Join the new world

In the past few days, I saw one of our citizens wrote a few really short articles asking for inspiration for his newspaper. In the end, de did a few interviews with the CP candidates before the election. I believe that many people really wants to write articles but either does not know where to start or what to write about. This guide will try to help you to be a better article writer.

First I Need!!!!

Before you can start your writing career in eRepublik, you need to be level 8 or 50 experience points before you can start your newspaper. When you are level 8, on the tabs on the top, select My Place and click newspaper. There you will create your newspaper. You will need to create an unique name for your newspaper that no one is using for their newspaper. So you cannot choose "Better Tomorrow" since that is my personal newspaper. You can also like your personal avatar, upload a small picture which will be your newspaper avatar. The last thing you need to do is to pay your onetime 2 gold to create your paper. Once you have done that, you own a newspaper and you can publish whatever you want within the game rules.

Also for whatever reasons you want to change the name, the paper article, or location etc, you can go to My Place> Newspaper and on the left below the write an article button there is an edit newspaper button. In that page, you can change your paper's name etc just like the creation page but minus the 2 gold cost. You can change your name, location, paper avatar as much as you want.

Types of Articles

The Bad

There are many different types of newspaper in eRepublic. I believe one of the most annoying type of articles that people new in the media can write are articles that are like the following.

"Hi, I am ________ and this is the first edition of my newspaper __________. This newspaper will discuss politics and econ. Thanks and stay tune for more....."

I really do not want to be mean, but to tell the truth, we really do not care. It is good to have such a goal but it is better for you to actually write what you intend to do. Instead of telling us what you want to write in the near future, write what you state you are going to do. Articles of this length, or of this nature should not be in a newspaper but a shout and nothing more.

Troll Articles

I am personally are not a fan of this type of articles. They are like the articles above in length (most but not all) but instead of stating an intention above, troll article's only purpose is to provoke people. In a way it is like a shout of insult.

Look at eHil's (An ePolish troll) article and you will know what troll articles are. They are childish and really stupid in my opinion. I wish all readers of this guide will not resort to such low class style of article writing.

Fun Articles

There are a few examples of fun articles. There can be trollish like Mr Woldy's article which while looks like a troll article, but the intention was not to incite/ or provoke negative feelings. The purpose was to be fun for a laugh or two. It is in good spirit which eHil's article is clearly not.

Other types of fun articles are more complex like Dncelyn's MHAB series which use eRep events and add his own lore into it. Fun articles not to be taken seriously.


Simple Articles

There are many kinds of simple articles. I would state that most news articles are simple articles. All they do is state what, when, and how it happened. On day XYZ, nation A attacked region Q and nation A won the battle etc. They are really simple articles as they only state what happened. They state the facts and that is about it. Most of this type of simple articles are MoFA reports or congressional reports etc. While they lack creativity, it is still vital to our media.

A different type of simple article are must read articles. They are a collection of links to other articles. They are not hard to do. All you need is to read many different articles around the eWorld and post a list of your favorites or what you think are the most important/ worth reading. Examples to this type of articles are from Myers11's Today's Must Read series to Lord Rhindon's Breakfast Politics Series to the eGerman state run Kulturstaatsministerium's Deutschlandnachrichten and the eCroatian Info-Min series. I would argue my Germany Today/ Dutch News series are simple articles too but they do offer personal analysis which is a mix of simple and complex articles(discuss later in the guide).

Interviews

Interviews are really neat and fun articles you can do. In a way they are like simple articles as you report what the interviewee said but it is more complex than just a normal simple articles which almost does not require you to think or be creative. Interviews require you to think of interesting questions. Overall, the strength of the interview are the questions themselves. Ask questions what you yourself wants to know as well as that of your audience.

There are a few ways to do interviews. The most simple are done via PM (either in the game PM system or an off-site PM like in your national forums etc). This method is easiest for both the interviewer and the interviewee; since, the interviewer can just write the questions and send it and does not do anything until the interviewee replies back. It is easy for the interviewee too as s/he can take as much time as they want to answer each question (no stress). While it is not a bad method to do the interview, I think a live interview is better. The more advance form of an interview are done on IRC or chat. It is a lot more work than the PM interview, since the interviewer needs to establish the questions first. Then s/he needs to work on the logistic so that both the interviewer and interviewee can meet on IRC. The interviewer ask one question at a time and the interviewee have to answer it like a real chat. The benefits of this form of interview is that it does not give the interviewee to plan their answer. S/he must answer it within a reasonable time period and the answers are most likely to be more raw and less BS. Also this type of interview allows the interviewer to ask follow up questions to a response that the interviewee have made. It just feels more like a discussion than a Q&A secession. The BKA series is a good example of an live interview.

Complex Articles

I think it is important to know What, When, and how of that of the simple articles, but I am more interested in why. Why are things like this instead of that. Complex articles are articles that ask challenging questions and really ask the question why. The article might not find an answer to the question but it is to challenge the common understanding and to offer a new way to think of the issues that we face in this game. Instead of just saying eNL is having a population crisis, Tonie112 in his article asked serious questions. Why?

The next type of complex articles are response/ reaction articles. It is really easy to say I am against the WP's wage increase a few weeks ago, but why? Complex articles require some research and it is not just reporting but providing evidence why you support your views etc. Tonie112's NO to Minimum Wage Increase article offers supporting evidence to support his opinion of why the wage increase is bad. It creates an hypothesis and he tries to use evidence to defend his position.

Another type of complex articles are articles that challenge the conventional views of the game. They offer new insight to this game, and it tries to offer a new way for the readers to view the eWorld. I recently wrote a few articles of this type which I think is an good example of this type of articles. If you look at Bundesrepublik Phoenix or United States of Phoenix or my The eCommunist Delusion which offers new or different ways to look at our eWorld. It challenge the normal understanding and tires to make us rethink of what we think are the conventional understanding.

To sum up what complex articles are, they are articles that ask a question (hypothesis) which tries to make us think. It is not a report of what happens but a discussion, trying to convince the reader to have your view of thinking. All in all, it answers the question why.

What to do?

You will need to decide on what kind of articles you want to use. Also you need to find an issue you want to write about. If you just want to do simple articles, then it is really not difficult. Just read the news and keep up to date with current events and just write what happened etc. However, if you want to write a complex article or an interview, I would suggest you read many newspaper and be up to date; however, you need to think critically. It is best to be active in politics as well and be active on the forums etc. Read the forums and be on IRC. Many times, many great interesting topics are discussed on the IRC or the forum which is a great place to get inspiration for articles etc. Also, read the comments of your own articles or comments from other peoples articles, it is really interesting and a great place to get ideas. The two complex articles I talked about got inspiration from comments and IRC. My eCommunist Delusion article was from the comments I got from my newspaper. I wrote a few articles which was against the eCommunist in eGermany and got a lot of comments from the eCommunist from around the eWorld. Am I so quick to say all eCommunist are stupid etc, certainly not. So I use this curiosity to research this article. My Bundesrepublik article got it's based on the IRC and the comments from other articles. I keep seeing Hail PHX etc and the PHX command's response to Kaspar09 of Latvia which inspires me to write that article.

For me personally, I do not write what I know, but I ask questions and investigates the issue with my RL knowledge as well as that of other peoples via comments, discussions etc and tries to answer my question I have asked. As I write my articles, I learn more and more about the issues. I started with an opinion of an certain issue before the article, but by the end of the article, I changed my opinion about it. I think a good article is an article that is like a discussion which talks to the reader. It does not just state what happened and that is it, but really talks to the reader, trying to convince him or her your view point. It does not forces your viewpoint upon them but mainly suggestions with supporting evidence.

Additional Tips

I would highly recommend that you write your article on MS Word or some kind of an offsite word processing program. I say this since Word etc has spell checks and other tools which helps you more than that of eRep. Also if you have a HTML error or when you are idle on a single page for too long, you will lose all of your work, writing it on word etc will allow you to have a backup copy so you do not need to rewrite the whole article again.

I would say your article should be of a certain size/ length. I am not suggesting your articles should be a wall of text like most of my articles, but I would say at least 300 words or so. Unless you are doing a troll or fun article, you really do need at least 300 to tell us what, when, and how an issue.

I would recommend that you have a picture or an image on the top of each articles you write like this article. It looks more professional and it just looks better. Besides most articles in eRep have this so it is ideal that your article should have this as well.

Depends on your articles, you might discuss many different parts. Like in this article, it have many sections and subsections. From "First I Need" to this section "Additional Tips," It is an good idea to break your article into logical parts which makes it easier for your readers to read your article. Imagine this whole article without the sections and subsections, it would be much harder to read.

Final Remarks

I really hope you find this guide helpful. Writing in eRep is not hard at all. Once you get started, it comes more and more easy. Like all things in life, the more active you are in this game, the more ideas and recourses you will gain for articles etc. Therefore, not just about writing articles, but I urge all readers to continue to be active as the more active you are, the more fun the game is.

In this guide, I did not mention about writing manifestos etc. Since that is more of a congressional nature, I will save that part of article writing in my congress guide. Besides at this point with the article being over 2360 words long, I doubt you want to read more.

Many thanks for reading this guide and I really hope you gain something about it. Also, please leave feedback, comments, or something I missed etc so that I can add on and improve this guide etc.

[img]http://teenormous.com/images/t-shirts/faroutshirts.com/images-LiveLong-Preview.png?1234490938[/img]

Konrad Neumann
Former eGerman President x2
MoI of eNetherlands
Congressman of Northern Netherlands x2
eGerman Congressman x6
Party President of Green Liberal Democrats
Party President of Open Minded Germany x5
Former eGerman MoFA from Aug-Jan 2010

http://thenewworld.nl/images/rijksoverheid-s.jpg">

Please join the eNL forums and subscribe to the following governmental newspapers

*Forum of the Netherlands
*Ministry of Media & Education
*Ministry of Defense
*Ministry of Home Affairs (Interior Affairs/ Binnenlandse Zaken)
*Ministry of Recruitment & Coaching
*Ministry of Foreign Affairs
*Ministry of Economic Affairs
*Ministry of Finance
*Ministry of Raws