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Dateline: Sunday February 21 (Day 824)
Location: USArmy Public Affairs Office
Reporter: Major General George Armstrong "F-Bomb" Custer

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eREP NEWSPAPER WRITING TIPS
This article is in no way intended to cover all aspects of effective News article writing, just maybe a few "high points" that I employ and others have asked about.
For a proper education in eRep Journalism, I suggest contacting Robert Grosseteste about signing up for a Journalism course at North American University.
Let's get starte😛

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:1: Consistent Format: Look at any real newspaper or magazine. The content changes but the layout remains constant. People find comfort in that familiarity. You see mine: Byline; Headline repeated; Content; Recommended Reading (optional); Chick Pic with Standard Set of links to other papers; Bottom Byline. then an extra blank line to get that damned annoying "Read more" and "Share this" links off the tail end of my work.
:2: Catchy Headlines: Your headline is the first impression readers get, make it a good one. Loyal subscribers will click in anyways, but surfers are looking at the Latest News page for something interesting. "The Week That Was, Week 10 Edition" might, or might not, grab a new reader, and if you already have 4000+ subscribers you can get away with it. But to grab the attention of potential new readers, "Economic Armageddon (or How the Hell Will We Ever Recover?)" is better.
:3: Interesting Images: You might opt to post a larger photo at the top and not use the system's "Choose File" upload. When utilizing the system's own upload feature, be sure to use a photo larger than the space, hopefully square, so eRep's compression and cropping looks good. A smaller image will be expanded to size and appear blurry; rectangular photos are cropped and you'll chop off the top of someone's head or something. Long articles are referred to as a "wall of text" and you'll lose your short attention span readers.. break it up with a photo after two or three short paragraphs.


more about posting photos as its own list item, below.

:4: Basic Language Skills: Whether your content is serious or fluff, nothing says "what an idiot" like poor spelling, grammar and punctuation. Know the difference between plurals and possessives when using apostrophes. This Edit section does spell-check, but doing your work in Word or another program specifically designed for writing can help you with punctuation and sentence structure. Don't sacrifice your own style, exercise a degree of "artistic liberty," but remember there's a difference between a compound sentence and a run-on sentence.
:5: Pre-Publication Editing: After doing my draft in Notepad, I copy that work into the Edit of an old issue of the paper. You can tweak your work-- insert images, proofread, generally perfect your work-- over and over.. without some jackass posting "First!" or "your link is broken" in your Comments section while you're in there doing final edits. Then copy your perfect work out and paste it into a New Article.
:6: "First" My Ass! Prepare your first Comment ahead of time, have it copied to Clipboard, then immediately after hitting that Publish button get down there and paste it-- stake your claim to your own First Comment. I like to re-emphasize a main point of the article, or give credit to a Guest Writer or Contributor, right there at the top of the Comments list where it can't be overlooked.

http://siavashon.ir/pic/el/1/photojournalism.jpg" align="left" border="1">:7: Inline Photos: While in most cases a regular posting of a photo will be fine, as with the top photo and the small one used to break up this wall of text, sometimes you might want to get fancy.
eRep's Newspaper script allows a few HTML code snippets to be adapted to their method, but it's damn fussy about using proper HTML code and you have to get it just right or the whole article won't display.
One important aspect of utilizing inline photos is the width of the photo, which determines the amount of width left over to use for text. eRep will resize big pics, but is inconsistent in displaying them, so your text may fit perfectly one time or may run past the length of the photo and continue below it. It's best to select a photo that's 300 px or less in width, and tailor your text to fit nicely beside it. For this, right here, I've been hitting Edit and counting how many lines I need to fill to get exactly to the bottom of the photo, so I can continue with showing the actual code used.
See.. one last line.. fits perfectly. Let's see that code:


This is the basic img line of code. It automatically aligns left and gets resized (the actual image is 450px wide), and your next text will appear below it.
http://i938.photobucket.com/albums/ad221/ArmyPublicAffairsOffice/inline_image_code.png" align="left" border="1">This is the inline image code. You MUST get this exactly right-- every quotation mark and space-- or your whole article will not appear at all. Start your text immediately after the code bracket, and it appears next to the image.
Note the difference in appearance as I was not concerned about counting lines, that the text continued on below the image.
:8: Publication Time: See yesterday's Saturday Night Special Edition and note the number of votes and Comments. That was published in the evening. Bump back to the Friday edition and see the vote and Comment count. Published in the morning.
I like to prepare my work late at night, then publish first thing in the morning. My theory is that I want the maximum time on the Latest News pages, and that time should be when the most players are on. Weekdays, 0800 to 0900 hrs is when I figure office and school people are screwing off and playing the game. Weekends are a crap shoot, but I still think more people are on mornings and mid-day and looking to read something over coffee than in the evening.

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I hope some of this information will be useful to you. I am not running a class, here, just offering up some basic tips on form and format that I employ in publishing my work. Please don't ask me a lot of questions about this stuff-- tinker with it in an old issue of your paper, and learn on your own.
For a proper education in eRep Journalism, I suggest contacting Robert Grosseteste about signing up for a Journalism course at North American University.
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http://embracetheshadows.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/sexy-computer.jpg" align="left" border="1" width="400">read, vote, comment, and subscribe to these papers:
The USArmy Times
Defense Intel Review
Civilian DoD Orders
The Briefing Room
The Angry Kitten
McFarland Journal
eRepublik Insider
2-Clicker Morning Coffee
Stars & Stripes Journal
The Buck Stops Here
The Irregular Repertoire
USArmy Application
all USArmed Forces
"Gosh, I've met just the nicest people since joining the USArmy on eRepublik!"

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http://i938.photobucket.com/albums/ad221/ArmyPublicAffairsOffice/Custer_2Star_100.png" align="left" border="1">Major General George Armstrong "F-Bomb" Custer
Senior Officer, Army Public Affairs Office
Headquarters Corps Quartermaster
Combat Veteran since Taco Bell
An Equal Opportunity Offender

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