Aaaaaaaaaaand Blog Critics decided to piss me off.
From Lisa McKay:
Hi Scott,
Welcome to Blogcritics. I've just taken a look at your first submission, and I've returned it to draft for a few reasons. For openers, we like our titles to be pretty family friendly and we're looking (more or less) for a PG-13 rating with our content. The piece is essentially a bloggy rant, the primary purpose of which seems to be to call John Chow an asshole. You're also lacking the required Amazon ASIN, and the piece doesn't meet our minimum length requirement of 300 words.
So... please do take some time to review our posting guidelines and editorial policies before you resubmit, and take a look around the site to get a feel for what we do publish. You can certainly turn this into a decent article on what you don't like about the "make money by telling other people how to make money" Internet subculture, bearing in mind that we are basically looking for magazine-style articles, not blog entries. If you choose to do that, we'll be very happy to take another look.
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What their editorial policies ACTUALLY state:
1. Have fun, do your best. The editorial staff is happy to work with writers who are willing to put some effort into improving their skills, but we do ask you to run through a spell check and grammar check prior to submitting your work. We also expect writers to fact-check their work.
2. We are a "destination" site: that is, we need complete, stand-alone articles -- whether they be news, reviews, opinion, interviews, or satire -- such as you would find in a magazine.
3. Article length:
a. Regular articles (regardless of whether they are news, opinion, review, etc) must meet our 300-word minimum; most articles in this category fall between 500-1500 words.
b. NewsFlash: This is a feature available to all BC writers. The purpose of a NewsFlash is to convey news in a concise fashion. NewsFlashes must be between 200-300 words in length, and should be informational rather than editorial in nature. While they can certainly be written from a particular slant, their primary purpose is to convey information, not opinion. Where necessary, links should be included to provide further resources for readers. NewsFlashes can be written for any subject matter. When your NewsFlash is ready to go, please notify the editors via email to @yahoogroups.com" title="mailto:editorbclist@yahoogroups.com">editorbclist@yahoogroups.com. All other editorial standards apply: pieces must be well-written, and they must include the usual 20-word subhead, and an Amazon ASIN or ISBN-10. Attention to quality will help to ensure a quick turnaround time. All writers will be added to the NewsFlash feature.
c. Reviews In Brief: This is a new feature available to all writers. These will be concise reviews of any type of material -- movies, books, CDs, etc. The reviews must be between 200-300 words in length, and they must hit all the necessary points of a review concisely. The reader's takeaway should be a good sense of whether the item in question is worth his or her time or money. As with the NewsFlash feature, be sure to choose "Reviews in Brief" from the drop-down menu if you wish to submit one.
Please ask if you have any questions about this policy. Certain review materials acquired via our Yahoo group are not eligible for Reviews in Brief.
4. Please use proper sentence structure and punctuation. Keep your paragraphs short and separate them with a blank line space.
5. Spelling is critical: spell-check your work and verify the spelling of names.
6. Titles and subtitles are critical: for the sake of our readers, content partners, and search engines, please be as descriptive and explicit as possible with your story titles, and include the name of the item in the title when you write a review.
7. Use italics for albums, movies, books, video games, and TV show titles, in both the title and the body of your post. Use quotation marks for songs, chapter, and episode titles.
8. Always credit and link to your sources -- make any URLs in your articles actual HTML links: WordsInLink
9. Quote sparingly, just enough to make your point about the information contained in the quoted article(s).
a. YOUR words should always be the bulk of the article.
b. The reader should not have to click links to understand the context of your post. Whenever possible, rewrite information gained from other sources in your own words as opposed to using large blocks of quotes - make the story "your own."
10. Images within posts are encouraged, but be careful about size: 450x450 pixels max, and smaller is generally better. Please use the “Upload Images for This Article” tool located above the Article Body box and follow the instructions there.
11. Please post stories to Blogcritics in their entirety (i.e. no partial posts with "to be continued" links to your own site).
12. WRITERS MAY NOT DELETE ARTICLES OR COMMENTS FROM BLOGCRITICS. If you have a problem – such as the accidental duplication of an article -- let the editors know here: @yahoogroups.com" title="mailto:editorbclist@yahoogroups.com">editorbclist@yahoogroups.com and we’ll take care of it. Please email our Comments Editor Christopher Rose @blogcritics.org" title="mailto:christopher.rose@blogcritics.org">christopher.rose@blogcritics.org if you see a comment that might violate our Comments Policy, including the article URL, the comment number and why you think it might be problematic and he will review it.
I don't see a single fucking mention of PG-13 or language usage anywhere. Also, I asked the admin if he was fully aware of my writing style and he never got back to me.
Aaaaaaaaaaand Blog Critics decided to piss me off.
by voodooKobra
voodooKobra Note: I can make it longer (I misjudged the length) but I'm not going to change what I'm going to write about after they didn't explicitly forbid what I was going to say in the terms and want to go back on their terms now.
5/07/10
numby lol! They're trying to censor you!
5/08/10
voodooKobra Nah, I can just publish stuff on my own website in lieu of in their magazine. Which is what I did with that post. :P
5/08/10