Do you want to promote a cause or event? Do you have news to share? Do you want to pique our interest in investigating or writing a feature on an issue of interest to you?
Like all media outlets, we receive a steady stream of mail. Here are some tips for getting yours to the top of the pile and on to The Hub.
The ideal media release
If you write the media release well, you make the editor's life easy, and your release may well be published verbatim.
Many experts will tell you that your release should answer the questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How, but they expect your answers to those questions in sentence form. Bullet point answers with no verbs, no action, will get you no attention.
Go over your sentences, and take the extras out. Make your sentences short and active. Avoid those weak adverbs as much as possible, and think twice about your adjectives too.
Write your media release to capture the main thrust of your story in the first paragraph and make it as short as possible. Subsequent paragraphs can build up the story. Publications trim from the bottom up, so if the editor is short on space, you want to be sure the important bits stay in.
Send your document to us at [email protected] in as simple a format as you can – .txt, .doc, .docx, .odt. Anything with fancy formats just gums up our works, frustrates the editor and slows us down. PDFs are pretty much the worst.
A picture is worth....well, you know
For us, images are part of every story. If you can give us a usable image, we have a better chance of getting your story up on the Hub in a timely manner.
We cannot simply publish your event poster as the image. First, it is likely a PDF file that can't be resized in our graphic software. Second, the words will be unreadable and the pictures and logos undecipherable in some of the sizes we use.
Often the graphic portion of your poster, or an eye-catching photo (to which you own the rights), saved as a .png, .gif or .jpg in the highest resolution you can, will be the best choice. If you really don't have an image, tell us how you would like to illustrate your story and we'll try our best to find something suitable. We will not knowingly post an image without the owner's permission, and if you have it, please give us the information so we can credit the photographer/creator.
We promote all our stories on our Facebook page, and spread around from there. Sometimes, for reasons that remain a mystery, Facebook takes some odd image (usually an ad) instead of the story's own image. Let us know what pages you would like to be promoted on, and we'll do it from here – usually with more success.
Feel free to suggest story ideas, send in your own opinion pieces, videos, recipes, letters to the editor, features or fiction. We want you to get your message out to your community and we are here to help
