Filing Your Story: A Style Sheet

JRN 300 STYLE SHEET

When you enter your content in WordPress, use the TEXT option, NOT the Visual option. The Visual option adds extraneous coding you do not want. You can toggle over to visual for a look (or use preview) but ENTER the content with the TEXT option.

Headlines and subheads are downstyle. Capitalize only the first word in the headline and proper nouns. Numbers should never be spelled out. Subheads are recommended in long stories. Subheads should be downstyle and bold body type.

Bylines:

By Sam Spartan

Listen Up Lansing staff writer

Place references: Follow AP style

Day references should include the date, as our stories live on, on the web. The day of the week is optional: "The board met at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 3." The year is usually not needed, as stories are time-stamped. In dates, AP style is to not use ordinal numbers such as 3^rd.

Paragraphs are not indented. Simply hit return for an extra line between paragraphs.

Put the first photo with your story above the story if it is full width or to the right of the lede for maximum exposure. You’ve gone to the trouble to take a photo – show it!)

Stories continue off the home page after 3-5 paragraphs or a logical break point. Use the –more– button in WordPress. This saves readers from scrolling through long stories and gives us more headlines on the home page.

Hyperlink from names or nouns. Do not simply paste in an email address or hyperlink a phrase like "click here." A link from a noun is called a content link. Google likes them.

Example:
The contest hours are on the Happy Valley website.

Multimedia like a slide show or video needs to have a blurb of at least 150 words to explain it and to give search engines the cues they need to find it. A video posted on YouTube or Vimeo should link to our news website. The blurb goes on both locations.