Community Directories: How To Do It

COMMUNITY DIRECTORY ITEMS

To learn about your community and to build the background information for our news sites, you will write three community directory items. You may have seen versions of these on sites like MetroMix and Patch. But we want to better than what they do. To achieve that – and to get the photo – you must visit these places. Do not cut and paste any words or images from the web. That is not journalism and might be plagiarism. These are your challenges:

• To be 100% accurate
• To follow style so that our items are consistent
• To include visual elements that you make yourself
• To have some fact or nugget that makes locals say, "Gee, I didn't know that."

Each directory item should have the name in bold and that hyperlinks to the website (if there is one), a photo or graphic to the right, a description of 50-100 words followed by relevant information such as the address, phone number, hours, available parking, price ranges, that will help people decide whether they want to go to the place.

I did one to give you an example. It is the Hannah's Koney Island item under the Entirely East Lansing Restaurants/bars dropdown. (It is a little longer than you need to do because I really love coney islands.)

A couple things to remember:

Go to the Mom and Pops. They are unique and more interesting. Plus, Mom or Pop might be working there. Going to places like Arby's may seem safe, but is almost are almost guaranteed to be boring. Plus, you might encounter the Arby's gag rule:

"No one except the CEO is allowed to talk to the media -- and the CEO DOES NOT TALK TO THE MEDIA!"

Get it?

The other thing to remember is Louey's Law. For circumstances I am not at liberty to divulge, Louey's Bar & Grill has set its hours to reflect every circumstance journalists will encounter when trying to get the style right with times and days of the week. Louey's is famous for its $1 hamburgers, $2 if you want Louey to cook them. If you get days or times wrong, I will refer you to Louey's Law.

Sunday: noon to midnight
Monday and Tuesday: 1:30-11 p.m.
Wednesday to Friday: 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.
Saturday: noon to 2 a.m.
Then, put your signer at the end, in italic and with a dash, like this:

—Joe Grimm