Submissions
FIRELINE PRESS is looking for contributors.
You don’t need to have been published before. You don’t need a masthead behind you or anyone to vouch for you.
We ask one thing: that every claim in your piece traces to a source a hostile reader can check.
That is the whole filter.
Fireline is not a business, at least not yet. Nobody here is paid, the editor included. What it offers is publication under a masthead that has a standard — your name on it, edited seriously, sourced so it holds up alongside other Fireline work.
If you are a researcher, an activist, or a writer with something worth reporting, and it’s Fireline material, we want it.
What we publish
Geopolitics, international law, and religious power structures. The sections are Faith and Power, Law and Accountability, and The Middle East.
We publish essays, not news. The test is not whether something happened but whether something true is going unsaid — under-reported, misframed, or documented in plain sight and never picked up.
Often that means taking a subject out of the frame it has been filed under. Shariah is treated as a religious question. It became a political one because politicians and the media around them made it so — so we wrote it politically, in “Shariah: What Politicians Get Wrong,” and grounded the politics in what the religion actually teaches. The evidence answers the argument being made in public, not the one a seminar would prefer.
We are not neutral. Fireline argues positions. But the argument is built on documents, and the standard is whether you could defend each sentence in front of a congressional committee.
The standard
Primary sources, not summaries. A court filing, not an article about a court filing. A government report, not a think tank’s characterisation of it. Where only secondary reporting exists, say so in the piece.
Both sides held to the same test. If you apply a standard to one party, you apply it to the other. This is not a call for false equivalence — apply the standard honestly and the evidence sometimes lands wholly on one side, in which case say so at full weight. What we won’t publish is a piece that applies the standard to one party and not the other, or that reaches its conclusion before the documents do.
Every load-bearing claim comes with its source. You do not need to know how to format endnotes — we handle that in editing. What you need to supply is the source itself, and enough of a locator that we can find the passage: the date, the paragraph, the case number, the page. A link to a document is fine. “See Reuters” is not, because it doesn’t tell us which article or which line.
If a claim arrives without a source, it comes out of the piece. Not because we doubt you — because we can’t check it, and the standard is that a hostile reader can.
Sources in other languages are welcome, and often they are the best evidence on these subjects. Send a translation of the passage you are relying on.
Uncertainty stated plainly. Where the evidence is contested or incomplete, write that. A piece that hedges nothing is a piece that will be taken apart.
What we’re looking for now
Open commissions. Where we know exactly what a piece needs, there’s a commission brief: the subject, the spine, the gaps in the existing coverage, and what will get a piece rejected. Read it before you pitch — it answers most of what this page can’t. Open now:
Somaliland — Israel’s operation in the Horn of Africa. [Read the commission brief.]
Subjects we want but haven’t briefed. Places and subjects worth more attention than they get: Sudan. The Sahel. Myanmar. India. International law, where the detail matters and most coverage skips it. No brief for these — pitch on what you would establish and from which documents.
And anything we haven’t listed. If you know a subject and can see it being reported wrong, that’s the pitch. We’d rather hear it than have you check whether it fits a category.
You don’t need to be from the place you write about. It helps. It isn’t the requirement.
How to pitch
Tell us what is being missed, and how you would prove it.
Three hundred words is enough. What is going unreported or misreported, why it matters, and the documents that establish it — with links, and a line on what each one shows. Tell us where the evidence runs out; a pitch that admits its limits is stronger than one that doesn’t.
Not a draft. Nobody should write eight thousand words on spec.
With your pitch, send your name and a short paragraph about yourself — a few lines, the kind of thing that would run under a published piece. Anything that places you — a title, a background, or just what you know and how you came to know it. This will be attached to the piece as your bio.
If we commission it, expect editing. Sourcing gets checked. Claims that don’t hold get cut or reworked. If something in your draft is wrong, we will show you the source rather than argue about it — and if we’re wrong, show us ours.
Pitches to: james@fireline.press
Terms
You keep copyright. Fireline takes exclusive first publication and the right to keep the piece in the archive. You are free to republish elsewhere after thirty days, with attribution to Fireline Press and a link to the original.
What you’re telling us when you submit. That the work is yours and original, that it hasn’t been published elsewhere, that you have the right to use any material you quote, and that you haven’t knowingly written anything false about a named person. We check sourcing in editing, but we are relying on you for this.
On AI. We are a forward-leaning publication and recognise that AI is the future. Using AI tools is no more wrong than using a violin to make good music.
So use them. Draft with them, structure with them, argue with them. Edit and review your work with them. If you know a subject but struggle to get it onto the page in the shape you can see in your head, that is what they are for. The thinking has to be yours; the sentences can be arrived at however you get there. Modern AI is the tool, you are the mind behind the tool.
Two things you cannot do. You cannot send us work you have not shaped and reviewed yourself — the direction, the argument and the judgement have to be yours, line by line, not a prompt and a paste. And you cannot publish a source you have not opened yourself. Models invent citations that look right and misread ones that are real. Every source in your piece must be one you have read and confirmed says what you say it says.
Tell us if AI was involved. It isn’t disqualifying, and it tells us where to check first.
Editorial control. Fireline decides what runs and in what form. We may decline a piece, or withdraw one, at any stage — including after commissioning. Being asked to write something is not a guarantee it will be published.
Corrections. We correct critical errors. If credible new sourcing emerges that changes what a piece establishes, we correct it and say so. Where a correction is substantive, the note is dated and stays with the piece.
If someone objects. We review the complaint against the sourcing. If the piece is wrong, we correct it. If it holds, it stands.
Anonymity. We don’t publish anonymous work without discussing it first. There are circumstances where a byline is a genuine risk, and we will consider them — but we need to know who you are even if our readers don’t. Be aware of the limit: we can withhold your name from readers, but we cannot promise to protect it against a court order.