AssociatedContent.com has seen the number of news articles submitted by their content partners over recent months which is a positive development. They have done several things to make it profitable to the writers on the site to submit news articles resulting in this increase. News articles now pay a flat rate of $5 per article, and they are reviewed faster than most other articles on the website when they are submitted by content partners. Writing the news articles though may not be for everyone, and content partners should realize the risks involved with writing news articles up front. By realizing their risks up front they frustration level will be lower for the writers.
The first item to consider is time. News articles obviously need to be timely. An article about something that happened even twenty four hours ago might be obsolete in the news world. When considering timeliness, a content partner should also consider the shelf life of a news article. This means what is the likely length of time in the future that people will be interested in reading your article? If it's something that is extremely time sensitive it's shelf life may be very short as well. If an article has too short of a shelf life, AssociatedContent.com's staff may decide it is not beneficial to publish. Another reason articles may not be considered worth publishing is if they have too limited an audience. Remember AssociatedContent.com wants material that will have a large reading audience, if you are just doing an article for your town, the audience is rather limited. While an article might be declined to be published for payment for one of these reasons, remember you can still submit it for publication but if you offer it without requesting payment.
A couple other reasons articles may be declined are if the article has already been published on the website already by another writer, or if you fail to use citations at the bottom of your article to let the staff members reviewing your article know the sources that you used in your research. The final item to watch out for and will definitely result in the article being rejected is plagiarism. Plagiarism is not accepted for any category of articles at AssociatedContent.com. This makes sense because you should never publish work by someone else claiming it as your own.
So, am I telling you not to write news articles at AssociatedContent.com? No, I'm not saying that at all. As a matter of fact I myself enjoy writing news articles for AssociatedContent.com. You do need to realize though that with writing news articles comes a risk. There is a chance that you may end up putting time into writing your article and in the end not get paid for it if it falls into any of the categories discussed in this article. Sometimes it's hard to know if an article has already been written on your subject. You can use the search function on the website, but be aware that there may be other articles that aren't published but are in the queue about your same subject. My best advice for this is that if you think it's a really hot topic and you are finding out about it hours after others have heard, chances are there are articles submitted in the queue and you must realize there is a fair chance your article will be rejected for payment purposes. As long as you go into writing news articles at AssociatedContent.com with your eyes open though, it can be a very rewarding activity.

