We would love to have more people submitting links to articles they think OEN readers would enjoy reading / should read. OpEdNews is a botttom-up website and one way to make it more bottom-up is to invite you, the reader to participate in finding and curating the content we publish. This is an invitation to become part of the editorial process.
We have a widget that makes it pretty fast and easy to submit links by cutting out at least half a dozen clicks.
We're interested in all kinds of articles-- news, op-eds, science, arts, life, technology, human interest, blogs, not just politics. We're also interested in seeing great youtube videos, with some commentary or discussion of what's in them. (We prefer shorter ones to really long ones.) Even music videos are great, and they don't have to be new.
We do it with a link on your browser's bookmark bar. The button grabs the title of the article, the link to the article page, and opens up a quicklink submission box.
Go to this page to get the button, and instructions on how to put it on your bookmark bar. Put the link as a bookmark on your browser bookmark bar.
Here's how you use it:
1-Go to the page you want to quicklink.
Copy the text you want to use-- (you can excerpt up to 900 characters, or less than that and your own summary. You can also change the title.)
2- Then click on the widget bookmark.
The bookmark widget will grab the title and grab the link and they will be pasted into the quicklink submission user interface. That saves you from having to open the quicklink submission interface and from having to copy and past the title and link. Please check to make sure the publication name is removed from the title. We link to the publication. That'll do.
3- Write or paste in the description.
There's a link, just above the tool bar for text entry, that will do a character count. Use it to be sure you are under 900 characters.
4-Use the commonsSearch tool to find an image to go with it. Our policy is to NOT use images that are copyrighted from sources like the NYTimes, API, WAPO, Getty, etc. I've found that I can usually find something that works well, except when the image is the central part of the story. Sometimes, you can use a screengrab from youtube, if the story is about something that happened on TV, because then, it's fair use. You can use the commonsSearch youtube search to find it, and even include the youtube channel (which is case sensitive.)
5- Select the content category
Best Web OpEds
General News
Life Arts
Sci-Tech
The click SUBMIT QUICKLINK
6- select some tags, select the best crop of the image for the front page, and voila, you've posted a quicklink.
7- add a comment to get a conversation started.
The quicklink will go into the queue and an editor will assess it, and, most likely publish it.
Please use this for links to articles that are not yours. We'd love to crosspostings of your full articles. And we'll soon have a widget, similar to our quicklink widget that makes it easy to do, including a link back to your blog.
2
1
1
