Why 'guidelines'?
We try to have some fun gathering and presenting the world's worst bad news, but we're also serious about what we're doing.
We work on the news while most folks are sleeping. We read a zillion news and counter-news websites, read readers’ e-mails and respond when possible, until the alarm clock goes off. Then we rush to proofread and finalize that day’s edition of Unknown News, before leaving for work at our respective jobs, where, during lunch and at breaks, we read a newspaper. After work we come home, eat dinner (with TV or radio news in the background), and work on the website till our eyes won’t stay open.
On days when we have plenty of leisure time, we might disregard many of these rules and look at almost anything anyone sends. We don't have many days with plenty of leisure time, though. Most days, incoming emails that break the rules are swatted away like flies circling a horse's ass.
We need our helpers' help, definitely. There are only 1½ of us here, and we have a very limited time to work on the website. If you’re sending material we need, you’re helping — and we love ya.
Other people send material we can’t possibly use, and lots of it. They're not 'helping', just wasting their time and ours. And we get so much crap, we have to screen it out. All these annoying, nitpicky, anal, and boring rules are here to save your time and ours, by explaining what we are and aren't interested in.
To make tomorrow's edition worth a click, we need to stay sharply focused. We need and appreciate our readers' help — and the first step in helping is reading the guidelines.
Thank you!
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Unknown News is more fun and more informative with your participation, so please don't be shy. Consider yourself invited to speak your mind.
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Anything sent to Unknown News may be published.
If you don't want it published, say so plainly. |
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Please don't send attachments or other crap we don't want. Send only plain, un-coded text.
A bit about ... bylines, chitchat, copyright, disorganization, feedback, hate,
language, quality and quantity, reality, rewrites, scummy websites, and wingnuts.
GUIDELINES FOR
NEWS LINKS
Send news to
newsuneed at yahoo.com.
IMPORTANT: When sending news or commentary links, please include the number 111 in your email's header. We use this to automatically sort our in-box, giving top priority to people who've actually read these guidelines, and lesser priority to people who haven't.
1. Our beat is 'unknown news' — news from credible sources that hasn't received the attention it deserves. We're not interested in the same news that's being covered everywhere else. And even among the unknown news, time and comprehension limits us to at most a few dozen items daily.
2. We only include material that really grabs our attention. Usually that means it either infuriates us, or makes us chuckle, or both.
3. We're much more likely to be infuriated or amused if, instead of just sending a link, you tell us what you think of the news behind the link -- something more substantial "This sucks" or "I think the President is lying."
4. It helps if you say something, almost anything. We get about 150 emails a day consisting of just an URL, without a clue what it's about or even a "hi, Helen." Such wordless suggestions almost always turn out worthless -- either sales pitches or miles off-topic -- so we almost never click unless you tell us why, unless the suggestion is from someone we know and love.
5. Common sense, please: News about matters unknown to us or our readers must of course include a primer on the basics of the matter. If the article doesn't tell us the basics, and you don't tell us the basics, we're not going to know what's going on.
6. If you're sending your comments along with excerpts from an article, it's important to make it clear which is which. Please don't make us scratch our heads and pick through every paragraph to seperate your wheat from the Boston Globe's chaff.
7. We can't guess why, but some websites prefer to hide their internal URLs. If you've found a good article at such a site, you must either figure out the secret internal URL or tell us plainly how you got to that internal page. If we can't find an internal article or figure out the secret URL, we'll assume such websites don't want a link.
8. Many media websites let readers "send an article (or an "e-postcard") to a friend." Please don't send stuff to us this way. We don't want to be on newspapers' spam lists, and anyway, many of these sites send their articles as attachments or with encoding ... so they get filtered into the trash.
9. Please look at Unknown News once in a while. It makes our heads shake side-to-side, but the overwhelming majority of news-link suggestions we receive -- at least 7 out of every 10 -- are suggesting links we've already linked to. Seriously. An occasional rerun is unavoidable and not a problem, but if you're sending nothing but news links and we've already linked to, you're wasting our time, and we're going to have your e-mails auto-deleted.
10. "If it bleeds it leads" is the media's mantra. We have a different perspective: Personal tragedies are not news unless it's a crime committed by someone in high office, or unless there's something abhorrent in the authorities' response.
11. Our credibility is on the line: Every news link must trace back to a mainstream professional journalistic site or to an alternative source or reporter we (Helen & Harry) trust entirely.
Even if it looks genuine, we simply will not present news from sources that induce snickering. No exceptions.
And your credibility is on the line, too. Once you've sent us "news" that Drew Barrymore shot JFK, it's unlikely we'll take your next suggestions seriously.
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12. We do not link to 'news' from:
• sites with permanent pictures of space aliens on their main page
• sites with names like TinFoilHat, or my-dentures-pick-up-shortwave-broadcasts.com
• sites where a recurring theme is the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs, how the planets control our lives, the Trilateral Commission, the wit and wisdom of Lyndon LaRouche, or anything else which falls beyond the realm of things which make sense
• sites where the agenda is offensive, or where we can smell an agenda but we can't quickly figure out what it is, or where we get a gut feeling they're bonkers
• sites where the layout or lack-of-proofreading debunks the text
• sites that seem less than credible for any reason.
13. Other 'news' that isn't news includes
• poll results
• news conferences
• politicians making speeches
• talking heads talking
• backstage political squabbles
• announcements of government statistics
• et cetera, ad nauseum — unless there's something truly surprising in there somewhere.
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14. We think copyright law is a questionable idea rather poorly executed, but we also believe in fair play, so we won't link to sites that routinely republish entire articles from elsewhere on-line with the source site obfuscated or not mentioned. We won't link to pages offering the first few paragraphs of an article, and then requiring readers to pay for the rest. When we receive link suggestions for such sites, we'll search the web for the same or a similar article at a better website ... but only if time permits. |
15. We welcome press releases, but we don't welcome wastes of our time. When we receive a press release that's clearly un-related to anything this website is about, future e-mails from the same e-mail address will be blocked.
16. News from months or years ago is rarely of interest, unless a rerun would shed light on some aspect of more current events.
News link suggestions should be sent to newsuneed at yahoo.com.
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GUIDELINES FOR
COMMENTARY
Send commentary to
newsuneed at yahoo.com.
IMPORTANT: When sending news or commentary links, please include the number 111 in your email's header. We use this to automatically sort our in-box, giving top priority to people who've actually read these guidelines, and lesser priority to people who haven't.
1. The name of the page is Unknown News, which means we publish and link to very few 'commentary' articles. We're not interested in the same links to the same commentary a zillion other weblogs are linking to today. We rarely link to syndicated columnists, or commentary from Michael Moore, or the National Rifle Ass'n, or CounterPunch, or The New Republic, The Free Republic, AlterNet, or any of the other big-time alternative sources with a thousand times our readership. We strongly prefer 'unknown' authors and 'unknown' websites.
2. It's not important whether we agree or disagree with anyone's commentary. If we only published what we agreed with, we'd be our only byline.
3. What's required is this: The commentary must be relatively unknown, yet thought-provoking. It must hold our attention, and make points we haven't seen in a gazillion other articles. Generally, this means an opinion piece must say something startlingly out of the ordinary. Please don't send dull, familiar articles using dull, familiar rhetoric to make dull, familiar points. (This includes anything titled "No blood for oil," and articles from journalism majors that start, "College students have a lot on their plate these days — and I don't mean greasy cafeteria food.")
4. Common sense, please: Commentary about matters that are unknown to us or our readers must of course include a primer on the basics of the matter. If an article pronounces that the verdict in the Fleming case was an outrage, and we haven't been covering the Fleming case, we'll need to know what the heck the Fleming case is about.
5. We welcome criticisms of the world's so-called leaders, but prefer they be referred to by name, not by infantile insulting nicknames. The Attorney General, for example, is John Ashcroft, not John-Boy ASS-KKKroft. The President is not ushie-Gooshie-Between-the-Ears. This rule has nothing to do with respecting such leaders, as most deserve nothing but contempt; it has everything to do with respecting our readers. Criticism requires thought; insults do not.
6.For various stupid reasons, some websites hide their internal URLs. If you've found a good article at such a site, you must either figure out the secret internal URL or tell us plainly how you got to that internal page.
7. Many media websites let readers "send an article (or an "e-postcard") to a friend." Please don't send stuff to us this way. We don't want to be on newspapers' spam lists, and anyway, many of these sites send their articles as attachments or with encoding ... so they get filtered into the trash.
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8. Like any reader, we are far more likely to take an article seriously if it's written and presented seriously.
9. Material from mainstream professional pundits almost always puts us to sleep, and anything written by celebrities or politicians is almost always immediately deleted. Some of the rich, powerful, and famous are no doubt fine, upstanding citizens, but Unknown News is nobody's fan club.
10. We rarely link to "think tanks" or advocacy sites designed for "true believers." There's nothing unexpected at i-love-guns.com or guns-are-bad.com; you know what the article's going to say as soon as you see the web address. It reads like a rerun, even if the material is new. Besides, it's just too easy — at a website you already agree with, what's to disagree? We'd rather have our assumptions questioned than reassured.
11. We feel the same about articles in Arab News detailing how bad Jews are, and articles in Jewish News detailing how bad Arabs are. Everyone's entitled to hate to their heart's content, but we couldn't care less.
12. We almost never link to e-mail petitions or "open letters" to politicians, because we don't believe anyone on the receiving end cares.
13. We can't link to 'Geocities' or other sites which allow free web space but severely constrain the number of visitors allowed. Ten minutes after we put up the link, the bandwidth limit is exceeded, and further connections are blocked for the day.
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14. If you're sending an article that's already on-line, just send us the link — if we like it, we'll link it. If you send us the entire text instead of the link, you're asking us to re-do work someone else has already done -- the work of editing, coding, and prepping your article. In other words, you're wasting our time.
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16. If you're sending an original article you've written yourself, please send it as plain, un-coded text. Remember, if it's not plain, un-coded text, our software will automatically delete it.
17. Any article published by Unknown News is subject to editing for clarity, grammar, and style.
18. This is important: We love publishing original commentary, but we work at day jobs and assemble the site in our spare time. We have no time to nursemaid writers who don't even try to follow these fairly simple guidelines.
19. We can fix typos and grammar easily, but we can't write your article for you. Material must be well-written, have a point, and require a minimum of tinkering to be presentable.
20. Check your facts. Don't make unsubstantiated or factually incorrect statements. Our credibility is on the line, so you must check your facts. I cannot stress this enough: Authors who spout "facts" that aren't facts are authors we won't publish. If you write that the Berlin Wall came down in 1993, or you refer to Secretary of State Ronald Rumsfield [sic, sic, and sic], we're going to hit "delete" and move on -- and we're going to hit "delete" the next time we hear from you, too. Check your facts.
21. Use common, everyday English, not lots of insider jargon. If complicated terms are necessary, define them in your article.
22. Capitalize the first letters of sentences and proper nouns, and use other rules taught in Fifth Grade (wee yare nott intarrested inn ourtickles rittin wit playfull oar intenshiully rong Inglish).
23. The first time you mention someone, tell us who he/she is. For example, "Albright said ..." is wrong and confusing unless you've established that you're referring to Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
24. Similarly, all unusual acronyms must be defined the first time they are used. Don't tell us about the FYWZGG without telling us what it is.
25. Proofread your article before sending it (we recommend reading it to yourself, out loud). If you don't proofread it, and you send an article full of exactly the sort of mistakes proofreading would catch, we will assume you don't give a damn, and we won't give a damn either.
26. Overall, just make sure your article makes sense, make sure any links are correct and still work, and make sure your facts are facts.
27. If you'd like to say a few or a few dozen words "about the author," please do. We won't publish your e-mail address unless you ask us to.
28. We don't have length limits, because when you need 10,000 words, you need 10,000 words. Generally, though, briefer is better, and a lot more people will read a few hundred words of commentary than a few thousand. Extremely lengthy original submissions take much longer for us to prep and code, and thus may be delayed or even discarded if, in the editor's opinion, they're not worth the extra time and trouble.
29. No re-writes. Please.
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15. If it's not yet published but you're submitting the same article elsewhere, please send us the link when it's published. We'd rather support other websites with a link than simply duplicate their work.
Commentary links and original commentary should be sent to newsuneed at yahoo.com.
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| GUIDELINES FOR
DIALOGUE
Send dialogue to
xoxounknown at yahoo.com.
"Dialogue" is what we call our "letters to the editor" section, where we publish incoming e-mails that we think would interest our readers.
1. E-mails might be rushed through a spellchecker before publication, but only if we have time. Other than that, dialogue is published verbatim. We won't make changes, corrections, additions, or deletions after your e-mail is received. We recommend you proofread your e-mail, and don't send it before you're finished writing it.
2. We publish, read, and link to a lot of material, but we're not Encyclopædia Britannica. Please, if you're responding to something you've seen at Unknown News or elsewhere, provide a clue — an URL, or a headline, or something — so we'll know what you're responding to. If we can't figure out what you're talking about, we're probably going to hit 'delete'.
3. The spirit of dialogue is one of camaraderie, but we welcome disagreement, and the arguments do get heated sometimes. A gentle reminder: You're in our apartment, not in a bar. Others will judge you here solely by the words you offer ... and words that provoke thought are generally regarded higher than words that merely provoke. Or in the words of Author Unknown, "Great people talk about ideas, average people talk about events, small people talk about each other."
4. Of course, it's your credibility (not ours) on the line if you say something stupid. But be warned: Our readers are sharp and stubborn, and they rarely let 'stupid' have a free ride.
5. We utterly, absolutely, and wholeheartedly reserve the right to put troublesome types out of our misery.
We won't tolerate threats of violence against anyone for any reason.
We won't tolerate "e-firebombing" — repeatedly making inflammatory or misleading statements, flat-out lying, or otherwise trying to stir up a ruckus while adding little or nothing of value.
We won't tolerate hecklers whose idea of political thought is "jeez, you're stupid." We might delete such e-mails instantly, or we might (if we're in a good mood) try to coax something coherent out of people with third-grade mentalities — but we won't try for long. Three strikes, you’re out.
E-mails clearly intended only to insult and/or annoy will be published on our hate mail page, where they'll remain on-line permenently for their chuckle value.
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6. With only the rarest exceptions, we don't publish:
• entire articles you've cut-and-pasted from elsewhere
• lengthy excerpts from articles elsewhere
• "Johnny One-Note" stuff (serialized e-mails reiterating the same points over and over again)
• forwarded e-mails
• e-mails addressed to someone else
• lunatic e-mails or material that's wildly off-topic (unless it makes us laugh)
• press releases
• mass mailings
• advertising disguised as e-mails, or
• comments that amount to endorsements of the status quo (hint: the status quo isn't working).
7. Generally, if we don't "get it" or don't see what it adds to the dialogue, we're not going to publish it.
8. HTML may be included in your e-mail, provided it's close enough to correct that it doesn't blow up the page, and provided it's limited to the commands listed here. Coding to generate graphics, animation, sound, or change font color or size, etc., is not allowed.
9. Here's a rule you didn't expect: Don't use the symbols "<" or ">" unless you're coding HTML. They're cornerstones of the code that builds web pages like ours, so if you use "<" or ">" as text instead of HTML and we don't catch it and fix it, it'll almost certainly make what you've written look all wrong.
10. E-mails are published in no particular order, since we often open e-mails in several screens at the same time. This means "Helen, you're a flaming cunt" may be published, while your immediate subsequent "I'm sorry I called you a cunt; please don't publish that..." might not even be opened until the next day. If you send comments in a three-part series of e-mails, there's no telling what order your e-mails will appear on-line.
11. We don't have length limits, because when you need 10,000 words, you need 10,000 words. Generally, though, briefer is better, and a lot more people will read a few hundred words of commentary than a few thousand. Extremely lengthy submissions take much longer for us to prep and code, and thus may be delayed or even discarded if, in the editor's opinion, they're not worth the extra time and trouble.
Dialogue should be sent to xoxounknown at yahoo.com.
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And, of course, we break our own rules when we feel like it...
A bit about bylines and pen names:
Authors "roll their own" bylines, and we don't keep records of who's who, so please tell us your desired non de plume, each and every time.
If you don't specify, we'll probably 'genericize' you (Robert Q. Liffenopski becomes Bob L., etc.).
A bit about personal chit-chat with the folks behind Unknown News:
Readers who raise thorny personal or philosophical questions but don't want their comments published will almost certainly get only a brief reply, if that. We're sorry, but we simply can't be electronic penpals. Our replies are usually brief. When we receive especially compelling, heartfelt personal e-mails that require a long, heartfelt response, they go into our "urgent, must reply" file ... and we sincerely hope we'll get to them ... but we rarely do. Personal correspondence is not our strong suit.
A bit about copyrights:
Authors retain the copyright on their works. We hold only the right to on-line publication and maybe-someday-eventually an off-line "best of" collection for fundraising purposes.
Sometimes, love is not forever, but once you've given us the right to publish, you can't take it back. This means: If we've written, published, or linked to something that offends you, we're not obligated to take a day off work and promptly excise each and every mention of your name from the website, just because you demand it.
A bit about our disorganization:
Please don't send multi-part emails, serialized articles, or anything that won't make sense until we see "part 2" or "part 20". We're far too disorganized to keep track of more than one e-mail at a time.
A bit about feedback:
Some of our readers and writers fear their government, as anyone who knows anything about government should. For this reason, we keep no records of who’s who or how to get in touch. We have no files to seize.
This puts some people's minds at ease, but it also means we can’t forward e-mails to our authors. So if you’d like to get in touch with one of our writers, or if you’ve written something we’ve published and you’d like to follow the feedback, the dialogue page is your best bet.
A bit about hate:
We won't tolerate hate material (i.e., _______s are lazy, sick, inferior, or deserve a lesser lot in life). And we'll be the judge of what's hate material.
A bit about language:
Tragically, we are fluent in English, and no other language.
A bit about quality and quantity:
Please send as many link suggestions as you wish. If you're sending several, please send them all in one big e-mail, instead of several little ones. Quality trumps quantity, though. If you're sending dozens of link suggestions, unless we're using virtually all of them you're probably sending too many, or too many reruns.
A bit about the reality of running this website:
Publication is not guaranteed. Remember, we’re low-level worker-drones doing the website in our spare time, and time is limited. We don’t publish everything we write or find, so we can’t promise to publish everything you write or find.
We receive literally dozens, sometimes hundreds of link suggestions daily, and we're always in a rush, so if the article is subtle, or requires a reader's slow, thoughtful rumination, we probably won't "get it" unless you write a paragraph or two yourself, and explain why this article is worthwhile.
For example, a link to an article headlined "Gummi bear sales projected to decline" is a link we probably won't follow to an article we probably won't read unless your e-mail tells us why we should.
Similarly, if you're sending a link to something long or complicated — the complete text of a legal document, for example — please summarize it in your e-mail, or we might miss the significance of Section 4, subsection B, Item 17."
A bit about re-writes:
Folks unfamiliar with the work of coding sometimes think it's an instantaneous process. It's not. HTML coding can be a little tedious, and it takes us half an hour (at least) to proof, prep, and HTML-code an average, uncomplicated article for publication. An article with lots of typos by the author or lots of links to insert takes longer, sometimes much longer. And we're happy to do it — but please don't ask us to do this work more than once.
This means: Don't send something you've written until you're done writing it.
If you absolutely must send revisions, don't send the whole article a second time; just tell us what to revise. (It's like mopping a floor — if we miss a spot, we can go back and fix it. But if you send a revised version of the same article without telling us what the revisions are, you're asking us to start all over and mop the same floor twice ... and that's going to make us cranky.)
A bit about scummy websites:
We won't knowingly link to websites that publish hate material. We won't knowingly link to websites that send spam, do automatic downloads, publish ads designed to look like internal warning messages about your computer, disable the 'back' function, try to reset your home page, or do any such dirty tricks. We won't knowingly link to websites that play sound without warning (except on our mystery links page, where users are warned).
If any of this crap slips by us, please do let us know.
A bit about wingnuts:
Life is short, and the time we give the website is huge but never as much as we wish it could be. For this reason, we're impatient with wingnuts — an old-school term for the deluded and dingbatty.
If you send "link suggestions" to deluded or dingbatty sites (the Martians are coming, RFK shot JFK, racial supremicists, advice straight from God, etc.), with notes suggesting that you take such stuff seriously, we'll never take you seriously again.
—Helen & Harry Highwater
your Unknown News hosts
There's much more than this at Unknown News.
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We try not to whine too much or too loudly, but we are poor and this site eats a lot of money and time.
We couldn't do it without the help of our volunteers. And for those who can't afford the time, giving just a buck or two can make all the difference and keep Unknown News alive.
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