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Readers & Writers

It is our raison d'être; a new online journalism site offering Canadian readers, and those beyond the borders of Canada, access to independent, freelance, feature journalism which is professionally written, professionally edited and offered for purchase on a story-by-story basis for 40 cents per article.

These are the salient aspects of beststory.ca:

  • We don’t accept or allow advertising, which we believe interferes with an enjoyable online reading experience. The sole source of revenue is the sale of individual stories to individual readers.
  • BestStory.ca has no affiliations to government, political parties, big business, unions or religious organizations. We are self-financed.
  • Journalists decide if and when they wish to write on any subject of their choice. No articles are assigned by beststory.ca and no pressure from outside sources will influence story selection, which is in the hands of independent, freelance writers.
  • Every story is edited by Warren Perley, a Montreal-based career journalist who has worked at major media companies as both a reporter and editor.
  • Stories which appear on beststory.ca must be unique to our site, meaning they have never been published elsewhere.
  • All our stories are long-form journalism with a length anywhere from 1,500 words to 15,000+ words, in addition to photos and graphics. The teasers list the word counts and the number of photos in each story.
  • Short teasers are provided free on the website to give readers a taste of each story and to help them decide whether they wish to purchase the entire story for 40 points, which equals 40 cents.
  • There are several ways for readers to access the teasers, as explained in Become a Reader.
  • In the coming years, as we add more stories to the site, we’ll likely install a search engine, but at the beginning we feel that readers will enjoy browsing a manageable number of teasers.
  • We shall post stories on virtually any subject as long as we feel that they are well written and will appeal to Canadian readers, and, perhaps, to readers in other countries who appreciate original, long-form journalism on alternate subjects which are not found in the daily press.
  • As we receive more story offerings, we shall expand the category of subjects on our website to accommodate those articles.
  • Also, as stories are ready for posting, we shall publish the profiles of the writers involved. At any given time, there are numerous journalists working on various stories for our site. In the same vein that category listings are added only after we have a story on those subjects ready to post, journalists’ profiles are listed only when their first story goes online.
  • We don’t allow videos on our site, which is reserved strictly for print journalism in digital format.
  • Each journalist earns 25 percent royalties based on the sale of her/his individual stories for 40 cents each, while maintaining copyright and moral rights.
  • Contributors, using their Username and Password, can track their story sales by year, month, day and hour, as well as by country anywhere in the world. In Canada and the U.S., geographic tracking of story sales drills down to the level of province, state and territory.
  • Royalties are paid monthly via PayPal.
  • There is no publishing schedule so we don’t offer subscriptions. As they are posted, individual stories are made available for sale for a modest amount of 40 cents each, which translates into 40 points.
  • There is often a lead time of weeks or months between when a feature story is submitted and the time it is posted. This is due to back-and-forth discussions between Editor Warren Perley and the contributors concerning possible structural changes and text modifications, if needed, to make a story better. This rigorous editing process, which sometimes involves rewrites requested of the journalists, is a key ingredient to our ensuring high editorial standards. If a story does not make the grade in Warren’s opinion, it does not run on our site.
  • Quality, not quantity, is our mantra. We have no control over how many or when stories are submitted to us by contributors. That depends entirely on our freelance writers. What we can influence is the quality of the stories which end up on our site. Inevitably, that means that a certain number of articles won’t make the cut – unless the journalists in question are able to modify them to meet our standards. Our pledge to readers is that we will work closely with our writers to help them make their stories the best they can be. It’s a return to high-quality, editorial print values, but this time through an exclusively digital format.
  • As part of this high-quality presentation, we emphasize striking photos and clean layout to complement the good writing and compelling editorial content.