The Bay Journal News Service syndicates columns that offer new perspectives on the environmental issues that most affect the communities of the Mid-Atlantic. Bay Journal News Service columns are original invitations to consider challenging ideas. Sometimes those ideas spring from local knowledge and traditions, sometimes from the world of technology and science. In either case, they provide keen insight into the region's most pressing environmental problems.

While most Bay Journal News Service columns take a current issue as their subject, they are not driven by conflict and they tend not to paint the world in the antagonistic language common to public debate. Instead, each column explores, in an original voice and with a deep knowledge of the region, a new way of seeing, thinking about, and living in the diverse communities of the Mid-Atlantic.

Before submitting a column, please send a brief query with clips and publication history to editor@bayjournalnewsservice.com or by mail to Bay Journal News Service, 619 Oakwood Drive, Seven Valleys, PA 17360. Columns should be no more than 750 words. Submit accepted columns via email to editor@bayjournalnewsservice.com. Please include a thumbnail photo of the author in a jpg file, which many newspapers require. Provide a telephone number where you can be reached.

Payment for column is $500 upon publication. The Bay Journal News Service buys all rights. We will syndicate the column to an unlimited number of newspapers and post it on the Bay Journal and Bay Journal-related web sites, and allow it to be posted on the websites of newspapers publishing the column. The Bay Journal News Service may also release the column to other commercial and nonprofit publications and may reprint it in an anthology of the Bay Journal News Service writing on the Mid-Atlantic environment

For more information, please contact Michael Shultz, (410) 972-2470, or editor@bayjournalnewsservice.com

While Bay Journal News Service columns challenge conventional wisdom, they do adhere to some of the stylistic conventions of newspaper commentary. We generally follow AP Style. Most columns are strongly linked to the news. Nut graphs typically follow an anecdotal lead and make a clear connection to a current issue. Unless specifically commissioned for longer commentary pieces, columns run 750 to 800 words. Columns are distinguished in several ways, however.

Regional Focus

Bay Journal News Service columns are, first of all, about the places, people, and issues familiar to newspaper readers in the Mid-Atlantic. They address local and regional concerns, from fragmentation of forests in the Blue Ridge to the struggles between smart growth and sprawl. Bay Journal News Service columns do not need to deal specifically with issues related to the Chesapeake Bay. When columnists take on national affairs, they explore the issues that matter most to the people of the Mid-Atlantic. The nut graphs of columns, therefore, strongly connect the news to regional concerns. Supporting facts throughout columns often do the same.

Questions and Solutions

Equally important, Bay Journal News Service columns address regional issues by asking questions and offering information and solutions: What's at stake for our communities? What can science, regional history, and the arts tell us about a public issue? Are there reasonable alternatives to an entrenched debate? Rather than employing polemics and personal attacks, Bay Journal News Service columnists persuade readers with innovative ideas. They explore issues with instructive examples of the problems and solutions shaping the region.

Original Perspectives

Finally, the perspectives offered by contributors to Bay Journal News Service come not from the desks of national columnists, but from a wide variety of people with a deep interest in the communities of the region. Columnists' viewpoints, therefore, come from their personal experiences of the cities, farms, forests, mountains, and coastline of the region; from years of work as a scientist, economist, land manager, public official, architect, or journalist; and from a studious attention to the ways in which issues in the news affect the everyday lives of people in the Mid-Atlantic.