Send in your news
We are always happy to consider contributions from the industry relevant to our core market, i.e. deep-sea merchant ships, with particular emphasis on their machinery, equipment and building/repair.
Our typical reader is a person holding a senior technical position in a ship owning, operating or management company. The Motorship deals primarily with technical aspects of ocean-going merchant ships and their equipment (particularly their machinery). Items about other subjects – e.g. ship operational issues, naval vessels, ports, yachts etc may be considered but are less likely to be used. Articles such as case studies, or which demonstrate quantifiable benefits to our target readers from using a product or service, are likely to meet our requirements. See our features schedule for a list of topics planned for our printed publication.
If articles are not of interest to The Motorship, we may forward them to our sister publications, e.g. Maritime Journal (workboats, marine civils etc), Port Strategy (ports and terminals) or Boating Business (recreational marine).
Copy by e-mail is preferred to editor@motorship.com
Notes for contributors
1. Suitability
If an article holds potential interest for our audience we will consider it for use. Company profiles, advertorial, or articles that would double as sales literature or catalogue descriptions do not. We reserve the right to edit all contributions to be consistent with house style, or to fit available space. A copy of the current style sheet is available on request. Please contact the Editor for advice.
2. Requirements
Please send in at least 200 words for News items. Feature-length articles should ideally be one page in length – about 700 words. Normally a maximum of about 1500 words per article is applied, unless otherwise agreed in advance.
Each individual illustration and the text for each individual article should be supplied as individual files.
Text should ideally be in a .txt file format, or one that is readable by MS Word, preferably saved in ‘compatibility mode’ in order to be universally readable.
Illustrations suitable for magazine-quality printing should be supplied, at least one illustration per 700 words.
- Please adjust your digital camera to the highest quality setting. This will maximize both the quality of the image, as well as the range of sizes at which we will be able to use it.
- The photo image file type required for our website is: Three colour (RGB) jpeg or JPG. i.e. with a '.jpg' filename.
- To ensure a digital image is suitable for publication online and also in print, our guideline for minimum image width is 1000 pixels approximately. This assumes the resolution looks sharp (not blurred!). For example: 942 pixels wide x 673 pixels high is suitable, whereas 448 x 299 pixels is too small.
- As a guide, the minimum file size for a three colour jpg of suitable resolution and dimensions would be 100kb. The maximum file size we can upload is 2MB.
- If a selection of images is available please send them all so that we can choose the most suitable for use online and in print.
- Please supply at least one landscape orientation images that can be cropped to 5x7 aspect ratio. i.e. 5 (high) by 7 (wide) is the image aspect ration we use online, and in our e-newsletters.
- All illustrations must have captions supplied, with each caption clearly referenced to the graphic to which it refers.
3. Copyright
Mercator Media does not support unauthorised use of copyright material. All text and illustrations are accepted for reproduction on the understanding that they are free from copyright restrictions. If a credit is required for any photograph, this should be clearly indicated in the accompanying caption. Your image will only be used by Mercator Media in association with the article it was submitted with. To discourage unauthorised copying by third parties, you will see a copyright statement published with the images alongside articles: ‘Unless otherwise stated, all images copyright © Mercator Media. This does not exclude the owner's assertion of copyright over the material.’ We frequently get asked by companies if they can re-use images from our web site; when that happens we always refer them to whoever sent us the image in the first place. For further information, see Use of Website - Terms and Conditions
4. Payment
Payment is not normally made for items submitted on behalf of a company or organisation – if payment for any other item is required, this must be agreed in advance and should be supported by an invoice, which will be submitted for processing on publication of the item.
