Yes, it’s that time of year when we have to finally admit that summer is over. The leaves are changing color, the temperatures are dropping, the kids are well into their new school year schedules, and Ukrainian community life is in full swing. As for us here at The Ukrainian Weekly, after the summertime lull, we’ve begun receiving news about community activities. For those familiar with our paper and our guidelines, all is good. But for those who might be submitting materials to our paper for the first time (as we’ve seen from numerous e-mails with inquiries), we offer a few helpful hints on how best to communicate with us and ensure that your submissions are published. (For those who’ve previously seen these directions, well, a reminder never hurts.)
We prefer submissions by e-mail. Expect that we will respond likewise, therefore, please do not block our responses. News materials intended for publication in The Weekly should be e-mailed to the editorial staff address: [email protected]. Do not send these to our advertising department, or our administration, or our webmaster. Please include a specific subject in your subject line. For example, “NYC festival article” (not simply “article”).
When you send us information in attachment form, please do not label the attachment “The Ukrainian Weekly,” “The Weekly,” any other variation thereof. Please use a label that will distinguish your attachment from others (i.e., “exhibit opening,” not “news story”). Articles should be sent as text documents, not PDFs. The story file should contain: the name of the author (byline), captions to any photos sent and photo credits (the photographer’s name, not that of the person whose camera was used).
Speaking of photos, please do not ask us to visit sites or online photo albums in order to download photos. Please do send jpg files to us directly. Do not embed photos in your text documents. Do send good-quality, high-resolution photos that are suitable for reproduction (just because they look good online or on your smartphone, doesn’t make them OK for print). Please make sure the photos are labeled and that captions correspond to those labels (these may be numbers or names, but the photos and captions must match for us to get it right).
We ask that you send information about events ASAP after their occurrence to keep the news fresh. At the same time, we caution readers that sometimes we simply cannot run your story immediately due to the many demands on the finite space in our paper. Thus, we must publish the most time sensitive and significant news first, while making a judgment call about others.
Please remember that you don’t have to be a writer and you don’t have to provide an exhaustive account of your event. Quite often, a simple caption to a great photograph will do the job. But please remember what they used to teach us in journalism school: the “the 5 Ws”: the who, what, when, where and why of the event being reported. Also, keep in mind that the editors here will work with you on your submission. We’re here to help, so consider us your staff!
Finally, if you have any further questions, e-mail [email protected] (preferred) or call 973-292-9800 and ask for one of our editors. We look forward to running reports about your community events in our community newspaper.