The real meaning behind the words at the bottom of each Kansas Reflector story

Kansas Reflector stories and columns are free for all to use, which means they can spread far and wide. (Eric Thomas/Kansas Reflector)
These words are free.
Take them. Please.
You can use every one of these 1,400 words in your family newspaper, next to advertisements for home renovation companies and the used car dealership.
You can run this entire column on your news blog and construct an elaborate takedown of my grammar, word choice and politics.
You can build an internet application that gobbles up this story and its headline and automatically robo-publishes it 10 seconds after we do.
You have our permission. In fact, you have our encouragement.
Kansas Reflector's explicit invitation — posted at the end of every news article and commentary — encourages everyone to steal our work. Please and thank you.
The notice reads, 'Our stories may be republished online or in print under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. We ask that you edit only for style or to shorten, provide proper attribution and link to our website. AP and Getty images may not be republished. Please see our republishing guidelines for use of any other photos and graphics.'
The Reflector's parent organization, States Newsroom, spreads this generous policy across its network of publications, from the Nevada Current to the Maine Morning Star. Thousands of stories on dozens of websites — for free.
Because Kansas Reflector allows all publications — from Yahoo News to the Peabody Gazette-Bulletin — to reprint its reporting and commentary, these words reach an audience that is often 10 to 100 times larger than a single publication.
Sometimes Reflector writings get printed on honest-to-goodness paper. This is a particular hoot for me when my hometown metro newspaper, the Kansas City Star, prints one of my columns. When they do, I know my wife's eagle-eyed coworker will clip it out and send it along (Thanks, Dave).
Some folks, including me, believe that this republication policy is a central virtue, power and impact of these publications.
I have been writing for the Reflector since 2021 (141 columns and counting). Still, I have a bit of journalism vertigo when I explain this republication philosophy to others. The idea of giving away your intellectual work for free lacks a contemporary vocabulary. It's not monetizing. We aren't selling. No subscription required.
Because of the cognitive leap, I interviewed Sherman Smith, editor in chief of the Reflector and the person who approached me a few years ago in search of a new commentary writer. (I recruited myself.) If anyone understands the tensions and benefits of allowing other publications to republish the work of the Reflector staff, it's Smith.
'We believe in doing journalism as a public good and making this accessible as part of our public service model,' Smith said. 'We let everybody read us for free, and we let other publications republish us for free, because we want to get our work out to as broad of an audience as possible, and this allows us to do that.'
Smith's data, provided to him in Google News alerts and weekly email reports, shows that more people than ever read the Reflector, whether through republication or on the Reflector's website. February 2025, as a matter of fact, was the largest month for readership on the website, Smith said, besides the August 2023 readership spike from a particularly viral Kansas news story.
'What I see so often is this idea that news is dying, but the reality is we reach more people today than ever before,' Smith said.
A few decades ago, Smith continues, a brilliant story in a community newspaper might have been restricted to a local audience. Meanwhile, stories on the Reflector are both on the internet and without a paywall.
'Today, when we write that story, we reach a million people nationwide and even internationally,' Smit said. 'It ripples across the globe in a heartbeat. That's a very powerful thing.'
Of course, the benefits of a free product are easy to list for the consumer. Low-income readers can get their Kansas news for free. International readers who just want to read one story about Kansas don't need to subscribe for $15 per month just for the privilege of reading one article that they might — or might not — like.
Smith also said that the Reflector's growing readership forces some prominent people to agree to interviews. Kansas state representatives, for instance, know that their hometown newspaper is likely to run a free Reflector article — so they may feel pressure to be a source.
'Leveraging information,' Smith calls it. Of course, a complete report with relevant sources is another benefit for readers.
Many of my current and former University of Kansas journalism students have worked for the Reflector in one way or another. Smith sees the Reflector's republication policy as serving these young journalists in particular.
'Part of our public service mission here is trying to work with the next generation of journalists to elevate them,' Smith said. 'If you're a young college student, you're trying to establish a portfolio to take to an employer. You could write three stories for us and present it as three different publications, showing, 'My work has been in Hays and Manhattan and Dodge City and Hutchinson, and not just the Kansas Reflector.' '
Like the young journalists Smith mentioned, many other journalists are obsessed by the impact that their work has. Why write if no one is reading? Why podcast if no one is listening? Why publish a photo if no one is looking?
In that way, the grand bargain that the Reflector has made with the world — that its reporting and commentary are free — reimagines the typical transactional relationship between a journalist and their audience.
My first days in journalism were during the 1990s at a series of community newspapers. The way that I knew people were seeing my work (back then, photojournalism) seems Andy Griffith-era folksy today. I would watch people — at coffee shops, at sporting events and in the local muffler shop — reading the headlines, their chins turned up in a skeptical expression that furrowed their brows.
The feedback on our work in the 1990s? They slung those jabs at us in a way that seems antiquated today: As I lugged camera gear into a high school basketball game, moms and dads would walk up to me, telling me exactly what the newspaper got right or wrong yesterday. Some, but few, would write letters to the editor.
The publisher of a newspaper in the 1990s had a pretty exact sense of how many people their paper reached. Simply track subscription numbers. Then, ask the circulation folks downstairs about single-copy sales at grocery stores and newspaper racks.
Modern journalism, especially when paired with the Reflector's republication policy, upends this previous journalism world. It's unlikely that you are reading this column on a printed page. It's unlikely that you will run into me at your local hardware store. And my work — so tightly guarded by my first employers decades ago — is free for you here.
This limitless distribution of the Reflector's content also sends me Google-ing for my headlines to discover who ran them. The publications in the search results form a motley parade of websites.
One of these online searches inspired me to write about our republication policy. A few months ago, I wrote about how Donald Trump's make-up routine confused me.
Like many pieces by the Reflector, my column was republished by Yahoo News. At the bottom was the biggest response I have seen to anything I have done in journalism, whether photography, editing or writing. I assure you it's not my best writing.
Nevertheless, it found an audience. Yahoo recorded 2,200 comments in response to my column before it switched them off two days later. The first comment — 'More unreadable Trump hating fake news from the lib infested fake news media' — sums up the comment-section death match between MAGA and the left, between real people in the heartland and bots in a server farm.
An audience like this — even if it's not my dear neighbors — is part of what keeps me writing for the Reflector. I love knowing that you, dear reader, can critique my work without a subscription from just about anywhere on just about any website.
The bitter irony of writing this column about our republication policy: It's perhaps the least likely column to demand republication.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote: 'So it goes.'
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.

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