Any article written about local Sacramento topics and covered in a clear, concise and well written language is worthy of our front page. Not everyone is a great writer. If you have an interesting topic about which you'd like to write, but worry that your writing is not up to snuff, that isn't a problem.  Send us your writing, we'll clean it up and send it back to you. Then you can post with the confidence that it will look professional. In a physical paper the top half of the newspaper is called, "above the fold." The bottom half is what's known as, "below the fold." On our website we have a similar notion. Above the first leader board ad is what we refer to as, "above the fold." That

I challenge you, the readers of our publication to see the news that is going on all around you. Kevin Johnson thanked his supporters on the corner of 5th and I Street 500 feet from the front door of our office. Several weeks ago the entire Sacramento Federal Courthouse emptied out for a fire drill and marched across the street invading the local Starbucks and our parking lot. The last Friday of every week all the air raid sirens positioned around Sacramento blare loudly at 11 A.M. Have you heard them? Did you ever ask why? The picture above depicts all the construction going on at the Amtrak station, which is undergoing quite a transformation. The Sacramento Press is a place for you

 RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It has had several other names over the years, but that is the current one. RSS attempts to solve a problem that people have when using the Internet; they are overwhelmed with information. In the age of the Internet you can now read all your favorite newspapers and blogs and do so all while never leaving your computer. The problem is, how do you keep track of the newest information on all these websites without being completely inundated, or having to spend hours combing through these sites? This is where RSS comes in handy. So what is RSS exactly? Wikipedia defines RSS as follows: "RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequentl

The most frequently asked question about the Sacramento Press at this point is, what is that tag cloud and what are tags? Great questions. I'll start with a definition and then give a few basic examples. Practical E-commerce has a really great definition of tagging:   "In general tagging can be defined as the practice of creating and managing labels (or “tags”) that categorize content using simple keywords."   So then tags are like categories. The problem with categories is that often things are given a single category, whereas anything almost always can fit into many categories.   Which brings us to the first concrete example of tagging, this article. If you were asked what this art

The Sacramento Press is an amazing tool. Our development team built the site from the ground up to be clean, fast and useable. But most of all it is a flexible platform. Why the focus on flexibility? Because we know that we will not get everything right the first time around. We know there are bugs. We know there will be usability problems and design flaws. We need your feedback. Our goal is to be responsive and flexible, not perfect. We strive to be always better. Our operations are also designed to be responsive and flexible. We want input on how to make our terms of use better. We need your feedback about our privacy policy. We have posted both as storylines on the site so that you can

"Beta" is a little bit of shop talk I guess. In our case it refers to the release state of our web software application. We built our online newspaper platform from scratch. Beta just means that our initial release has not been tested enough to be considered 100% robust and sturdy. We will be "beta testing" our application by launching it in a specific neighborhood. We call that neighborhood our "beta" area because, like the application, we are just testing our processes in preparation for a full launch. Our "beta" neighborhood is the quadrant of downtown between the Sacramento river, Capitol City Freeway, 16th Street, and N street. This area includes the neighborhood of Southside Park,

Its easier than you think. If you want to be a writer, sign up or log in and click the "write!" button on the top of the page. Now you can sign up to become a Community Contributor. Our journalism support department offers a manual, seminars, and workshops on becoming a better writer and journalist. The more workshops you attend the better your credibility with us and the more likely our editing staff will place your work on the front page. For more information contact journalism@sacramentopress.com. Please pay close attention to our ethical code and disclose your biases. Our watchword is transparency because it helps us balance the news we report on the front page. Start by covering on

We do not prohibit content based on its viewpoint. We do however select stories that will go on our front page and our section pages. That editorial decision is primarily based on the quality of the content written. We also rely on the community to help label offensive content, spam and redundant content. When identified, said content will be removed by staff at the Sacramento Press. 

At this time we do not fact check all of our community contributors' content. We will fact check what is written in house by our editors and interns and We do provide resources to our Community Contributors to allow for them to find the most factually correct information available. Should a reader find that a fact is incorrect we have the ability to take down the offending content or issue a retraction.

Yes and no. You have the ability on our site to post anything to the site without it being reviewed. If you violate our terms of use, your content will be removed. If you continually violate or terms of use your account will be suspended. If you write content that is not in line with the mission statement of The Sacramento Press, "To be the most comprehensive source of local news and information in the Sacramento area," your content will never be featured and will dwell in the bowels of our site. For instance we do not want people's thoughts on life. A life diary is better suited to a blogging site like Blogspot or Blogger. Additionally we do not want people writing about national or stat

We sell advertising. However, you will not see any pop up ads or ugly flyovers on our site. And you won't see lists and lists of button adds or text adds crammed on the sides and bottoms of our pages. All of us at the Sacramento Press use our own site and rule number one is if it looks bad to us then it will look bad to you. Our advertising is based not on the number of eyeballs we can distract or the number of clicks we can generate. It is based on the privilege of sponsoring the best stories and conversations about Sacramento. Our advertisers want to be associated with you, not distract you! We respect that our advertisers keep us in business and sponsor your great writing. So we do no

There are three main differences. The first is not technical. Right now storylines are usually written by one author. He/she is the author for each article in the storyline just like most blogs. However, we ask each author to tell just one story over time rather than posting all sorts of interesting tidbits. While blogs can go all over the place, we ask our writers to stick to one story and cover it well. The second difference is technical. Our storylines are dynamic. Editors can combine any series of articles into a storyline. This kind of editorial control is really great. And because we built our system with this kind of flexibility in mind from the start, we have an amazing content ma

Ben, the cofounder of the Sacramento Press gets asked this question about 20 times a day, so below is the answer that he gave for this question: Let me start with a different question: what is an article? In printed newspapers articles are the basic unit of content, it is how a newspaper tells a story. An article can only be a certain length because there is only so much room on the page. And if a writer wants to post a history of the topic covered, link to older news items, or follow up the progress of the story? Well, tough luck. Traditional papers are constrained by space and time and try to tell the whole story in any given article. So if you want to start an online newspaper, you cou