GUIDELINES FOR CONTRIBUTORS WRITING

NEWS ARTICLES

Table of Contents

FINDING AND WRITING ‘STRAIGHT NEWS’ ARTICLES 4

IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, READ THIS BIT 5

WRITE A HEADLINE FIRST, EVEN IF WE DON’T USE IT. 5IF YOU ARE NOT EXCITED ABOUT THE STORY, DON’T WRITE IT OR SUGGEST IT TO US. 5DON’T WAFFLE. DON’T REPEAT YOURSELF TO BUMP UP THE WORD COUNT. SAY IT WELL, ONCE. 5GIVE ALL THE SALIENT POINTS IN THE HEADLINE. 5GET RIGHT TO THE STORY WITHOUT PREVARICATION. 5UNDERSTAND WHO YOU ARE WRITING FOR 6LONG QUOTES DON’T COUNT TOWARDS THE WORD-COUNT. 6300 WORDS IS THE MINIMUM, NOT THE ABSOLUTE NUMBER REQUIRED. 6IF THE STORY IS VERY ‘HOT’ OR GENUINELY ‘BREAKING’, HURRY UP! 6PUT IN ADEQUATE HYPERLINKS, INSIDE THE TEXT OF THE ARTICLE, TO JUSTIFY YOUR CLAIMS. 6SUBMIT THE ARTICLE TO US AS A WORD DOCUMENT. 6DON’T MENTION COMPETING SITES 6EXAMPLE OF AN IDEAL STACK NEWS ARTICLE 8

WHAT IS THE STACK AND WHAT DO WE NEED FROM YOU? 9

NEWS BASED AROUND CLOSERSTILL’S GLOBAL TECHNOLOGICAL EXPOS 9THE STACK IS NOT A MARKETING SITE 9ARTICLE TOPICS AND SUITABLE SUBJECT MATTER 9

FINDING A STORY TO WRITE 10

FINDING A STORY WITH OUR RSS-BASED NEWS SYSTEM 10

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOU CHOOSE NEWS STORIES 11

ARE YOU EXCITED ABOUT THE STORY? 11IS THE STORY ALREADY ‘DEAD’ OR ‘USED UP’? 11DO THE VERY BIG TECH SITES ALREADY HAVE THE STORY? 13HAS IT ALREADY BEEN FEATURED ON (OR SUBMITTED TO) SLASHDOT? 13IS THE STORY FROM BETANEWS.COM? 13IS THE STORY ABOUT COMPUTING OR COMPUTING TECHNOLOGY IN SOME WAY? 13SUCCESSFUL EXAMPLES OF STACK ARTICLES WHICH ACHIEVED HIGH TRAFFIC 14

THE THREE TYPES OF NEWS THAT WE RUN, AND HOW WE MARKET THIS NEWS 14

UNDERSTANDING ‘REFERRERS’ SUCH AS SLASHDOT AND FARK 14SLASHDOT.ORG 15FARK.COM 15SUBMISSION PROCEDURES AT FARK AND SLASHDOT 15

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FARK SUBMISSIONS 15SLASHDOT SUBMISSIONS 15

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Finding and writing ‘straight news’ articles

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If you read nothing else, READ THIS BIT

“WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY?”

Everyone’s busy. This is a quick digest of the most important points in this document, plus some other important points:

Write a headline first, even if we don’t use it. The headline should either explain the whole story or intrigue the reader in a way that the story can actually deliver on. If you can’t find a good headline, you either don’t know what the story is, or there is no story. Both of these things can happen to the best of writers, but either way, it’s a problem.

If you are not excited about the story, don’t write it or suggest it to us.If you cannot get excited about tech stories at all, try another field of journalism. This is reiterated later in this document, because it is very important. We can tell if you’re ‘faking it’. And so can you.

Don’t waffle. Don’t repeat yourself to bump up the word count. Say it well, once. And don’t use any other ‘tricks’ to bump the article up to an acceptable word count. We need to deliver high-effort, fat-free, well-informed, properly-attributed, information-heavy prose that’s distinct from other sources covering the topic. There is one exception to the rule about repeating yourself, explained in the next point:

Give all the salient points in the headline. Then cover them all again, slightly longer, in the first paragraph. Then tell the story a third time, at length, in the article itself. Then add some extra info that makes our version of the story give extra value. Get some background for context. What happened before the story? What led up to it? What might it mean for the future?

Get right to the story without prevarication. If you want to write something discursive, we can talk about news features, or features. That’s a different type of writing. But for news articles, stand well back and let the news itself do the work. The way you write a story and the fact that you chose to write about it give you plenty of opportunity for personal expression, so there’s no need to deliberately ‘add personality’ or stray away from a straight, lean, tight news style.

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Understand who you are writing forA typical reader for The Stack understands the current technological trends and, in many cases, most of the advanced concepts in the areas we cover. Don’t waste time and word-count over-explaining material they can find on Wikipedia. Instead use hyperlinks to other web-pages that explain the concept (not Wikipedia), if you feel the reader might not know about it. Keep the prose very tight, and don’t drift away from the story.

Long quotes don’t count towards the word-count. Each article needs 300 words at least of originally-written text (i.e. originally written by you, having digested your sources). Long quotes won’t save you work, and they do not represent good journalism, in most cases.

300 words is the minimum, not the absolute number required. We’d like more, if you have time, and you don’t feel that the delay in extending the article a little would affect its chances in the market. We might need to cut your article down, so give us something to cut, rather than hitting exactly 300 words every time.

If the story is very ‘hot’ or genuinely ‘breaking’, hurry up!This doesn’t happen often, but it’s ‘All hands on deck’ when it does. Five minutes can make the difference between getting 10,000 hits for your article – or fifty hits. As you write, there are about 250 other writers trying to do it faster. The race doesn’t always go to the swift, but the writer who can deliver a timely write-up of a hit item and adequate background and quality of writing has the best chance in the market.

Put in adequate hyperlinks, inside the text of the article, to justify your claims. If someone said something, hyperlink to the place that they said it, i.e. the source of the interview or quote. Use Google to check whether The Stack has a suitable article to refer to before looking for articles from other sites. We’d rather remove excess hyperlinks than have to go hunting for them to put them in. We must prove what we say.

Submit the article to us as a Word document.…and provide substantiating hyperlinks in your words directly, like this, inside the article. We are short of time to ‘assemble’ these things ourselves. Use Wikipedia to gather information and supporting links if you need to, but never link to Wikipedia pages.

Don’t mention competing sitesIf you have to link to The Verge, TechCrunch, or other technology news sites, do it with a simple hyperlink, such as ‘he said’. You can mention Reuters and major news sites which do not specialise in technology, such as the Wall Street Journal, The Times, etc.

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Example of an ideal Stack news article

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What is The Stack and what do we need from you?

News based around CloserStill’s global technological exposThe Stack is a news outlet run by CloserStill Media Ltd., which organises a series of technological expos around the world.

The expos that the site currently supports are:

Cloud Expo Europe Cloud Expo Europe (Frankfurt) Cloud Expo Asia Cloud Asia Cloud Security Smart IoT London Data Centre World (UK) Data Centre World Asia Data Centre World Germany

The Stack is NOT a marketing siteHowever The Stack is not a marketing site. Through referrals from major aggregators such as Slashdot and Fark, and through becoming an official provider for Google News, The Stack maintains standards of independent tech journalism in its news output and in its general features and news features.

The site carries some third-party advertising, and has a dedicated section called Community, within which on-site advertising is carried out with select partners. This section of the site is distinct from the news-based portion of the site, and you will not be asked to contribute to it.

Article topics and suitable subject matter

Articles fall into one of five categories: IoT (Internet of Things); Security; Cloud; Data Centre; and ‘World’.

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If possible we try and write articles which fit into the first four categories, but our priority is generating traffic, so any tech-related stories which have a good chance of success but do not fit into the main categories will go in ‘World’.

Finding a story to write

Sometimes we may point you to a particular news story that we’d like you to write up. Most of the time we expect that you will email us a selection of possible stories from the day, stories that you might like to write, i.e. hyperlinks to news articles or other places on the web from which you’d like to generate a story. Either Martin Anderson (editor) or Alice MacGregor (Deputy Editor) will choose one of these, and give the go-ahead for it.

Finding a story with our RSS-based news systemWe have our own ‘news ticker’ into which several thousand possible news stories feed every day in the form of emails to a Gmail account. You can log in to this Gmail account with these details and make use of the news feed:

EMAIL/USER: feedreaderstack@gmail.comPASS:[ Email us for this ]

Though we are constantly adding new sources to this news feed, it is not intended to be a comprehensive resource for all news. You may have your own favourite sources of news, and we encourage you to use these as well.

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nb: The first time you log in to this Gmail address, Google may ‘block’ you as an intruder. I get alerts when this happens. I will ‘whitelist’ your login then, so try again later.

Things to consider before you choose news stories

Are you excited about the story?It doesn’t matter whether it’s an opinion piece or breaking news - there is a moment when a writer ‘finds’ a story that is unmistakeably arresting. It’s like a cat catching scent of a potential meal in a neighbouring street, or a dog guarding a house who hears some unfamiliar noise. The ears prick up. The neurons begin to fire. Somewhere inside you, a clock begins ticking. You’ve found your next meal – now to make sure that no-one else eats it instead of you!

If you do not feel like that about a story, do not write it, or suggest to us that you write it.

If you never feel like that about tech stories, give up trying to write them, and find an area of writing where stories do give you that feeling occasionally. If you cannot generate enthusiasm for a story, why would anyone else want to read it?

There is a temptation to ‘try’ tech or business journalism because it can pay well, and there is less competition, in many ways. But, as in so many other areas of life, you cannot ‘fake it’ and expect to convince – editors know, and deep down, you know too.

Is the story already ‘dead’ or ‘used up’?When a writer becomes aware of a good news story to write, he or she often sets to writing it before ensuring that it is new news. Even very high-profile sites can fail to realise just how old a story is, so don’t rely on their enthusiasm for the piece – go to Google and put in some search terms that are relevant to the story. Find out for yourself; it only takes ten seconds.

Let’s take an example: at the time of writing, the hack of the UK site Talk Talk has been in the news for about four days, so let’s search Google for ‘Talk Talk Hack’.

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Here we can see that follow-on stories from the initial hack are still in progress. By clicking on ‘More news for talk talk hack’ we can see just how much buzz there is on the web about this story:

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Obviously the story has now moved on from the initial break to analysis and further developments, and since there are 402 news articles to read, we’d better have either something new to add or have some good reason to write this story, because diffusion is clearly already very high.

So whatever the story is, try a few different Google search terms to establish how fresh it is (or isn’t). If there are few sources covering it, and particularly if their stories only went live a few hours ago, it might be worth covering.

Do the very big tech sites already have the story?If you’re seeing results on your story from sites such as Gizmodo, Techcrunch, The Verge, Motherboard Vice and similarly ‘huge’ outlets, think twice about submitting this story as a possible article for The Stack. These are some of the biggest names in tech news, and once they have the story, it is likely to spread as far as it can quite quickly.

Has it already been featured on (or submitted to) Slashdot?If Slashdot (find out about what it is here) has already featured the story on its front page, the story is of no use to The Stack, because 65% of our traffic comes from submitting our stories to Slashdot and getting them featured on there. Therefore check the front page of Slashdot and make sure the story is not already on there. Also use the search box on the Slashdot front page to put in a search term related to the story (which might have fallen back to older pages).

If there’s no evidence that the story has been featured on the Slashdot front page, go to the submissions area of Slashdot, known as the firehose (http://slashdot.org/recent), and see if someone else has already submitted the story, in the hope of being included on the front page.

It is very unusual for the ‘second submitter’ to get their submission onto the front page of Slashdot, so if you can already see the story there, the story is effectively ‘dead’ for The Stack. Unless we have some particular reason to pursue it anyway, move on to another one.

Is the story from Betanews.com?Betanews is a direct competitor to The Stack, and it submits ALL its stories to Slashdot. Therefore any news it has written is a ‘dead’ story as far as The Stack is concerned.

Is the story about computing or computing technology in some way?There are many interesting stories that are science-based but unrelated to The Stack’s core interests, such as breakthroughs in stem cell research. On the other hand, apparently unrelated science stories such as breakthroughs in materials research (graphene, etc.) have direct implications for computer use when developed, and these are fine to pursue.

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Successful examples of Stack articles which achieved high trafficWe maintain a Google Spreadsheet documenting the articles which ‘get referred’ at Slashdot, Fark and other sites. These are a good resource to understand how we choose and write stories, and how we market them. You can check out the spreadsheet links at:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1i76aoxvnHKRQTAUsSRfqSk4y5__QM9BPm6fFodWVoTU/edit?usp=sharing

The three types of news that we run, and how we market this news

The three main types of news story that we run on The Stack are:

a) Breaking news - exampleb) Research-based news - examplec) News analysis - example

The final one, ‘news analysis’, crosses over into the realm of ‘features’, which this guide does not cover at the moment (although it is more time-sensitive than a ‘general’ feature, since it’s based on current news or current news trends).

Understanding ‘referrers’ such as Slashdot and FarkWithout some basic understanding of how we drive traffic to our content, you will find it difficult to write for The Stack successfully. Therefore we include here some details about how we market your articles after they are published. Once you understand our aims for marketing your work, you will be better able to write to our style, and even to choose stories that fit in with our approach.

The Stack has two main sources for traffic, and it promotes its work quickly to these two sources as each article comes out. Both these sources allow readers to submit suggestions for their ‘front pages’. If the suggestion is chosen by these sites’ moderators, a link to our article will appear on the front page of these sites, delivering a massive boost to traffic.

The sites are:

Slashdot - http://slashdot.org/ (No registration or account required to submit)Fark - http://www.fark.com/ (Free account/registration required to submit)

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Stack news articles can do equally well on each of these referrer sites, though they have to be marketed very differently at the time of submission.

Slashdot.orgSlashdot is a popular source for trending and highly technical technology news, and a fair amount of its content goes beyond our remit, such as an interest in space travel and pure science, without any applications to computing.

Fark.comFark is a highly populist referrer, divided into various categories, which prides itself on its humorous and dark approach to news.

The submitter to Fark is most likely to succeed if his or her headline is funny, pithy or in some other way exceptional. However a great Fark headline cannot usually get a badly-written or poorly-timed story ‘greenlit’; by the same token an unimaginative headline will usually not get even a very good story greenlit. All the major online publications, including giants such as The Times and TechCrunch, submit their stories to Fark in the hope of garnering the traffic and exposure that a Fark referral can bring.

Submission procedures at Fark and Slashdot

Fark submissionsBoth these sites have ‘submission’ areas where viewers can see how their own submissions are doing in the queue. They both use colour systems, but in different ways. If a submitted story to Fark is refused by Fark’s moderator, its headline turns red. If it is accepted, it turns green. Full access to this queue is only available to TotalFark subscribers, who pay a small monthly fee for this access. However, anyone who submits a link must create a basic free Fark account, and from their own account settings page they will be able to see whether their own submissions were greenlit or refused.

Slashdot submissionsSlashdot has a far wider range of possible colours in its own queue, which is called the ‘Firehose’, and which can be freely accessed at http://slashdot.org/recent. Usually a submission going ‘green’ means that the submission will feature on the Slashdot front page within hours, or at least within a day or so. Unlike Fark, the colour of a submission can change after it goes green, even all the way back to black (the least favourable in Slashdot’s confusing colour-rating system).

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