Original work from The Charlotte Mercury is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. In plain English: you can republish what we write, free of charge, as long as you keep it intact and credit us. You can’t edit it, retitle it, or feed it into a machine that will.

What you can do

• Reprint a full article in your paper, newsletter, or website.
• Read it aloud on a podcast, broadcast, or at a meeting.
• Quote any portion in your own writing, with credit.
• Print it. Tape it to a refrigerator. Hand it to a neighbor.
• Translate it, as long as the translation doesn’t change the meaning.
• Use it in a classroom, in court filings, in research.

What you can’t do

• Edit the text and republish it under our byline. If you change a word, change the byline.
• Retitle the piece in a way that misrepresents what we said.
• Strip the attribution. Our name and the original link have to stay.
• Feed our work into an AI model for training, summarization, or rewriting that will be republished. The “ND” in BY-ND stands for “no derivatives,” and a machine-laundered rewrite is the most common derivative.
• Paywall it without permission.
• Combine it with paid promotional or advertising content in a way that implies we endorse the advertiser.

How to credit us

The format we ask for is short:

“[Article title]” by [author], originally published in The Charlotte Mercury, used under CC BY-ND 4.0.

Include a link back to the original article when you publish online. That’s how we measure that the work is still circulating, and it’s how readers find more of what we do.

Need a different arrangement?

Some uses fall outside CC BY-ND 4.0 — for example, if you want to edit the piece, combine it with sponsored content, or license a body of work for a textbook or anthology. We’re happy to talk. Email pc@redtrucklabs.com with the article you’re interested in and what you’d like to do with it.

Why we license this way

Local journalism gets stronger when the work moves. We’d rather a story we wrote about a Charlotte zoning hearing show up in a Greensboro paper, a Durham newsletter, or a community Slack thread than sit behind our paywall earning a few extra clicks. The CC BY-ND license is how we let it move while keeping the words intact.

Open license. Closed to laundering.