Weekly Story #1: Pointers On Filing Your Stories

Okay, so this was our first time doing our weekly routine. Like many things you do the first time, there are hiccups and headaches. Here, we will go over some of the more frequent ones and see if we can get things smoothed out for our second and subsequent weekly stories: 

• Your story and visuals need to be filed directly to the Spartan Newsroom WordPress account. Your source lists are the thing that gets emailed to me, not your actual stories.
• DO NOT write in visual mode on WordPress. It ends up leaving a ton of extraneous coding when I try to edit it, making it impossible to read. Here's a screen shot of what it looks like:

.. and this is what it looked like on visual (where I can't do all the editing I need to do):

Can you read the text version with all that coding (that DOES NOT appear when you write a story in the text mode)? I sure as hell can't. So, please make sure you are writing in the text mode, located on the tab in the upper right corner.

• Write headlines down style; that is, only capitalize the start of a headline and proper nouns. Write it like this: Man bites dog in Chicago; not this: Man Bites Dog In Chicago
• Add captions in the media library, not on the post page.
• With captions, don't forget to include a credit line: photo by your name here. And for graphics and charts, add a source of your information: chart by your name here. Source: name of source of information.
• Upload pictures and charts and fact boxes to the media library, and then insert them into your story in the visual mode.
• Before sending your story, be sure to update the status tab in the upper right corner to "Send to Omar." And only then email me your source list. When I see a source list in my mailbox and a story set to "Send to Omar," it tells me it is done and ready to be edited, graded and published.
• Your login can be found at http://news.jrn.msu.edu/wp-admin
• There, use your MSU email address as your login and your temporary password as your password.
• Directions for how to use WordPress are here: http://news.jrn.msu.edu/student-journalist-resources/the-wordpress-dashboard/
• Questions? Let me know ASAP.