When you submit an article to Rye News (via info@ryenews.org.uk) it goes straight to the Rye News dashboard, a sort of holding bay, awaiting further action. The editor then decides if it’s fit for publication after carefully reading through it and making any necessary amendments along the way. Often the title needs to be changed, it could be too long or lacking in ‘punch’; photos may be missing or the wrong size or orientation, (landscape photos are always preferred); photo credits may be missing; checking if the images have permission to be used and if not, they will need to be replaced by images from the Rye News library.
The article may be too long and will need to be reduced, sometimes re-written, checked for obvious grammatical / spelling errors, set out in paragraphs and perhaps tidied up. The article must then be categorised: should it go under the heading of news, community, culture, opinion, letter, sport, business or somewhere else? The editor changes it from draft to rough and it is then passed to the sub editors.
The word rough is the green light for the subs to do their two stage checking. They go through a more in-depth process of checking sentence structure and grammar, capitalisation, photo credits, fact-checking, checking copyright issues and inaccuracies, looking for spelling errors and typos and making sure the text conforms to our house style. This process is conducted twice to be doubly sure and the subs often make suggestions or recommendations which are passed on to the editor who will action the points raised.
At that point the articles are ready to be published but this checking and subbing exercise often starts on a Sunday and needs to be completed by Thursday morning at the latest. The deadline for articles to be submitted is still 12.00pm on the Wednesday prior to publication on Friday. This gives the team time to get the articles ready to publish and involves a lot of work.
Once the prepared publication is ready it comes back to the editor for final signing off and at that point, all the articles are added to a publication list, categorised and set in priority order before going back to the subs who will publish the paper.
Each Friday morning at 8.00am an alert goes out to around 2,200 Ryecentric subscribers and the paper is then live. The number of stories vary but average around 20-30. If a major story happens after publication and it needs to be published, we have the ability to add a ‘splash’ which overrides everything and becomes the lead article.
Our readers then send in their comments which our comments moderator considers and he decides which meet our comments policy requirements and publishes them. The editor has the final say in any comments published but, on the whole, 95% of comments received are suitable for publishing.
After publication the whole process starts again and every week thereafter and is currently conducted by the editor and an editorial team of four volunteers who spend many hours producing what we see and expect each week. Following publication many articles are immediately highlighted via the Rye News Instagram and Facebook pages which like the paper, have seen the numbers of subscribers and followers increase on a weekly basis.
There’s a lot which goes on behind the scenes to produce your Rye News and hopefully this brief insight makes the whole process more transparent but as always, any comments you want to make are welcomed and will be listened to.
Image Credits: Cavendish Consulting .