Topics
Pretty much anything to do with local transit or land use, from the frivolous to the pivotal. You also have limited license to talk about what’s going on in other cities, especially other Northwest cities.
Although personal anecdote can be a useful lead-in for a post, avoid overly biographical or self-referential writing.
Also, we much prefer discussions of policy to “horse race” stuff – discussions of political tactics by campaigns.
For these purposes, “local” is defined as Snohomish, Pierce, and King counties.
Titles
It’s very tempting to get cute with titles, but if your title is helpful and descriptive it’ll be much easier to find in Google when you’re trying to link to it three months from now.
Use sentence case in your titles.
Scheduling
Unless something is extremely time sensitive, try to keep posts at least three hours apart. Always check the “Posts” page to see what’s scheduled. Also:
- An important objective is to have at least one post per weekday, so if there’s no hurry it’s helpful to schedule a new post for a morning where nothing’s scheduled yet.
- Important pieces should be during business hours, where the readership is.
- Saturday is a good day for general musing.
- We have a traditional Sunday Open Thread. This usually includes a transit-related photo or video from somewhere in the world with little or no comment.
- All else being equal, new roundups should be on Wednesdays, and they should also be open threads.
Frequency
We distinguish between “big” and “small” pieces. Big pieces require some footwork to do: contacting officials, attending or watching a meeting, reading a long report, going and getting a tough photo, editing video, etc. Small pieces, regardless of length, are everything else: reacting to other people’s writing, off-the-cuff opinion, linking to stuff, etc.
There are four levels of responsibility at STB, defined not by your WordPress permission level but by what it says here:
- Editor-in-chief: Responsible for making sure there is at least one post every business day.
- Editor: Produce one big or two small pieces per week.
- Contributor: One big or two small pieces per month.
- Guest: Anything you like; if you’d like to become one of the roles above I suggest you get yourself to that posting frequency.
As a volunteer effort, obviously all this is a request, and we’re certainly not going around criticizing people for short lapses in meeting this expectation.
Fact-Checking
Although you can shoot from the hip on comments, I recommend thorough fact checking on posts. Don’t assume you know it, look it up on the web. If someone tells you something about a third party, ask the third party before posting. I think it’s fair to wait about 8 business hours for a reply.
Unless you’re formally canvassing the opinion of the group, use “I” instead of “we” for statements of opinion.
Manners
I expect posts to meet the standards of our comment policy. No ad-hominem attacks, etc.
Whining about the comment thread is unproductive. Take the high road or don’t engage.
Getting Comment
If your post critiques a figure and finds their behavior or viewpoint foolish, indefensible, or inexplicable, you should ask them to explain themselves and give them at least 8 full business hours to respond. Exceptions: there is no way to contact the person; the person has been given ample opportunity to clarify their meaning (e.g. you’re critiquing their 1000-word op-ed); the board can waive this for certain time-sensitive cases.
Excerpts
Keep in mind the “fair use” doctrine when quoting. Never duplicate the entire post when quoting. In fact, since websites live off clicks, it’s generally appropriate to excerpt at an absolute minimum to force people to click over, unless it’s a government website.
Brevity
For opinion and analysis pieces, you should make a single point and be able to do it in fewer than 10 paragraphs, and preferably 3-5. The shorter your piece, the more likely it is to be read by people fitting it in during a work break.
When a reporting post covers a long laundry list of projects and initiatives, consider splitting it up into a series of posts spanning several days.
Photos
At least one photo near the top of each post is strongly encouraged. It’s fine to have only a tangential relationship to the subject matter. I recommend photos from the Flickr Pool, government websites, or Wikimedia Commons, as these tend to be basically free of Intellectual Property Issues.
Official illustration style is to use the WordPress caption option to indicate the source of the photo, plus any explanatory title. Photos should be no wider than about 640 pixels. Larger photos should be centered; smaller ones should be right or left justified. In general, illustrations will be right-justified because the default formatting for left-justification is often terrible; however, you are encouraged to occasionally “mix it up” and do the work to make sure the page looks attractive with a left-justified picture.
Jumps
For posts longer than about 5 paragraphs, there should be a jump. The jump should always be between paragraphs and announced in the immediately preceding text with a reference to the “jump” or the “fold.”
The jump should generally be placed after the second or third paragraph for posts without centered photos and after the first paragraph for those with centered photos.
See also:
George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language“. The best part:
(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never us a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
If you’re looking for a writing to style to imitate for opinion and analysis pieces, I recommend Matt Yglesias, who is an extraordinarily gifted writer for this medium.