Download: PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com: Department Submission Guidelines

PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com gives students in Klein’s journalism department an opportunity to have their multimedia work published to the public. Stories submitted do not have to originate from the PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods class, nor do they need to originate from students who have taken the class. It is a platform any student in the department can utilize to publish professionally produced work.

However, all stories need to be rooted in Philadelphia to be considered for publication on PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.

Below are the general guidelines and criteria students and/or faculty should be aware of to submit work and have it considered. All stories must also adhere to basic reporting standards and practices. Students should also refer to the tutorials page where many of the most common questions and issues are addressed: philadelphianeighborhoods.com/tutorials.

Students should also review our website before submitting for style, tone and voice.

Please note: All work must be the student’s own. While we are willing to work with anyone to get packages ready to run, we cannot dedicate extensive resources to editing, fact checking, line edits, etc. For that reason, work submitted needs to follow the standards below in order to be considered for publication.

Please reach out to Christopher Malo with any questions: [email protected]

PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods Style Basics

All stories filed need, at a minimum, 50 words of copy and a horizontal photo. Even if the story is not primarily words or photos, we need words these as a multimedia outlet and for WordPress purposes.

WRITTEN
All written material must adhere to Associated Press Style. Exceptions are: PN uses italics for names of television programs, movies, books and newspapers rather than quotation marks; do not use serial/Oxford comma; do not use “over” unless in reference to a spatial relationship, use “more than.”

• We use past tense and third person voice. Do not stray from that without prior approval.
• One space between sentences, not two.
• Keep paragraphs short, two or three sentences at most.
• Make quotes stand alone as their own paragraphs.
• Place attribution (s/he said) after the first sentence in a multi-sentence quote.
• Avoid “partial quotes.”
• When talking about people, say “people who,” not “people that.”
• Do not say “over” when meaning “more than.” Do not say less than when meaning fewer.
• “Punctuation ALWAYS goes inside the quotation marks,” George screamed.

PHOTOS
Photos should capture color, action and feeling, and be relevant to the story. Photos of buildings and headshots are boring and don’t evoke thought or emotion. When featuring a person in a photo, make sure the subject is slightly left or right of center (the same as in a video). Candid shots make better photos than posed shots.

• At every situation, shoot wide, medium range and close-up shots.
• All images need people in them (with the exception of secondary close-up shots).
• Shoot portraits in environments that create a visual story about the subject.
• Follow the subject doing whatever s/he does.
• All submissions need a strong horizontal for the top/featured image.
• Do not over-manipulate images in PhotoShop. Just crop, tone and re-size, please.
• Resize images so they are 15 inches across the widest edge and at 72 DPI.

VIDEO
• Interviews should always be shot separately from the action.
• Be sure to shoot video of the subject doing whatever the subject does. Try to capture nat sound – including potential soundbites/quotes – while following the subject.
• Video storytelling should walk the viewer/listener through a narrative, with a beginning, middle and end.
• Here is a rough guideline for video stories:

  • Around 3 or 4 soundbites per 60 seconds of video.
  • A soundbite should not last more than 10 seconds, if that.
  • Cut away shots should last around 3 to 5 seconds. Preferably 3.
  • That means for a 90 second video, between 4 and 7 soundbites and around 18 cut-away shots.

• If doing stand-ups in the video, either do them as ins and outs or as a bridge in the middle. Do not do an in, bridge and out.
• If including a sig out, it should be: “Reporting in (neighborhood) for Philadelphia Neighborhoods, I’m (name).”
• Everyone who speaks in a video must have a lower third. Lower thirds should be semi-opaque black background with white Verdana text. Banner files can be found and downloaded in our tutorials.
• Video must be hosted on our Vimeo account due to legalities. This is an absolute. Please include a .wav or .mpg when submitting.

OTHER MEDIUMS
Audio, data and other visual multimedia stories are welcomed.

We are also able to incorporate and embed other interactive, third-party storytelling apps or platforms such as Knight Lab’s Juxtapose, Soundcite, StoryMap, Timeline or others such as Google maps, etc. Not all work, but we are open to these if the site can support them. Feel free to contact us to talk about what will or will not work.

SOURCES
All stories must have at least three human sources.

Retain a list of sources for each submission and provide those sources when filing a story for publication on PhiladelphiaNeighborhoods.com. That source list should include a full name, telephone number and/or email address of the sources. If this list is failed to be provided, the story will not be published.

If unable to get someone’s full name, that individual can not be used in a story. That means that people who provide only their first names cannot be used. Anonymous quotes may ONLY be used after consultation with an editor. If someone will not provide his or her name, that individual cannot be used in a story.

Sourcing is fundamental. Attribution is basic to solid story construction. If material isn’t referenced, it amounts to plagiarism.

Please provide reference links to sources for any other facts, stats or data included in the story. All stories will be fact checked against what is provided and if we cannot verify the information provided, we may cut the reference or be unable to run the story.

FORMAT/FILING
When submitting, please include a doc with the following:

  • Student name and contact information
  • Instructor name
  • Class name
  • Title (needs a geolocator of where the story primarily takes place, should be engaging and include a verb)
  • List of suggested categories
  • List of suggested tags (tag all important people and places in the story, and duplicate the geographic category tags)
  • List of sources with contact information (human and other reports, data, stats, etc. referenced in story)
  • Relevant hyperlinks (should also be embedded within the story)

All content for a story should be packaged into one folder and shared via OWLbox with: [email protected].

Please email Christopher Malo once a story has been uploaded.

Updated: April 26, 2019