Victory Press Policies

first published: 8-22-2017
last updated: 11-8-2021

Ethical Coverage Policies

  • The Victory Press is committed to creating an inclusive environment and explicitly opposes racism, transphobia, homophobia, classism, islamophobia, anti-semitism, misogyny, sexism, and other types of bigotry. As a result, we will exclude athletes from our regular coverage who have expressed those views. Any athlete or other subject who has expressed bigotry or violent/abusive behavior will be covered in the context of that behavior. [1]

  • We have made an effort to use gender-neutral terms for words that have been unnecessarily gendered (ex. defender instead of defenseman) as part of our official style guide. For more information, please contact our editorial staff.

  • We are committed to printing the correct pronouns for every subject, and welcome the use of any pronoun set in our coverage. [2]

  • We frequently refer to style guides published by advocacy organizations to understand appropriate reporting and terminology when discussing marginalized groups. We understand that terminology for a marginalized group should be determined by that group.

  • We will continue to include coverage of the problematic aspects of sport alongside more general discussions of sport. Pieces that focus on social justice and equality will always be given editorial priority.

  • We want errors in coverage and lapses in these policies to be reported to us or publicly called out so that we can correct them and not repeat the same mistakes. [3]

Business and Compensation Policies

  • We are entirely reader-supported. We will not use advertisements or pursue venture capital funding in order to maintain our coverage.

  • We do not collect or maintain user data in a traditional sense. We do use Google Analytics to check our page views and referrals, but this data does not inform what we publish or how we develop content. Personal information that we may collect from subscribers is only used to contact them to provide subscriber rewards.

  • No written work appears on Victory Press without payment of some kind being provided for the work which is negotiated between editorial staff and the author. Writers may choose to have their payment donated to a charity or mutual aid rather than receive the payment directly themselves.

  • Images and photographs that appear with stories may have a variety of sources and the source is typically listed at the top or bottom of an article. All graphic work that appears (a) was included under the assumption of fair use, (b) was licensed with a Creative Commons license that permits modification and commercial use, (c) was paid for on a freelance basis, OR (d) was donated. Sometimes authors provide their own images for a story and these may not always have a separate credit byline.

This is a living document; we hope to refine and expand on these policies over time. Please feel free to contact us with suggestions.


Footnotes

[1] "Regular coverage" refers to game stories and what would be considered traditional sports reporting. For example, if a player who has publicly expressed a racist view or attitude won a major sports award, we would not report on that. However, we would still publish an article about how that person expressed a racist view. We may state a fact of an event in a game, but we would not editorialize or praise that person and our goal is to minimize "regular coverage" of athletes and other individuals who have expressed bigotry. Stories published prior to August 2017 were not written under the clear guidance of this policy.

[2] Yes, we really mean any pronoun set.

[3] Mentioning us @thevictorypress on Twitter is the fastest way to get in touch or bring our attention to something. You can also write to us at info@victorypress.org