Submissions Guide

AlHudood accepts all manner of pitches and submissions from external contributors, Russian bots, intelligence agents, and Arab presidents. However, despite what our parents, friends and acquaintances say, we do have standards.

The following guidelines will ensure that your submissions are assessed in a timely manner without undue hardship for our overworked and over-caffeinated staff, who in addition to editorial responsibilities have to cater to the numerous whims of our overlord and supreme guide and his extended family.

• Our audience is primarily from the Middle East and Arab diaspora communities, as well as spies and “experts” with an interest in the region. We therefore see ourselves as the center of the world. Pitches and submissions should ideally have a Middle Eastern connection. While we would love to cover the eagle hunters of Mongolia or UFO sightings in America, we must focus our meager resources on crises closer to home.
• Pitches should generally be a couple of paragraphs long, and explain the thesis of the story and why it is important/relevant, while submissions should not be longer than 500 words, anything longer will be incompatible with our short attention spans (unless you have a very strong reason for it to be longer).
• The current formats we publish are news articles and feature stories, but we are open to pitch ideas that use other content styles, such as listicles, caricatures, interviews, and others.
• If you send us a submission, please paste it into the body of the email instead of sending an attachment. We’d rather make it a little bit harder for malicious actors to hack us.
• All our articles are published anonymously or pseudonymously. This is to protect ourselves and you from the trigger-happy fingers of our leaders and intelligence heroes.
• We do pay for submissions, and we appreciate good satire, but our resources are limited because, despite popular opinion, we are not funded by Qatar or the Freemasons. We are currently considering various financial models, which do not include acquisition by state media agencies. Do not send us ideas for get rich quick schemes, unless they work.

We know it can be hard to put yourself out there. We know, because 80% of our jokes in editorial meetings are met with uncomfortable silences. But if you have a good idea or a promising submission, we’re happy to work with you to make it better.