EDITORIAL STANDARDS

Write for the European Intelligence Review

Submission guidelines for contributors: What we publish, what we don’t, and how to give your piece the best chance of being read to the end.

The European Intelligence Review (EIR) is a practitioner-facing publication for professionals working across intelligence, security, policy, and risk in European contexts. We publish the conversation that the European intelligence community needs to have with itself — about analytical methodology, professional ethics, the strategic environment, and the institutional questions that shape how this work gets done.

We are open to contributions from serving and former practitioners, academic researchers, policy professionals, and others bringing serious professional engagement to the subject. We are not open to contributions that treat intelligence as a thriller genre, fictional content, a vehicle for partisan commentary, or a platform for self-promotion.

This post sets out what we publish, how to pitch, and how to format your piece so it lands well on Medium’s content cards — which is where most readers will first encounter it.

What we publish

The EIR covers six broad areas:

• Analytical methodology — how analysts work, where the discipline’s epistemic standards sit, and how methodology should evolve
• European security developments — strategic assessment of threats, actors, and the environment in which European services operate
• Economic and open-source intelligence — the disciplines that have moved from periphery to core
• Counterintelligence and influence operations — the contest space, including hybrid threat assessment
• Professional ethics and oversight — the obligations of practitioners and the frameworks they work within
• The European intelligence profession itself — standards, credentialing, training, the institutional questions

We publish analysis, argument, methodology pieces, reviews, and case-grounded essays. We do not publish breaking news, opinion pieces untethered from analysis, or material that would compromise sources, methods, or operational matters.

What “practitioner-grade” means

We hold a single editorial standard: would a serving intelligence professional of any category read this to the end, share it with a colleague, and cite it? That bar is high, and it is the right bar.

Practitioner-grade writing is:

• Argued, not surveyed. A piece should carry a thesis. Titles should announce the argument, not merely the topic. “Russia’s Hybrid Toolkit in the Baltics” is a topic. “Why the Baltic Hybrid Response Has Outpaced Brussels — and What That Costs” is an argument.
• Specific and grounded. Claims tied to evidence, sources, and named cases. Vague gestures at “experts say” or “many observers believe” do not survive editing.
• Honest about uncertainty. Confidence levels expressed with discipline. Speculation labelled as such. The reader trusts you more for it, not less.
• Written for peers, not for a general audience. You can assume readers know what INTCEN is, what the intelligence cycle is, what HUMINT and SIGINT mean. Pitch to the practitioner, not to the bystander.
• Editorially serious. Prose that respects the reader’s time. No throat-clearing, no padding, no “in this article I will argue.”

What we won’t publish

• Pieces that read as marketing for a vendor, consultancy, or service offering
• Anything that purports to disclose or speculatively reconstruct classified material
• Partisan political commentary dressed as analysis
• Generative-AI slop. We can tell, and so can readers. Use AI for research and editing absolutely; do not use it as the writer
• Content that names individual serving officers, reveals tradecraft, or otherwise breaches the OPSEC norms practitioners would expect
• Pieces longer than they need to be. Most EIR articles run 1,000–1,800 words. Length is not always a virtue

How to pitch

Before drafting a full piece, send a short pitch to info@eipio.eu with:

1. A working title — preferably a thesis title, not a topic title
2. A two- to three-sentence argument — what you are claiming, and why it matters
3. Your evidentiary basis — what you’re drawing on (case material, methodology, primary sources, professional experience)
4. Approximate word count
5. A short bio — your professional background and any affiliation we should disclose

We respond to pitches within ten working days. If a pitch fits the publication, we’ll commission and agree a deadline. If it doesn’t, we’ll tell you plainly and, where helpful, suggest where it might land better.

Unsolicited finished drafts are accepted but make our job harder and yours less likely to result in publication. Pitching first is faster for everyone.

NB: Our receipt of a submission does not equal publication; Editors decide.

Confirmed — your instinct was right. Medium has two tiers: writers can submit if they follow the publication (provided you have it set as “open to all”), or they can submit as approved writers (whom you’ve added manually, no submission limit). The “follow first” requirement is genuine — it’s the mechanism by which the EIR appears as a submission destination in their drop-down.

Here’s the paragraph — designed to drop in under the existing “How to pitch” section, or just before “Editorial process”:

Two routes to publication

There are two ways your piece can appear in the EIR, depending on whether you have a Medium account.

If you DO NOT have a Medium account, you may email your draft to info@eipio.eu as a Word file or Google Doc. We will edit it and, if major changes have been needed, will send you back the edited copy for your perusal. Once finalised, one of the EIR editors will post it on Medium under their byline — Medium requires every article to have a Medium-account holder as the technical author. A limitation we cannot avoid.

In that case, we will ALWAYS name you clearly at the top of the article (“By [Author Name]”), with a short author bio at the foot of the piece. The byline credit, the substantive authorship, and the rights remain yours; only the Medium account-holder line differs.

If you do NOT have a Medium account, the content card and byline appears like this on a mobile device.

If you DO have a Medium account, you write the piece in your own account as a draft and submit it to the EIR for review. To do this, you’ll first need to follow the EIR on Medium (medium.com/eipio-intelligence-review) — Medium only shows any publication as a submission destination once you’re a follower. Once that’s done, open your draft, click the three-dot menu in the top right, select “Submit to publication,” choose the European Intelligence Review, and send it for review. We’ll edit collaboratively from there. On publication, the piece appears under your own byline, on your own profile, and in the EIR’s feed — the standard Medium model.

For most contributors with a Medium account - and for us — the second route is preferable: you keep the byline natively, the piece sits in your own portfolio, and you build readership for your own profile alongside ours. But the email route is genuinely equivalent in editorial terms, and we use it for serving practitioners, academics, and others who don’t maintain a Medium presence.

Formatting your piece on Medium

Like all social media, Medium displays your article on ‘content cards’ across its platform — homepage, topic pages, profile pages, search, and email digests. The card is what determines whether a reader clicks through. Get the card right and your work gets read; get it wrong and it sinks. We take content card format seriously, as should you if you want to be read.

Required Kicker — Title — Subtitle order

A well-built EIR article uses five layered elements, in this order:

1. Kicker

A Kicker is optional, but highly regarded, and it does help a little with SEO (being found on the internet). It’s a short label above the title (see image above). One to four words. Use it to signal the article’s category — for example: ANALYSIS, METHODOLOGY, CASE STUDY, EUROPEAN SECURITY, REVIEW, COMMENTARY.

To set a kicker on Medium: place your cursor before the first character of your title, press Enter to create a line above it, type the kicker text, highlight it, and click the small T in the formatting toolbar. The kicker will format as small caps above the title.

2. Title

Your strongest line. The argument, compressed.

• Aim for no more than 60 characters
• Carry a thesis where possible — a claim, a tension, a question worth answering
• Avoid clickbait, but do not be coy. The reader should know what they’re getting and, hopefully, be made curious by the right title
• Format using the large T in the toolbar

3. Subtitle

The line below the title. Where the kicker labels and the title argues, the subtitle does the work of earning the click — it tells the reader what they will gain from reading.

• One sentence, 140–160 characters
• Specific, not promotional
• Set it by adding a line below the title and clicking the small T in the toolbar
• Then go to the three-dot menu and select “Change display title/subtitle” to confirm the metadata matches what shows in the article

A note on subtitle SEO

The subtitle does double duty. Inside Medium, it earns the click on the content card. Outside Medium, it becomes the meta description that Google displays beneath your article in search results, and the preview text that appears when readers share the link on LinkedIn, X, or in email. Treat it as the single most important sentence you write after the title itself.

A few simple rules:

• Length: 140–160 characters. Google truncates meta descriptions beyond roughly 160 characters, and LinkedIn previews cut off earlier still. Anything shorter than 100 characters wastes space; anything longer gets clipped mid-thought.
• Keywords matter, but naturally, not padded. Include the one or two terms a practitioner would actually search for — INTCEN reform, European hybrid threat, intelligence methodology, open-source intelligence in Europe. Place them early in the sentence where possible. Keyword stuffing is obvious and counterproductive; semantic relevance to the article is what search engines now weight.
• Front-load the substance. The first 60–70 characters carry the heaviest SEO weight and are most likely to survive truncation on smaller previews. We notice the first 8 or so words survive truncation. Lead with what the piece argues, not with a throat-clearing phrase like “This article examines…”
• Write for a human first. Google rewrites the meta description 60–70% of the time when it judges yours unhelpful. The best defence is a subtitle that genuinely tells a reader what they’ll learn — clear, specific, and intent-matched. If a serving analyst would read it and think yes, I want to know that, you’ve written it well.
• Avoid duplicating the title. The title and subtitle do different jobs. Title = the argument. Subtitle = what the reader gains by reading it. If the subtitle just rephrases the title, you’ve burned the most valuable real estate on your content card.

A worked example:

Title: Why the Baltic Hybrid Response Has Outpaced Brussels — and What That Costs Subtitle: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania built a working hybrid threat doctrine while the EU debated definitions. The capability gap is now a strategic liability.

The title carries the thesis and triggers curiosity. The subtitle names the actors, signals the keywords (hybrid threat doctrine, EU, capability gap), and tells the reader what they will gain. It’s 156 characters. It will survive Google’s truncation, fit a LinkedIn share preview, and earn the click on Medium’s content card.

4. Feature image

The image that appears on the content card. It is the largest visual element and does as much as the title to determine click-through.

• Place it as the first image in the body of your article, immediately after the subtitle and before any text
• It must be landscape (any other shape will get automatically cut off). Minimum 1500 pixels wide, ideally 1500×1000 or larger
• Use a still photograph, archival image, or document where possible — not stock illustration, not generic AI-generated imagery, and not anything that would not pass an editorial test in a serious newspaper
• Always include a caption and a source attribution. If you don’t have rights to an image, don’t use it. The EIR will reject pieces with uncredited or improperly licensed imagery. If the image is made with AI, which is perfectly fine, it must simply say “Generated with AI”
• Do not put logos, watermarks, or text overlays on the feature image

If you don’t have an image, tell the editor in your draft. We’d rather supply one than see a piece run with something poor or no image at all. Both of those outcomes are social media disaster.

5. Body

The article itself.

• If you are not the author of the work, but are submitting on someone else’s behalf, the first text in the body should be an italicised note as to the authorship (see sample image above)
• Lead with your thesis in the first paragraph. Not in the third, not after a scene-setting anecdote. The first paragraph
• Use subheadings to structure longer pieces. Medium renders H2 well and Google wants to see at least 2 x H2s; use it
• Pull-quotes are powerful when used sparingly — once or twice in a long piece, never as decoration
• Embed images inside the body where they earn their place; always caption and source them. Always prefer landscape unless it somehow deserves a longer space, i.e. an infographic
• Close with a clear final paragraph. No “in conclusion.” Land the argument and stop

House style

• Spelling: British English. Organisation, not organization. Defence, not defense
• Voice: Authoritative but not arch. Direct but not blunt. We are writing for serious people; we don’t perform seriousness
• Citations: We prefer you hyperlink primary sources inline. This is the Medium and EIR standard. For academic or longer-form references, you can use a brief APA 7 format references section at the foot of the piece
• Acronyms: Spell out on first use unless universally known to practitioners (we don’t expand HUMINT, SIGINT, OSINT, OPSEC, or NATO; we do expand INTCEN, BICES, CSDP on first use)
• Numbers and confidence: When expressing analytic confidence, use language consistent with established estimative standards (high / moderate / low confidence; likely / unlikely / highly likely). Don’t invent your own scale

Editorial process

Once a piece is commissioned:

1. You submit a draft by the agreed deadline as a Google Doc or Word file
2. We edit. Expect substantive feedback — line edits, structural suggestions, queries on evidence and argument. The standard is high and the editing reflects that
3. You revise. One round of revision is normal; two if needed
4. We agree the final version, set kicker/title/subtitle/image on Medium, and schedule
5. We promote the piece across EIPIO’s channels — LinkedIn, the newsletter, RSS — on publication
6. Submission does not at all guarantee publication. EIPIO reserves the right to reject any submission.

Compensation and rights

The EIR is a practitioner publication, not a paying market. We do not currently pay for contributions. We do offer:

• A serious editorial process and a credible byline
• Promotion through EIPIO’s channels to a professional readership
• The chance to shape the conversation in a community that needs voices in it

You retain copyright in your work. We publish under a non-exclusive licence: you can republish elsewhere with a courtesy line acknowledging first publication in the EIR.

Anonymity and pseudonyms

Serving practitioners are sometimes constrained from publishing under their own name. We will consider pseudonymous publication on a case-by-case basis where there is a legitimate professional reason. Speak to the Editor early; this is a conversation, not a checkbox.

We do not publish anonymous pieces. There must be an identified author known to the Editor, even where a pseudonym is used publicly.

To pitch: To the Editors via info@eipio.eu

To follow the EIR: medium.com/eipio-intelligence-review

To learn more about EIPIO: eipio.eu

A note for the EIR community: these standards exist because the European intelligence profession needs a publication it can take seriously. That requires demanding work from contributors and demanding work from editors. We ask both because the readership deserves both.