Read this document once you have talked with an editor about your article or project. (If you haven't done so already, please make sure to read the Submission Guidelines first.)
STANDARDS FOR WORK
Writers of journalistic and opinion content must carefully check the facts they present, preferably with two or more credible sources. Facts should be attributed to their source. Opinions should rarely be presented in journalistic writing, and only when buttressed by thorough reporting. In opinion writing, viewpoints should be backed up with an array of convincing evidence.
We urge our writers to be meticulous in avoiding libel. Obviously, they should never make up any information in their story, whether quotation, fact, or characterization. If anything cannot be firmly substantiated, it is better left out. Furthermore, writers should keep their notes for at least a year after the article has been published.
Writers should try not to use sources without attribution. When it is necessary to do so, the writer should be conscious of any biases or motives that may have led the source to seek “on background” (i.e. “not for attribution”) status.
Artists should never use copyrighted material in their own work without the express approval of the copyright holder. Use of another artist’s material should be indicated in the artwork’s caption. “Doctoring” photos is allowed in certain situations for artistic effect, but it must be clear to the average reader that the image has been altered, whether by the nature of the alteration or the accompanying caption. “Doctoring” images is only permitted with the approval of an editor.
EDITING PROCESS
- Your editor should give you a deadline for handing in a draft of your work. At this point, you should fill out a Contributor Information Form. The Form asks you to provide details about the article and post your bio and mugshot. After you've completed the form, please make sure you click "submit," so the appropriate editors receive it.
- Writers are encouraged to take photos or provide ideas for art to accompany their pieces. Please email any photo/art you have to the Art Desk at art-at-inthefray-dot-org. Photography should be saved in JPEG format; graphic artwork can be saved in either JPEG or GIF format. Please email any caption information (who took the photos, where they were taken, when they were taken, what is happening in the photos, etc.) to art-at-inthefray-dot-org.
- Please hand in your piece by the deadline that you and your editor agree upon. Remember to submit documents in Microsoft Word and images in JPEG or GIF format.
- Writers will normally go through two edits by one or two assignment editors, and then a copy edit by a copy editor. The first edit may be as simple as a conversation about the general structure of the piece, and suggestions for improvements. The second edit will likely be a line-by-line edit. After each of the first two edits, your editor normally will send you the draft again to approve any changes and make further revisions. After the copy edit, you will shown the edits for review, and if everything is fine, the piece will be sent to the designers. The entire process will take at least three weeks, and probably longer.
A WORD ABOUT STYLE
You can view the most recent draft of INTHEFRAY's Stylebook at http://inthefray.org/style. Refer to this whenever you have a question about what to italicize or capitalize, what word forms to use, etc.
Some style points you should pay particular attention to:
- We use the “serial comma.” In other words, there should be a comma before the last item in a list: apples, oranges, and bananas
- We do not hyphenate racial terms, e.g. African American, Asian American, American Indian (even when used as adjectives). We use “black” and “white” in reference to the racial terms, though we prefer to use “African Americans” or “black people” rather than “blacks,” etc.
- We do not abbreviate state names or months. For example, we would say: Cherry Hill, New Jersey; October 23, 2000. Remember to put commas after the state name or year whenever it does not end the sentence: Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is a wonderful town.
- Make sure there is only a single — not a double — space after the period ending a sentence. Also, we use em dashes with a single space before and after. For example: He opened the door — he closed the door.
To insert the em dash into your text, you should choose the symbol that says em dash in the Insert > Symbol menu in Microsoft Word (not to be confused with the shorter en dash), or you can hold down the CTRL and ALT keys and press the - key in the number pad grouping of keys, all at the same time (whew!).
- We spell out all numbers until we reach 10, in line with AP style. For example: one, nine, 47, 100, 4,353.
- Headlines use a “down” style, which means all words except proper nouns and the first letters of the headline are lowercase. For example: Burning Man lights a fire (for a story about the organization Burning Man)
- We italicize the names of books, computer software, magazines, movies, newspapers, operas, plays, reports, and television programs. We put quotation marks around the names of articles, essays, papers, poems, songs, lectures, speeches, and works of art. We do nothing to the names of Internet publications.
See the online stylebook for more information.
USING HTML TAGS
IMPORTANT: For all the instances of HTML code described below, you must replace the { character with the "less than" sign or the code will not work. Click here to see the final draft of a story from our archives. You can observe almost all the types of HTML tags described below in this draft, with this exception of the Internal Links (we’ll try to find an example of these links for a future version of this memo).
Links. Almost everything published in the magazine should include links. You should add the link within your article or artwork. Here's an example of how you write the HTML code:
After Al Gore chose the {a href="http://www.senate.gov/~lieberman">Connecticut senator{/a> as his running mate, all of the sudden Americans in rural Ohio and in Maine knew that “orthodox” Jews do not ride in cars on their Sabbath.
This code will create a link over the words, “Connecticut senator” — the two words will be highlighted and the reader can click on them to go to the Web page http://www.senate.gov/~lieberman. (IMPORTANT: You must replace the { character above with the "less than" sign for the code above to work.)
Internal links. The Web allows you to write one part of a story, link it to a second part and third part of that story, and then link those parts to a fourth and fifth part, and so on. In other words, you can think of a narrative “trunk” that branches off into two other narratives, which branch off into four, etc. On a more mundane level, you can think of a story that has a single sidebar, which can be reached from the main story via a link. That sidebar can be short, like a footnote, or long, like a separate article.
We encourage you to use links in these different ways within your stories. We call these kinds of links “internal links.” To use them, just write in the separate sections within your draft, tell us how they should be connected, and we’ll take care of the rest.
Questions? Don’t hesitate to contact any of the editors if you have questions. Here are the important email addresses to know:
recruiting-at-inthefray-dot-org, for general questions
art-at-inthefray-dot-org, for questions about art/photo to accompany your article (writers only)
identify-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to Identify/News editors
image-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the Image/Visual editors
imagine-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the Imagine/Literary editors
interact-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the Interact/Commentary editors
travel-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the Travel editors
offtheshelf-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the Books editors
pulse-at-inthefray-dot-org, to send mail to the PULSE/Blog editors
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