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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Easy guide to contributing to The Sacramento Press
by Kathleen Haley, published on August 15, 2009 at 5:54PM
Storyline: Writing for The Sacramento Press
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You can help us make Sacramento a stronger community by contributing to The Sacramento Press. Our website is free and open to the public. To become a community contributor, all you have to do is:
1. Sign up by clicking the button at the top of the page.
2. Then, once you are signed in, you will see a "write" button at the top of the page. Just click the "write" button, fill out a form and watch a tutorial.
3. Title your Storyline. This is the topic you intend to write about and it helps tie your articles about the same topic together.
4. You can start writing immediately inside the browser or copy and paste your article from a word processor. You can save your draft on our system and come back to edit the draft. However, please note that once you hit the "Publish" button, your story is published and cannot be edited without the help of an administrator -- you can email journalism@sacramentopress.com to contact an administrator.
Finally, we now offer copy editing and other services for writers. Just email a draft of your work to journalism@sacramentopress.com. Journalism Support Manager Colleen Belcher will coordinate an edit with one of our copy editors. Your story will be sent back to you within 24 hours. You can post the story with or without the editing changes.
Thank you again for your interest. If you have any questions, you can email journalism@sacramentopress.com and we will get back to you as soon as possible. We look forward to reading your work on The Sacramento Press!
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To prove my point, let's assume the opposite were true. I publish a highly controversial article and get my 10 closest friends to give it a thumbs up, but their identities remain protected. This creates a conflict of interest whereby the opinions of the community are not necessarily reflected by the perceived popularity of my article. The same could be said about any given comment on this site.
In the case of many articles written on this site, I question whether or not the staff (or a writer's PR agency, for instance) intentionally give thumbs down to opinions while equally valid, are dissenting or unpopular. This is as much a cowardly act as is my own decision to remain completely anonymous as I post this comment.
But, if this site were to remain true to its own standard of journalism, people who give thumbs up or down should as accountable for their own actions as I should be accountable for my own words above.
Maybe I would choose to be more public if the site owners would hold their own writers accountable for rating an item up or down. Or are the owners too cowardly to hold their own staff accountable for their opinions? Either way, this site will remain in its infancy until it can truly escape from its own hypocrisy and double standards to become any form of "journalism" with a capital J.
Why don't you just give me thumbs down already, cowards? How about we have an actual debate of the facts? The fact is that it shouldn't be so damn hard for people to write on this site... don't you want more people to write?
We have three layers of permissions for actions on the site. The first is that if you can read something you can flag it as offensive, spam or duplicate. If you can read it you can be offended. The second is for commenting, rating and tagging stories. You must register for an account, but you can use a user name rather than your real name. All you need is an email address and your zip code. The third level allows you to write articles. We ask people to give us additional information including a real name and physical address for legal reasons, transparency and our ability to contact writers.
We are open to suggestions about changing the permissions, how to make writing articles easier and the rating system. We are always looking to integrate feedback into our future releases. The site a work in progress and certainly not ideal. Thank you for hanging in there.
Perhaps you could email me at support@sacramentopress.com with these suggestions as well.