The Troy Press© is willing to take on new Progressive Voices. This article is NOT about content, but rather the mechanics of the article submission process.

Directions for News Summary Submissions

Submission Email Format

As indicated elsewhere, virtually all of the actions related to contributing to The Troy Press are done via email with different email addresses used for the various purposes. This includes submissions to the Daily News Summary. Your first step is to apply to become a contributor. Your editor will give you the various posting addresses for the various functions you will be interacting with - we don't want to publish them publicly for various reasons, including to limit the spam load.

Your email submission will be processed by an automated system. While it is a reasonably sophisticated bit of code whose job is to save humans time and improve consistency, it, of course, is not a human; it only works when your submission actually follows these guidelines. And, it will reject all inbound materials that do not match the expected pattern.

News Summaries and Articles share a common set of code which handles the creation of links and the display of images. And it has its own "directives" that are unique to the News. So, please see The Directions for Article Submission for that information. Here we only cover the part unique to News Summaries.

...Of course, we presume you are already familiar with what News Summaries look like! If not, please use the pull-down menu at the top of this page to view a few!

Here are the basic rules:

The News Summaries' title is the subject line of the email; do not include any other form of indication of "subject". Also, do not include any other informaiton in the subject line, either. Quotations should only be used if quoting a person.

The email must be in "plain text only" and not in a any other format - some html may be included as described in the Article Submission directions. Most of us can likely use our email program as-is, but you may use any editor you want to develop your work, so long as it is submitted in a way that does not - cannot - include any other formatting information. We have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that no matter how your email sends your contribution, it should work, however, sending the body of your submission as an attachment mail fail unless the material is literally in "plain text only" format. You may have to practice a few times at making a submission before you get your email program to behave!

There are three "directives" which you may use and they MUST come before the main body of the contribution. In particular, note that except for a special start / stop feature described below, there may be no blank lines before or between directives, as the first blank line terminates the software's search for directives.
Directives ALWAYS start at the beginning of a new line. Even a single space will throw it off!

The Three Directives Are As Follows: All of these are optional but for the most part we expect all will have a source! And, they may come in any order. Note that the nomenclature used here intends that the angle brackes are omitted! It's just to tell YOU that here's where goes the data indicated within the < and > characters.

Source=<URL> This entry is usually vital. Virtually every submission should have this! Yes, miniature articles can be submitted this way, but new News should be done as an article and we encourage you to become an article author! Generally speaking, all entries should be based on something found on the web, and this is the official way to provide a pointer to it! When there is more than one link, put such links in the body of the submission using the Article Submission directives!

Contributor=<name> This permits you to credit someone else. IF the given name is of a Disqus account and if we have their avatar on file, their avatar image will be displayed along with the contribution as a small way of saying thank you and recognizing their contribution.

Date=<yyyymmdd> This permits making "back dated" updates, when appropraite. When omitted, the present day is presumed! The format only allows numeric characters with no punctuation between. yyyymmdd means a four digit year, two digit month and two digit day. Obviously, use a leading zero for single-digit months and days! Hopefully, this format is easily understandable.

The directives MUST start with the Very First Line of the mail body. The original system has evolved some, but best use is that it's one directive per line, in any order, and the list of directives is terminated by the first blank line. Because some contributors were having trouble with their email systems in controlling an accidental blank line, we expanded the system but do not encourage this use: You may optionally use a start and stop. More on this below.

There May Be NO Blank Lines Between Directives! This is because a blank line tells the automation software that's the end of any directives. There is an exception to this, described below, but we discourage its use...
The directives are all case-insensitive, but the data conveyed MAY be case-sensitive! So, it doesn't matter if you enter "source=", "SOURCE=", "Source=" or any other combination, the software will find it just fine. However, the content of URLs - everything to the right of the domain name, anyway, is absolutely case-sensitive! And so are contributor names...
NO SPACES go between the equals sign and the directive name or the equals sign and the data being conveyed. You may get away with it - we've tried to make the software flexible - but, then, you may not!
As alluded to above, we've had some contributors have a real challenge at keeping blank lines at bay, so, we added a stop/start mechanism! If, during valid directive processing (that is, before any blank lines!) it finds a "start" (again, case insensitive), then it will continue searching for further directives and ignore any blank lines that usually signal the end of directives! However, there MUST be a matching "stop" directive or the entire rest of the submission will be ignored! If using the start/stop mechanism, it's recommended to make "start" the very first line of the email, and "stop" then ends the directives. If using a start directive, do not forget the stop directive!
The body of the submission, below the directives, becomes the main body of the News Summary, and it uses the same basic rules as for articles, as cited previously. DO NOTE: Two blank lines are needed to indicate paragraphs! One blank line is not enough - your input will result in a large paragraph!

Example

Here's a text-based email program about to send a News Summary Update:

To : ttpdaily
Cc :
Attchmnt:
Subject : Politicians, NATO Officials Furious As Spain Plans To Refuel Russian
Battle Group
----- Message Text -----
contributor=Alan McLemore
source=https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-26/politicians-nato-officials-furi$

Spain is facing international criticism as it reportedly prepares to
refuel a flotilla of Russian warships en route to bolstering the bombing
campaign against the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo. El País reported that
the Spanish ministry of foreign affairs was reviewing the permit issued to
the Russian flotilla to stop at Ceuta. Politicians and military figures
condemned the support from a NATO member as 'scandalous,' and 'wholly
inappropriate,' while the head of the alliance indicated Madrid should
rethink the pit stop.

Some things to note here:

The post-to address is not fully formed here, of course!
There are no quotation marks around the subject or body content. If either contained direct quotations of someone, then you'd use quotes!
There are two blank lines following source= here, but there could only be one and it would be OK!
The URL for source is on the same line! This particular email program indicates there's more not displayed by using a dollar sign on the right margin. The original URL was: https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-26/politicians-nato-officials-furious-spain-plans-refuel-russian-battle-group

Please send questions or feedback to: Editor at TheTroyPress.com