With springtime come new beginnings. Thus, it’s a perfect opportunity to refresh The Ukrainian Weekly’s cooperation with our readers and community activists. Following are some suggestions about how to better communicate with us and, through us, with the paper’s readership.
We do prefer submissions by e-mail, but you can still use the regular mail if that works better for you. Please note that, if you send us a message by e-mail, expect that we will respond likewise. Therefore, please do not block our responses. Please include a specific subject in your subject line. For example, “NYC festival article” (not simply “article”).
It is important to use the appropriate e-mail address for your messages. News materials, both stories and photos, intended for publication in The Ukrainian Weekly should be e-mailed to the editorial staff address: [email protected]. Similar materials intended for our Ukrainian-language sister publication, Svoboda, should be sent to: [email protected]. And, just because you’ve sent photos to one of the papers don’t assume that we will automatically pass them along to the other.
When you send us information in attachment form, please do not label the attachment “The Ukrainian Weekly,” “Ukrainian Weekly,” “The Weekly,” any other variation thereof. Please use an appropriate label for your attachment that will distinguish it from others (e.g., “exhibit opening,” not “news story”). Articles should be sent as text documents, not PDFs. The story file (not the body of your e-mail message) should contain: the name of the author (byline), captions to any photos sent and photo credits (the name of the photographer, not the person whose camera you used).
More on photos: please do not ask us to visit sites or online photo albums in order to download photos that go with your stories. Please 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, don’t assume they will be good in print). Remember: if a photo you have looks fuzzy or out of focus, it is. So, don’t send us that one. We’d much prefer to have two great photos rather than 10 poor or marginal ones! When e-mailing photos, 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).
We humbly ask that you send information about events not later than 10 days after their occurrence, in order to keep the news fresh on our pages. (Who wants to read about St. Nicholas in March?) At the same time, we caution readers that oftentimes we cannot run your story immediately as there are many demands on the space in our paper and each week is a careful balancing act. We must publish the most time sensitive and significant news first, while making a judgment call about others. Another request: please use the full names (not just initials and a surname) of everyone mentioned in a story; please do not guess the spellings of names.
You say you’re not a writer, or don’t have time to write a story? Well, you don’t necessarily have to write an exhaustive account about your community event. Quite often, a simple caption to a great photograph will do the job. But please remember what they used to call the “the 5 Ws”: the who, what, when, where and why of the event being reported.
The Weekly welcomes letters to the editor on topics of concern to the Ukrainian American and Ukrainian Canadian communities, and especially letters related to materials that have been published in our newspaper. Letters must be signed (anonymous letters are not published). The daytime phone number and complete mailing address of the letter-writer must be given for verification purposes; the city you are writing from will be published along with your name. The key for letter-writers: be clear and succinct. We have a very generous limit of 500 words for letters (that’s about a quarter of a page in our paper). As with all materials sent to The Weekly, letters may be edited or abridged.
Finally, if you have any questions that are not answered by the helpful (we hope) hints above, e-mail [email protected] or call 973-292-9800 and ask for one of our editors. As we end this editorial, we look forward to a new beginning with you, Dear Readers – our community partners.