Writing diaries on Daily Kos is a lot of fun. You get satisfaction from informing the community about interesting events and issues, people express admiration for your efforts and you learn some new things yourself as you explore a topic in order to write about it intelligently. If you haven’t yet tried your hand at creating a diary, give it a whirl and you might find that you’re quite good at it.
However, there are some pitfalls to avoid if you want your diary to be accurate, informative, and — above all — useful and enjoyed by the community. The items that follow are my personal list of pet peeves, so your mileage may vary if you ignore my suggestions but the community seems to love your work anyway. Also, note that these apply primarily to news diaries; use your own judgement about applying them to personal life stories, or posts about pets and gardening, or clever cartoons.
So, without further ado, here’s what not to do when writing your news diary.
Urgently break your news on DK right now!!!You were shocked this morning when you read the latest issue of the Journal of Applied Picklology and discovered that the government changed the regulations for nutrition labels on jars of pickles. Naturally, you rushed to your keyboard and typed out a missive with the headline “BREAKING!!! Pickles Under Federal Assault!”
You should have taken a deep breath and asked yourself a few questions before clicking Publish.
Will this news dramatically affect the lives of many people? Does it require readers to urgently do something about it? Are readers unlikely to already know about this from other sources?If you can’t answer yes to all of those questions, tone it down. Save the breathlessness and “BREAKING!!!” for the right time and events. If the dead are rising from their graves and hunting for live human brains or if ICBMs have been launched and we have about 17 minutes left before extinction, surrender to your most hysterical instincts. On second thought, just step away from the keyboard and seek out family and friends, either to share final solaces or to plan your defense strategies for the zombie apocalypse.
Remember that very little news published on DK is truly original. Most of our news stories are compiled from other sources — CNN, WaPo, White House press releases, and so on — so we generally aren’t actually breaking news here. We’re sharing news items that have already broken elsewhere and if they’re important enough they will be on the major news media, seen by many of your readers; if they’re not that important, they don’t merit a screeching alert in your headline.