This is a community site, and we love it when so many of you sign up and become a part of the site by creating your own posts. It’s fantastic that we can get so many different voices that provide information and perspectives that us editors would otherwise miss.
But there are some simple rules. The biggest is how to reference content from other sources:
- Don’t cut and paste entire articles from somewhere else
- Do include a link to the original source
- Do include an excerpt, generally just a paragraph or two. Use the “Blockquote” tool in the advanced story editor to set it apart as quoted content.
- Do include your own thoughts or information to supplement what was written elsewhere
I had to delete an interesting story about a gay bashing because it took all of the text from the original story on the Slog. It totally could have stayed if it had used less of the original content and added a bit of something new to the story (including facts, opinions, or other thoughts).
Other tips:
- Make it interesting! Well-written, informative, well-thought-out posts will often make it to the front page.
- Got an upcoming event? Put it in the calendar, and it will be above the fold on the front page when it gets close to the date. Although separate story posts about events won’t be deleted, we typically won’t promote those kinds of stories to the front page
- Commercial messages will almost never be promoted to the front page, and will sometimes be deleted if they’re particularly egregious. We’ve got free & paid ads and a business directory that were created for those purposes. And if you have an interesting business-related story, let us know and we might write about it editorially.
Thx for participating!
i posted the original story from the SLOG yesterday. I wasnt aware of rules for posting and thought the story was important enough to include in its entirety.
Im still formulating my thoughts on the story so I really had nothing to add except for lots of anger.
sorry for not following the rules, i still hope everyone reads the post.
and it was important news. See the story about the funeral above. Just one sentence to introduce with a link and a quote of the beginning of the Slog story would have worked. And sure say you are angry. Even say you can’t formulate your thoughts. We identify.
Another helpful thing for people is if you do write an article about an event or a project related to a series of events, link to that article in the calendar notice. Obviously, give us enough info who what when where in the calendar notice, but give us the link for the further info, background, motivational speech, etc. This way the work you do to explain your passion for a project is leveraged instead of being buried only to be found if someone figures out how to search for it.