Draft Guidelines for Authors

While our blog is not autocratic in nature, some level of uniformity of posts seems to be advisable. If so, some guidelines or rules for authors may be needed. The below is a draft for discussion. Feel free to comment.

(General)
(0. You may breach any of the below rules if you think there is a good reason for that. Otherwise, consider following them.)
1. To be published, news must be important, instructive, or funny. Boring news is no news.
2. A legal point must be present. Economy, politics etc. may be discussed, too, but primarily this is a law news blog.
3. Be neutral, or appear neutral. Avoid making political statements in news items (you may put them into comments, though).
4. Be brief. A couple of paragraphs is a maximum.
5. The heading must be informative and short. Describe the essence of the item in three to ten words.
6. Include the country name to the heading. At least mention it within the first several words of the item.
7. Provide links to your sources.
8. Do not copy and paste news from other sources. Rewrite it.

(Pictures and videos)
9. Do not copy pictures. They are copyrighted.
10. Video is different. Video clips on news sites often come with a button saying "Copy to blog", "Embed code", or the like; we believe this constitutes consent to embed the video to your post.
11. However, avoid embedding obviously pirated video found on YouTube etc.
12. Do not post links to large video files requiring downloading. Embed video clips as objects instead, to make the video instantly viewable.
13. Video or not, the text must be self-sufficient. Some readers may be unable or unwilling to view the video.

(Technical)
14. Use the country name (or countries' names) as a category tag (tags).
15. Begin other tags with “_” (e.g., _IP Law).
16. Separate tags with a comma, not semicolon. Otherwise it does not work.
17. Use the sub-window “Edit HTML” rather than “Compose” for copying your item text from MS Word (or whatever). Otherwise, a lot of unneeded formatting stuff is copied, which usually prevents the item from showing correctly.
18. Avoid back-dating your items, even if you are writing about a several-day-old event. Visitors are unlikely to notice back-dated items since they are not on the top.

No comments:

Post a Comment