News article submissions guide

Some helpful hints to maintain the quality of News article posts

Below are some guidelines for News post submissions, which are there to help us achieve consistent standards in the articles.

Reasons:

  • Quality control – we seek to deliver articles of a high standard
  • To avoid publishing inaccurate or fake stories
  • To develop trust from the readers
  • To treat the stories with the seriousness they deserve
  • To create high quality articles and a website people will return to

Instructions

  1. Headings:
    Important as they set the tone for how we wish our audience to read the piece. Keep them as short to convey main points as succinctly as possible, removing unnecessary words. Be aware that the heading automatically will become the story’s URL and is important for SEO, so needs to be correct. The URL can’t be easily changed after without losing all the view stats.
  2. Sub-Headings:
    These contain additional important points that can’t be fitted in main Heading. These can be a bit longer than the Heading.
  3. Article Image:
    Upload an image if you have one. Ideally it needs to be a composite image including a photo of the victim and the perpetrator together in one landscape letterbox shaped image. If you lack the image editing capability and our team can take care of this.
  4. Image caption (Optional):
    Keep these short and as succinct as possible. Long captions can break the design so restrict to around 110 characters.
  5. Article Content:
    1. The first paragraph should be a quick summary of the story. The first 300 characters appear in Social media feeds, so place important information in the summery.
    2. Convey the story in a succinct and to the point manner.
    3. Avoid repetition of points and words where possible.
    4. The News and Video posts are mainly designed to be factual as supposed to opinion pieces.
    5. Opinion and emotional responses to News Stories should be reserved for Blogs and Feature articles.
    6. Spell check your article and force yourself to read it several times before publishing. Ideally an editor will check it as more people join our content team.
    7. Please avoid using racial slurs that can be classed as ‘Hate Speech’ in certain countries.
  6. Race of protagonists:
    Attempt to find the backgrounds of those involved in the stories if available and present this information clearly. If not available an educated guess can be presented from the appearance or name of the protagonists. One of the functions of the website is to present this information hidden and suppressed in MSM.
  7. Use a Word Processor:
    Write the article on a Word Processor first so it can be checked easily.
  8. Article Links:
    Seek reliable sources for your article and include links to these in the Article Links field. Back end users: Add hyperlinks and select ‘Open link in a new tab’ so that the user stays on the page if they click a link. These should be in bullet point format.
  9. Summary:
    Summaries appear on the listing pages and are designed to indicate to the reader the main points of the story and encourage them to read the full article. Attempt to list the main points of the article with most important at the top and least at the bottom. Keep these points short and succinct. Back end users – use a bulleted list. For those submitting via the web form please create a new line for each point. The bullet points should not have full stops – as this is how articles have been formatted so for consistency no full stops are needed.
  10. Tags:
    Select relevant tags but restrict these to no more than 5 as can break the page layout.
  11. Search Tags:
    Select relevant search tags to help readers find your story. These are used on the Advanced Search Page and do not appear on the web page – so there are no restrictions on how many are selected.
  12. Source:
    Select this only if the article is a mirror version of one on another site.
  13. Year:
    Select a year for your story if possible as this makes searching easier. If the exact year of the story is not available choose the nearest year to when the story was reported as this makes searching for it easier.
  14. Location:
    Select the country where the story took place. If this is unknown select the continent option such as ‘Africa’ or ‘Europe’. This can be updated if the exact location of the story is later found.