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December 10, 2009 |
by Gina Hamilton
Coastal Journal editor
To all our valued correspondents:
As some of you may know, we are a very small operation. There are only two of us working full time in the editorial department, and quite often, especially this time of year, our email boxes are flooded with important notices of events and activities. We would like to include as many of these as possible - we believe that one of our strengths is providing the community with news that comes from the community, as well as news we write here. However, often, things are falling through the cracks, and we believe it is time for some minor changes to improve the situation.
So, effective immediately, please send all press releases to our new email address:
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. In the subject line, please type the name of the organization, event and the date, such as:
For Art’s Sake art show opening 12/15/09
This will allow us to prioritize your release and get it into the correct edition.
Press releases can be embedded in the body of an email (preferred) or attached using Word formats. Currently, we cannot open the new Word “docx” extensions, and we’ve been getting a lot of those lately! Please save your documents to an earlier format of Word before sending it to us. We can’t open Word Perfect, or Works, or anything else. If you are using one of those programs, just embed your press release in the email.
We can sometimes publish photos if there is space available. Please send photos as “jpeg” format. The photos must be large enough to be manipulated but not so big that they crash our email system; DPI should be 170 or higher but the size can be fairly small (NOT thumbnail!)
Please do NOT send your document or photo as a pdf. We cannot pull the information out of a pdf, and must retype it. This makes it much less likely that we will get the info in for you.
In the first paragraph, please make sure that the event, date, time, and location are listed. We often trim press releases significantly in order to include as many as possible in any given issue; we want to make sure the most important information is in the paper for you.
While we try to get as many press notices in the paper as possible, we cannot get all of them in on any given week. Priority is given to events that the public can attend, such as gallery openings, concerts, museum exhibits, wine tastings, kayak trips, auctions, council meetings, walks through gardens, etc. We focus on Sagadahoc and Lincoln Counties, and Brunswick, Harpswell, and Freeport, as well as coastal southern Knox County. Press releases for events out of this area will probably not be published unless it relates to one of our specific interest areas, such as pet events, energy or sustainable living, or children's issues.
Business-related press releases are inserted if there is space available for them. If you have a business press release, and it is not time sensitive, it may be held until enough accumulate to insert them into a special ‘business’ page. If you do not want a press release held, let us know in the email, and we will discard it if we can’t use it that week.
School news should also be sent to the
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address. Please label school or student news as such. Those are saved until a school news page is assembled. We do not use photos in school news, and we do not publish the last names of children under the age of 12 for safety reasons.
Press releases that are health care related should be sent to this address, well in advance if possible, and marked ‘Midcoast Health’ to be placed in our health-related quarterly. If you have a press release for one of our special pages - Retirement Living, Real Estate, Antiques, Energy and Sustainability, Midcoast Dining, etc., please mark it as such and we will do our best to get it into that section, but there are no guarantees of placement.
We rarely have time to retype a press release, so please send them electronically if at all possible. Press releases faxed or mailed are much less likely to get into the paper, because Will and I are notoriously slow typists!
We appreciate all that you are doing for our community, and want to help you get the word out. Thanks for your help with our new system.
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