UPublish HOWTO

This post will walk you through submitting your news, photos, videos and audio to Ohio.com to be published on our community section.

In order to publish your community news you have to be registered with Ohio.com. If you have registered with us on the old site you only need to use the "Forgot Password" page to have your password sent to you. We were not able to bring over the passwords from the old registration system so we've created random passwords for all our users. Once you get your password you can log in and use the "Change My Password" page to reset it to a password you can remember.

To create a new account go to the New Member Registration page.

The community publishing area is one of the portions of the site for which we require a user to be registered. When you post a story on the site your username will appear in the byline portion of the story. This allows us to contact the person who submitted the story if there are questions or problems.

Here are the areas where you can publish your news. Click any link below to get started once you are registered:

General News Items — target your news to more than 40 communities in Summit, Stark, Medina, Portage and Wayne counties.
School and Education News
Sports News — target your news to high school, junior high, youth and adult sports.
The Scene – Social Events — Post stories, photos or videos about parties, fund raisers, balls or other social events. To list an upcoming event, please use our events calendar.
On the Move – Business News
Military News

Once we receive a story it will be reviewed by someone on our staff before it's posted on the site.

Events Calendar

Our events calendar at http://events.ohio.com is also another form of community publishing. It lives on a different platform and requires a separate account.

If you have an event to publish we encourage you to post it first on the entertainment calendar. Once we've approved that listing you can create a story on Ohio.com. That way your Ohio.com story will also point to your event calendar listing to help you cross-promote the event.

You can go directly to the events calendar registration and login page.

Getting Started

Once you are logged into Ohio.com go to the "Community" link on any Ohio.com page:

When you mouse over the link the navigation window will appear below:

Click the above image to view a larger version.

Click on the link for the type of news you want to publish. If you are logged into Ohio.com you will then be taken to the form to fill out. If you are not logged into the site and one of these links is clicked, you will be taken to a login page.

Best practices for submitting your news

The forms all share a few common fields and all the forms allow you to submit photos, a video and even a sound clip. We will go into submitting multimedia a little later in this post.

A headline is the first field that is common to every form. Take the time to think about a good headline. You want a headline that is specific but not too long. The headline is the hook that will entice people to read your story. Include the key names or details about your story.

A field for the text of the news story or announcement is another item on all the forms. There is not a limit to the amount of text you can enter, but you want to make sure it appears in a readable form. After making certain that your story has no misspellings, the next thing to look for is making certain you use paragraphs. Nothing is harder to read than a huge block of text.

To make a paragraph in your story include a blank line where you want a paragraph. The software on the back end looks for those blank lines and inserts the coding. Click here to see how this looks.

URLs related to your story

Most of the forms also include areas to enter a URL related to the story, and a URL that references a listing on our events calendar if one exists. We recommend that you first get your event listed first on our entertainment calendar so you can use your story to further promote your event.

Multimedia

Our community publishing forms also allow you to upload photos, video or audio, or link to a video that is already hosted on video services like YouTube. We will look at this in detail below.

Photos

If you don't have a "story" to post there is no reason you cannot upload a few of your photos for others to enjoy. In the "body" of the news story give a brief background about your photos so readers can better appreciate what they are viewing.

The forms allow you to upload five photos. Each photo also has a caption box.

If possible you should resize your photos before uploading them. Please do not upload digital photos straight out of your camera. Those images can be several megabytes in size and will be slow to upload.

Size your horizontal photos so they are 500 pixels wide and 72 dpi. Size your vertical photos so they are 300 pixels wide. Save them in the JPEG format. Do not send BMP images. Most digital cameras include software to allow you to edit your images.

If you cannot resize your photos before uploading them you can still upload them. We do not restrict the upload size. We will resize them as time warrants. The software will automatically shrink the photo until then, but your photos may not look as good and your page will load slower.

Audio

Upload any type of audio file. It will be available to the reader as a download. It will rely on the software on the end user's browser to have the software to be able to play your file.

Video

There are two options to include your video on your story:

1. Upload the video file with the form.

2. Embed the video source from a video already posted to a video service, such as YouTube.

The rules for option 1 are the same as an audio file. The ability to play your uploaded video file relies on the end user having the software needed on their computer to play your video.

Embedding video source code

We think this is the best option for several reasons.

First, these services will often accept any type of video and trans-code them into a Flash video, which is the most common type of video on the internet today. More than ninety-four percent of web users can play flash videos.

The second reason is for marketing your story. Once you have your video posted to one, or several video services, you gain the benefit of users on those sites seeing your video.

Below is a list of sites (our favorites listed first) that allow you to upload video:

ComVu Mobile Webcasting

Jumpcut

The last item on the form is a check box that links to the community publishing disclaimer.

Final thoughts

Take a few minutes and look over a few of the stories that have already been posted. They will give you a good idea of what to do and what not to do.

If you have questions or problem leave a message on this post.

UPublish HOWTO

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