How to get your information into the newspaper

How come my press release/article/ad/News Bit/announcement/letter didn’t get into the paper this week?

I’ve been working for newspapers since I first joined my high school newspaper 34 years ago. A lot has changed in the way we do things in that time. Some things haven’t changed a bit. One of the things that hasn’t changed is the complaint that something didn’t get into the paper, or if it did get in it was changed or messed up.

Every so often I like to give some helpful tips for getting your information publicized in the newspaper. This is especially important for those who submit items for publication from nonprofit groups, organizations, churches, schools, etc.

First off, know your jargon. An ad is paid for and usually appears in a box at the bottom of a page. Announcements such as obituaries, weddings and engagements are paid for like and ad but are often printed like a story. Stories, and briefs – which we run as News Bits – are what I’m talking about here.

When writing something for publication, apply the KISS rule: Keep it simple, stupid. Long gone are the days when we had typesetters who would take in submissions and type them up for print. In the age of computers, streamlining and downsizing most newspapers have one person doing the job that two or more (usually more) did just a few years ago.

If you mail in or hand deliver something that needs to be typed up, it’s going to drop fast on the priority list. It might even get buried in a file of things to do later and never seen again. Email is by far the best way to submit your information. The ability to copy and paste takes seconds. Retyping can take valuable minutes. While that doesn’t sound like much, consider that the rest of this job takes about 55-60 hours a week. It all adds up.

When you do email something, again keep it simple. Please write it in a plain text format. Don’t mess around with special fonts and colors. Either write what you want in the body of the email or submit it attached in a Word document. If we can’t copy and paste it we have to retype it. This is especially true when people attach the fancy fliers they made to promote their event.

When writing about your event or activity, please keep it short and focus on the who, what, when and where. Please don’t pontificate about how wonderful your group is and what an amazing benefit that will come from the activity. We know that’s important, but 99 percent of the time we have to cut that part out anyway due to space limitations.

When writing, please do not put two spaces between each sentence. We know that’s what they taught in school but the reality is that we have to remove the extra space. A single space may not be much, but when you add it up over the thousands of sentences in a newspaper, you lose a lot of space and in a newspaper, space is expensive. The same goes for indenting paragraphs. The computer program we use does that automatically for us.

Please do not write in ALL CAPS or capitalize every single noun. Please limit capitalization to the first word in a sentence, proper nouns (names) and titles if they appear with the name. For example, your would say “Superintendent Sheryl Moore” or “Sheryl Moore, the superintendent.” Seasons are not capitalized. Spring, summer, fall and winter are all lower case.

Quite often we get people who go through the effort to put information into nice, neat columns. Please do not do that … ever. It makes more work for you to format it that way and just as much work for us to unformat it. If you need to put things in columns, please ask us first how best to do it. There are tricks of the trade that make it easy on both ends.

To submit pictures, please email them as attachments. Please do not imbed them in a Word document. It takes extra time to extract them and they lose a lot of quality in the process. The larger the JPG file you can send, the better.

Lastly, please submit your item as early as possible. Our deadlines have been Monday at noon, but with the high volume of stuff coming in at the last minute, we may be forced to move that back to Friday.

Doing these things will help assure that your information gets into the paper quicker and more accurately. Thank you for your cooperation.