How to share your news

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Quick links:

• Submit story ideas (NOTE: This will take you to a different site where we maintain a list of stories in progress and story ideas. You will need to use the "Return to Mi-Whi News" link to come back here.)
• Post a story, photo or other content

• Post garage sale information

How to share your news

Sharing your news, photos, videos and audio clips is a great way to make sure all of us are getting the news we need about our communities. If you have news to share, there are a few basic things you will need to do (or learn how to do) to get started. We’ll tell you those things below. However, we are always working to make it as easy as possible for people to share stories and media here, so if you have problems or suggestions, please send us e-mail.

If you have a great idea for a story but you don't have time to prepare the story and materials yourself, you're also welcome to post your story idea to our separate story idea site. Be sure to leave your contact information, in case a reporter wants to follow up and write the story.

If you write your story in Microsoft Word and post it by copying and pasting it, be sure to select the tool for pasting in material from Word. (See graphic below, which has the proper tool circled.)

Grab people’s attention!

The most important thing to remember when submitting stories, photos, videos or audio clips is that you have to capture people’s interest quickly. Just think about how you scan Web pages. What would catch your eye?

Be sure the things you post are clearly labeled, so people can tell at first glance what they’ll be reading, seeing or hearing. In other words, a headline that says “Dinosaur bones found” is better than “Archeologists digging near state line find bones of ancient dinosaur.”

It also means that, if you’re submitting a story, your should either tell people the most important, interesting or unusual thing about your subject OR write so well that people can’t bear to stop reading. (For most of us, the first approach is usually best!)

Building a basic news story

Be sure you include all of those “Five Ws” you learned in school: Who, what, when, where and why. “How” is also important in many stories.

Include some comments that can be quoted (and that means you’re should use the exact words of the person who’s commenting). The best comments focus on what someone thinks or feels about your subject, and a humorous remark (when appropriate to the story) is always a plus.

Adding photos

When taking photos, and selecting photos for posting, weed out any photos for which you would make excuses. For example, if you were to show the photo to someone and tell them, “It’s blurry, but …” or “It’s hard to see him, but there he is,” choose a different photo. The one exception: If your photo is a rare picture of an extremely important event, or if the conditions in which you took the photo (like a tornado) caused the photo to be less than your best.

If you have more than one photo to add, or you’re creating a slide show, think about which photos do the best job of conveying various aspects of your story, and how to put the photos in order so they make the most sense.

Use the controls toward the bottom of your story page to add photo.

Adding videos and audio clips

We encourage you to submit edited videos and audio clips as well as “raw” files like unedited interviews.

As with photos, please don’t submit video or audio that you’d find yourself making excuses for – again, unless it’s a rare recording of an extremely important event or the surrounding circumstances were what harmed the quality of the recording.

The preferred way for you to do this is to upload them to a hosting service like blip.tv, YouTube or Vimeo, then click on the button on the service’s Web page (it usually says something like “embed”) to automatically generate the fancy coding we need to include your video or audio with your story.

Then, copy that coding from the hosting site, then paste it into the box toward the bottom of your story page.

Contact us

Please let us know if you have any questions, or any problems submitting your material. We have done our best to make sure the site is functioning properly, but we’ve probably missed something. Our e-mail address is miwhinews@muohio.edu.

We are currently applying for grants that would allow us to hold several journalism training workshops at locations throughout the Miami and Whitewater valleys during the coming academic year.

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