Bylines for writers

There has been a little confusion regarding the difference between articles and blogs at MyBuffalo.

Here is the delineation:

• Blog: anyone can post a blog. You can blog. I can blog. Joe in Accounting can blog. In fact, I wish he would blog. That guy knows some dirt.
  
  
• Article: although they are written in the blog format, an article is actually a Buffalo.com-contributed piece. Deanna and I have access to administrative tags that allow us to mark certain blogs as "articles." This allows us to push content into the Articles section.

In the very near future, we will have a special interface for the Buffalo.com contributors that will allow you to directly post articles to the Articles section. This interface will also allow our photographers to bulk-upload photos. It's coming very soon! I was actually messing with some of the behind-the-scenes tools on this particular piece yesterday.

One more note for writers:

When you post an article, you obviously will no longer have the whole "Buffalo.com/YourHub John Doe" title anymore...so we need you to add a byline. At the top of each article you post, you should have a heading that looks like this:

John Doe
Buffalo.com Contributor

If you have any questions, please let me know!

...and here's a tip for the writers

Buffalo.com photo by Tom Parry.

I have been noticing this quite a bit lately, and wanted to make a quick note -

I know that when writing for online media, you don't necessarily want to be voluminous - you want to keep it relatively short and sweet.

However, please do not feel like you need to sacrifice key details in order to keep your word count down.

Writing a news story for an online outlet is the same as writing for print - you still need your who, what, where, when, why, and how.

If you're writing a review, you still need to include both a summary of the event and your own personal critique.

If you're posting a blog, you still need to follow the rules of grammar - words need to be spelled correctly, abbreviations are still a no-no, and so on.

I know I have mentioned this many times, and I will harp on it again and again - buy an AP (Associated Press) style guide and read it. Learn it. Know it. Use it.

If you want to write professionally, you will need to know AP style. If you do not know AP style, you will not get writing jobs. It's that simple. Editors will not have the patience to make these changes. An AP style guide costs less than $20, and if you plan to write in the future, it is the best investment you will ever make.

It is intensely frustrating to see the same style mistakes over and over again, and if you get one thing out of this internship, it is this message: LEARN AP STYLE.

Writers: An interesting interview opportunity.

So apparently there is a guy who is going to live in a suspended box over Darien Lake for a few weeks, and he is - surprise, surprise - actively courting the media.

Buffalo.com writers - check out the story, and if you want to interview Mr. Galpin, please let me know and we'll make the arrangements.

I don't think there are a lot of photo opportunities involved in a situation in which a gentleman is living in a suspended box...but if there's some angle I'm missing, let me know, Spotted gang.