesheet dependencies and no scripts. It is generated from our source text rather than copied out of the page, so it will paste into a CMS without dragging markup with it.

Questions

Anything not covered here — translation, audio adaptation, print syndication, an unusual format — write to oursantamonica@gmail.com and ask. The answer is usually yes.

A community-led record of how this city is governed.

Our Santa Monica is a community-led project, researched and published by residents. It is entirely self-funded. We do not solicit donations, memberships, subscriptions or support of any kind — none is asked for or implied. If you have documents, records or recollections, we would like to hear from you.