Usually when we write a Crikey editorial, we’re thinking about our readers. Today we’re thinking of our writers.

Private Media, the company that owns Crikey, was delighted to launch a new arts and culture site this week. Daily Review is a significant investment in arts journalism — and it’s free. We’ve hired two gun arts journalists to get the site started. They’re part of a team of 27 paid journalists who work at Private Media (nine of them at Crikey). We’re absolutely stoked that we’re hiring more journalists at a time when the industry is struggling.

But there were some concerns raised this week about the payment of contributors to Daily Review, and we want to address them.

We highly value all our writers’ work, and we try to do the right thing in terms of paying people. We should have been clearer in telling our readers what our policy is on paying writers. So we’ve created a Crikey payment policy, which you can read here.

In terms of Daily Review, it’s a startup publication, and we’re currently talking to people about the conditions under which they contribute. We negotiate conditions with each individual writer and are looking at our budgets to see what we can do. Daily Review has a limited contributors’ budget at the moment, and that’s directed towards pieces we think are core to the site’s mission. We prioritise payment for commissioning stories from professional writers. We also accept contributions from writers who want to have their work published, even if there isn’t the budget to pay for their work at the time.

If we haven’t been open enough about payment and copy-sharing, we unreservedly apologise.

Private Media’s writers do a fantastic job, asking the tough questions to bring quality stories to our readers, day after day. We would be nothing without our writers, and of course Crikey’s brilliant cartoonist First Dog on the Moon. So here’s our heartfelt thanks to all our writers, bloggers and cartoonists.