NEW ATSNN GUIDELINES AND CONTENT QUALITY REQUIREMENTS, page 1
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Topic started on 9-11-2004 @ 07:07 PM by SkepticOverlord
Submitting quality stories to ATSNN helps us gain the attention of the rest of the Internet world through concise formatting of interesting content. However, lately, especially with the fast-breaking news of this political season, we've seen a marked decrease in submission quality. Beginning now, we will become more strict with the quality of stories we upgrade to ATSNN. Headline You may not duplicate any headlines from existing source articles. Headlines must be in your own words and reflect an accurate ubiased presentation of the facts of your article. Grammatical Quality The vast majority of our audience is english-speaking nations. Therefore, we must insist on generally accepted style, syntax, grammar, and spelling of either American English or U.K. English. Submissions with poor writing quality will not be upgraded. Introduction Paragraph When you use the ATSNN submission form, the first paragraph must be ONE properly formatted full paragraph of your own words. This is the content seen on the front-page of the ATSNN website. If the format is incorrect, you've only submitted one or two short sentences, or you've copied material from the story, your submission will not be upgraded. This first paragraph should portray just the facts of the story in an objective and unbiased way and not your opinion. Reference URL No news submissions from members will be accepted without a reference URL. (On occasion, ATSNN staff reporters and editors may submit important news without a reference URL.) Op/Ed submissions are the only content that may be accepted from members without a reference URL. Story Snippet Generally, two to three paragraphs of the important points from the story should be pasted into this field in the submission form. Most often, the important points for ATS consideration are not the first paragraphs. Demonstrate that you understand the material by picking the salient points from deeper in the reference article. Additional comments When you use the ATSNN submission form, the next field is for your comments on the story where it is your chance to provide your spin and/or opinion on the reference news article. From this point forward, submissions that contain less than three sentences in this area will not be accepted for submission. Special Characters Please do not copy-and-paste your submissions from a word processing program without first removing special characters such as "curly quotes" and em-dashes. These special characters cause problems with our XML RSS feeds and submissions with these types of characters will not be upgraded. Because of the new, more strict guidelines, we've increased the points bonus for an accepted submission to 750 ATS Points. If your submission is not acceptable, but the topic is important, you will receive a (FIX) U2U that provides you with an opportunity to repair your submission. Our editors and reporters are busy, so in most cases, will not have a chance to help you make corrections. Please review the information above, and compare that to your submission. Finally, Duplicate Content Between ATSNN and ATS Given the desire for higher standards on ATSNN, there will be occasions where an ATSNN thread covers the same or similar topic as an ATS thread. Even if the topic is "covered first on ATS", we may still desire to have a more professionally authored post on ATSNN. This situation will be covered on a case-by-case basis, but generally, well-written stories with excellent points will be approved for ATSNN, even if the topic already exists in an ATS forum (with a link to the existing thread). ATSNN Experts Your material is subject to immediate status as a live ATSNN story. If you don't follow these guidelines, your "expert" status will be subject to cancelation. [edit on 6-8-2005 by SkepticOverlord]
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