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Photo and Video Contributor License

Last updated: October 28, 2026 (Version 2026-10-28.2)

1. What this covers#

This license applies when you send a photo or video for a story on a newsroom that runs on the Communities News platform, such as Alaska News at alaskanews.com. You agree to it by ticking the box in the upload form. It works alongside our general Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Where they differ about a picture you send for a story, this license applies.

The photo or video stays yours. This license is nonexclusive: you are free to share it, sell it or license it to anyone else, before or after you send it to us.

3. What you let us do#

You give Communities News, Inc. and the newsrooms it operates a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual and irrevocable license to use your photo or video in our journalism. That means we may:

  • Publish it in stories, including as the cover, on our websites and apps
  • Use it in newsletters, audio and video versions of a story, and social media posts about the story
  • Use it to promote our journalism, such as a post or video that leads readers to the story
  • Keep it in our archive, with the stories it appeared in
  • Crop, resize, compress, re-encode and caption it, and choose a still frame from a video, without changing what it shows

"Royalty-free" means we pay nothing beyond what our published rates say. "Perpetual and irrevocable" means a story that used your picture can stay published as it was.

4. What we do not do#

  • We do not sell or license your photo or video to other outlets or companies.
  • We do not license it to anyone for training AI models.
  • We do not alter it to change what it shows.

We may pass it on only as publishing requires: to the services that host and deliver our content, and to the social platforms where we post it, under those platforms' own terms for posts.

5. Credit#

We credit you wherever the format allows a credit, using the name you give or the name on your account. Some formats have no room for a credit, such as a small thumbnail; there we credit you where the full picture appears.

6. Automated tools#

We use automated tools, including AI, to describe your picture, check it for safety and duplicates, and read when and where it was taken from the file. That analysis is part of reviewing it. The copy we publish carries none of the details embedded in your file, such as its location.

7. Your promises to us#

When you send a photo or video, you promise that:

  • You took it yourself, or you hold the rights to give this license
  • Anyone who can be recognised in it agreed to be photographed or filmed, where the law requires it
  • It does not break anyone else's rights or the law

If those promises turn out to be untrue, we may remove the picture and withhold or void any payment for it.

8. Payment#

We pay for a photo or video only when an editor approves it and a published story uses it, at the rates shown when you send it. Pictures of emergencies are welcome but unpaid. Payment works as described on the upload form and in "How pay works" on each story.

9. Asking us to take it down#

You can ask us to stop using your picture by contacting us. We will stop using it in new stories and posts. Stories and posts that already used it may stay as they are, because this license is irrevocable, but we will consider each request.

10. Changes to this license#

If we change this license, the new version applies only to pictures you send after the change. Each picture keeps the version you agreed to when you sent it.

11. Contact#

Questions about this license go to communities.news/contact or [email protected].