Fedora Weekly News on Fedora Insight: Work Flow for Writers and Editors
Writing News Beats
Due Dates and Submission
Using their FAS credentials, beat writers sign in to Fedora Insight[1] and create unpublished news postings all week long with due date on Sunday 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Create your entire beat as one article in PageMaster, and use the WYSIWYG editor with bolding to create individual sub-articles within your beat. When you are finished editing, mark it as DRAFT ready for approval in in the article, and this will e-mail the editor that it is ready for editorial review.
Style and Formatting
You can help the editorial process quite a bit by remembering a few stylistic points in your writing:
- FWN attempts to adhere as closely as possible to the StyleGuide. This will need to be updated for Fedora Insight. Writers should familiarize themselves with it and try to keep in mind some of these elements in your writing, such as active voice, etc.
- Use the WYSIWYG editor when creating your beat content to separate the items within your beat as appropriate
- For references to people who are members of the Fedora Project community, it is good to insert references back to their wikiname pages. It is preferred that this is done with their User namespace, e.g. <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:fasname">Joe Bloggs</a>. A fallback for those who have not migrated their wikiname pages to the User namespace is to use their camel case name followed by the person's name with the first and last name separated by a space, eg. <a href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/JoeSmith">Joe Smith</a>.
- Another consistency point is what tense the writing is in. Write in the past tense, since the News is covering events that have already happened.
- If you can make your beat more narrative and summary, this will be more readable. When reporting on long exchanges or discussions amongst many people, try to write concisely, reporting on the most salient points.
Editorial Passes (Sun - Mon)
The editorial team starts reviewing the contents from beats to live issue page (with editorial pass) and a goal to have a rough draft by Monday morning Eastern Time.
An editorial pass should ideally consist of editing the submissions to conform to the StyleGuide, ensuring that the link references appear to be accurate and fixing up any obvious typos or grammatical errors. Other common corrections include: ensuring that there is no space between a citation in square brackets and the preceding word, making sure the wikinames of mentioned people are correct, and making sure that the list of URL references is separated with a complete newline between each reference.
Submit the News (Mon)
Submitting the news in Fedora Insight is a two-step process, performed by an editor:
- change the unpublished submitted beats to published status;
- create a new "News" article with the summary for the issue, written by the editor
Sending New Issue Out to fedora-announce-list and fedora-news-list
Finally, the editorial team submits the weekly news as a mailshot in plaintext to fedora-announce-list and fedora-news-list before Monday afternoon Eastern Time. This is handled by Pascal Calarco or Adam Williamson, whomever is available. If someone else needs to send this out who is not approved to post to the list, Max Spevack or another list admin can approve the message to the list.
Formatting the plaintext mailshot
If the individual beat articles are available as RSS postings, subscribing to these and then reformatting the posts for plaintext is probably the easiest way to generate the version to post to the mailing lists.
Use the printer page version of each article, which puts the link references in square brackets in place of the references, and then creates links at the bottom of the page for the URLs
Copy issue to appropriate news outlets
A CC: of the mailshot can be sent to the following addresses: distro@distrowatch.com news@phoronix.com editor@lxer.com