First Things First: Sign Up

2. First Things First: Sign Up • Go to http://www.lasplash.com/account/apply.php • Register as a journalist or intern • Fill out the forms thoroughly • This video will take you through the process - http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Account_Set_Up/Account_Set_Up.html • Choose a Logon Name and Password you will remember! You will need them in the future! Congratulations! You are now signed up with the ability to post articles using Article Manager and Calendar Events.

3. This is a list of very helpful video presentations. Please take the time to watch them. • Lean to register: • http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Account_Set_Up/Account_Set_Up.html • Learn side by side Photoshop tool: • http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Photoshop_Ashley/Photoshop_Ashley.html • Learn to post calendar events: • http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Calendar_Procedure/Calendar_Procedure.html • Learn to request things: • http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Requesting_Things/Requesting_Things.html • Learn to use Event Manager if your city has it set up: • http://www.lasplash.com/videos/Event_Manager/Event_Manager.html

4. Our Procedures: The rules of the road The following lessons are designed to teach you how to navigate our online publishing world. The rules are many and all are important to keep your articles from crashing and burning. • Lesson 1 • Writing Your Articles - General philosophy of article composition and preparing your articles • Lesson 2 • Article Manager – Text Prep- Preparing your text for Article Manager, our online content management system • Lessons 3 • Article Manager – Text Uploading- How to upload the text portion of your article to Article Manager • Lessons 4 • Photoshop Basics- How to prepare photographs for your articles • Lessons 5 • Article Manager – Photos • How to import your photos into Article Manager • How to place your photos into the article. • Finishing up for an Editor to review. • Lesson 6 (optional but very useful) • Photoshop – Advanced Photo Techniques- Making Macros Procedures • Lesson 7 (optional but very useful) • Photoshop - Advanced Photo Techniques- Side-by-side photo Procedures

5. Lesson 1 • Writing your articles • General philosophy of article composition and preparing your articles

6. THE BASIC TOOL • Microsoft Word or other text program with spell check and grammar checker.* I have a spelling checker It came with my PC It plainly marks for my revue Mistakes I cannot sea I've run this poem threw it I'm sure your please to no, It's letter perfect in it's weigh My checker tolled me sew -- anonymous *remember that spell and grammar checking programs are no substitute for proofreading.

7. WORDS COUNT • BODY - Articles must be a minimum of 500 words and can be as long as you feel is necessary. Some of our stories are as much as 2,000 words. Try to say what you have to say clearly and succinctly. Longer is not necessarily better. • SUMMARY - Articles must have a 3 to 25 words summary geared to pique the readers’ interest. Use sentence case.NEVER USE ALL CAPS! Marcel Proust once apologized to a friend for writing a ten-page letter, explaining he didn’t have the time to write a short one.

8. Style Let your personality show. An article is usually a blend of your opinion (the Color) and the facts (Black & White) • Write as if you are speaking to a friend about what you saw or did and what you felt. • Include the facts that readers will want to know. These usually come from a press release. • We want the color to lead and the facts to follow. • If appropriate, put in the who, what, when, where and why and a link to the product of services website.

9. Text Procedures Once you have written your article, you are ready to load it into Article Manager. But are you ready? Before you log on, go back and do all the steps below. We are not a blog, and your writing must adhere to professional standards. Step 1: Prepare articles for uploading • Put hard return breaks between paragraphs. Do not indent. • Check for sentence structure errors • Run spell check and then do a second check by reading the entire article through. • Look for troublemakers like ‘their’ and ‘there,’ ‘its’ and ‘it’s,’ ‘too’ & ‘to.’ • Imagine someone else reading the article and be objective about your interest or lack as you read. Fix it. • When reviewing an event or product, only write about your personal experiences as it is of interest to a reader. • Don’t be a kill joy or give too much away. Make the reader want to experience what you did with just enough information. • Give the who, what, when, where if readers might need that information. • Try to have text that corresponds with and explains the photos you will be using.

10. LET ME SPELL IT OUT FOR YOU … You have to check spelling more than once. Use your spell check program. Read it yourself at least once just to catch any problems. Fix the problem or problems and read it again until you go from start to finish without a hitch. Write out your summary and captions in your word processing program so you can spell check them, too. I know, I know, you want to just write the captions under the pictures in Article Manager. Resist. That is just the devil trying to lead you to perdition. Take care that you never spell a word wrong. Always before you write a word, consider how it is spelled, and, if you do not remember, turn to a dictionary. -Thomas Jefferson

11. TITLES (NOTE: The above title would not be appropriate for an article.) • All articles must have a title. • Use title case. Never use ALL CAPS. This Is Title Case - Use It! • The title must always start out with what you want to show up in a search engine. • The title keywords must be used in naming the article photos before uploading. SEARCH ENGINE MAXIMIZATION - The purpose of online articles is that they be ‘findable’ by someone looking for a subject of interest. That information is your title ‘lead.’ Write “Ralph Lauren Spring Collection 2007 - Easy Living.” Do not write, “Easy Living - Ralph Lauren Spring Collection 2007.” Readers looking for the info in your article are not typing “easy living” into Google, they are typing “Ralph Lauren.”

12. LOCK AND LOAD Getting your words into Article Manager • Open Notepad, Simple Text, TextEdit or whatever program you have. These programs remove all formatting that will confuse Article Manager. Any editing necessary i.e. bold, italics, underline etc. will be done in Article Manager. • Copy your entire articleand paste your entire article into Notepad, Simple Text, TextEdit or whatever program you have. • Then select everything in Notepad and cut the text from Notepadandpaste it into the Content Box of Article Manager. (Lesson 3) • Make sure to have a link to the event or the product for the readers to click on if appropriate. (more later) All articles will also need photographs - at least 4. But that comes later. The next lesson is all about using Article Manager to lay out and insert your article into Splash Magazines. Before we go on, review the following lists of do’s and don’ts.

13. Journalism Dos and Don'ts • Proofread your article already written in MS Word. • Look for sentence structure errors. • Look for spelling errors with spell-check • Look for obvious mistakes, example: there for their or choose for chose etc. • Be objective in your reading-- imagine what someone else would get from the article. • The article is about the event or product you are reviewing, • Don’t take much space talking about your personal experiences unless they will be of interest to the reader. • Make sure not to be a kill joy. • Don’t give too much away, make the reader want to experience what you did with enough information, but not too much. • If appropriate, give the who, what, when, where and why. • Try to have text that corresponds with the photos you plan are planning on using • If you do research and have the facts and figures, write where they came from • Use hyphens for compound modifiers • 30-day trial • three-round format • Numbers • AP style: numerals if 10 or higher (unless starting a sentence); numerals for ages • Time • 1 p.m. (NOT 1:00 PM) • midnight (NOT 12 a.m.) • noon (NOT 12 p.m.)

14. Keep punctuation inside quotes (,") • Very - Don't use this word. It's an adverb that modifies an adjective. If the adjective needs "very," you need to use a different and better adjective. "Very" is overused and has lost its effectiveness. (the word “that” is overused, too) • Avoid I, me, my, us, our, we • Don't use "seems" (a concluding word) • Respect the value of people’s time. Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. • We all need to remember: It’s not fascinating just because I said it. • Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it. A good focus is a simple idea that people care about–in a newspaper story, it’s the lead. It’s a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth as a model: the whole first movement is based on four notes. • Look for the heat in your subject. Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. This primacy of emotion is routinely abused in mass media–hence the prevalence of sex, death, greed and vanity–but you don’t have to go that far, just look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide. • Whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions. These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and clichés.

15. Use plain speech, and talk like a real person. Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can’t say it plainly, that may mean you don’t understand it well enough yet. • Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. They seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, “If you find an adjective, kill it.” Try it, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. • Opinions are not facts, even your opinions. Opinions make personal journalism lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions when you’re predisposed to believe something. This is the source of deluges of unreliable information on the Web. • Identify your sources. Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive–even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! –and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility. • Identify interests. If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that’s another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying. • Fact-check. Reputable pro media outlets use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: spell-check! • Short Paragraphs. A 100-word paragraph looks pretty long on a Web page. Long paragraphs send a signal to the reader: This will require effort. The writer expected you to have a lot of spare time. Sit down and read awhile. Short paragraphs send a different message: I'm easy! This won't take long at all! Read me!

16. Brevity: Write tight. Omit all unnecessary words. • Boldface: Depending on the content, words or phrases in boldface can help readers find what they want. Combining boldface and subheadings could lead to visual noise, so do not overdo it. Combining links and boldface text in the same paragraph could have the same unsightly result. • When to use bold, e.g., Title of books, movies, products whenever you want some word to stand out. • When to italicize: e.g., Italics versus quotation marksItalicize titles of books, newspapers, magazines, scientific journals, TV series, record albums, movies, plays, works of art, very long poems, operas and other long musical works, ships, aircraft, spacecraft, satellites. The names of poems, articles, and book chapters are set off by quotation marks. • Words used as wordsItalicize words used as words. • The term ozone refers to an atmospheric gas. • Non-English wordsIf a non-English word is unfamiliar to the intended audience, then set it in italics; otherwise use roman type. • Math is his bête noir.BUT: She's a real bête de somme. • When to underscore: e.g., when you name your photos use an underscore between the words you want to link together for search engines e.g. Calvin_Klein_Fall_2007

17. Never use all caps: • Underlining • DO NOT underline words or phrases in the copy of a website—in that context, underlining always signifies a hotlink. Instead of underlining, use italics. • Short Paragraphs: A 100-word paragraph looks pretty long on a Web page. Long paragraphs send a signal to the reader: This will require effort. The writer expected you to have a lot of spare time. Sit down and read awhile. Short paragraphs send a different message: I'm easy! This won't take long at all! Read me! • Lists: Numbered, bulleted or other indented lists help the reader make sense of the information on the page. In many print contexts, lists would look ugly and thus are not used. On Web pages, lists work well in almost all contexts. Like paragraphs, lists appeal more to the reader when they are short. Example: • Sentence Structure: Be straightforward. While a meandering introductory clause may seem like a good idea to you, the reader might stop reading -- before she gets to the heart of your sentence. Example: • Active Verbs: It is easy to write with passive verbs (am, is, are, has, have). Using active verbs makes the writer work harder -- but the reader benefits. The writer also benefits, because the reader stays interested. Passive verbs bore readers. Bored readers leave. • Say What You Mean: Try saying it out loud before you write it. We tend to speak more directly than we write. We get to the point more quickly, too, when we can see the listener's eyes glazing over. • Redundancy: Reading the same information twice wastes a person's time other than the repeat of the text for the Title and Summary. • More can be found at http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/index.htm

18. Congratulations! • You are now done with Lesson #1 • Please move on to Lesson #2 If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please email them to ld@lasplash.com Thanks Lawrence