Infoshop News Style Guide

Infoshop News Style Guide

The following guide is under development.

Last update: February 17, 2008

The Basics

Every news story needs to have the following in order to be approved for the news wire. Failure to meet these basic guidelines is the main reason why we reject story submissions.

Who, what, where, when: The basics of journalism. Your story needs to have this basic information, or you will confuse and anger readers.

Source: Where was the story originally published or posted? Mention the source under the author and/or include the URL after the story. If the piece is original to Infoshop News, then add "Infoshop News" and a date to the byline.

Date: When did the news happen? What is the published date for the story?

Author: Who is the author or authors of the piece?

HTML: If your piece includes links and pictures, don't forget to add the HTML to the rest of the text. Paragraphs should be tagged with <p> tags, not <br> tags.

Images: Images included from other sources must be no wider than 480. Use the width attribute, as needed, to keep within this limit.

Punctuation and CAPITALIZATION: We use standard punctuation and capitalization rules around here. If your story doesn't have the first letter of a sentence capitalized, we will reject your story.

Titles

Story titles should be short as possible. This makes them more readable, especially by RSS feed readers.

Story titles should not have any end punctuation, except in some circumstances.

Add geographical prefixes whenever possible. Example: "Russia: New Raids Against Anarchists."

For editorials by anarchist and anti-authoritarian writers, start the story title with the author's name.

Remove dates from titles wherever possible. Dates of events should be noted in the main body of a story or announcement.

Exclamation marks should rarely be used in a story title.

Avoiding the language of our oppressors

The following words and phrase are not to be used in Infoshop News stories.

"Eco-terrorist" = use "eco-activist" or "environmentalist" or "activist" instead.

'So-called anarchist" = just use "anarchist".

More resources

Economist's Style Guide

Last Updated Tuesday, May 05 2009 @ 08:46 AM CDT|29,960 Hits