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This week's Unknown News & dialogue with our readers
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| Unknown News is more fun and more informative with your participation, so please don't be shy. Consider yourself invited to speak your mind. But... we get a lot of email.
We've published Unknown News with the same email address for years and years, so we're on a lot of spam lists. Many dozens of weblogs have added our email address to their mailing list, and send announcements every time they update their blogs. Weblogs that do this without asking us first are, of course, spammers. We filter their emails into the trash, and we never knowingly link to spammers' websites. Politically, we're intolerant of the intolerant, so the intolerant are always sending insults, e-bombs, and threatening our lives. Such tactics are troublesome only the first time, but easy to filter away, so if you're trying to annoy us you'll need to be innovative. And if you're planning to kill us, remember we're in favor of gun rights and ours are loaded. It's the clueless, though, who most effectively waste their own time. Many, many people send us utterly irrelevent emails, and we filter 'em straight into the trash. If you're wondering why we're not using the suggestions you've sent, the answer is on this page, in the guidelines you've never read.
Anything sent to Unknown News may be published. If you don't want it published, say so plainly.
When we publish incoming emails, we usually edit out the sender's last name, email address, or anything else that would tend to uniquely identify the author (if we slip up, please let us know). But if your email is unambiguously intended only to annoy, insult, or threaten us, we'll publish all the details, and leave it on-line forever.
Webmasters — We would love to hear from you when you feel your site has published something particularly noteworthy, and we'll put up a link if we agree.:) But please don't add us to your routine mailing list (where you send out announcements describing each day's updates to your site). If we're on that list, we'll filter your emails into the trash, and never hear from you again. :(
NEWS DIALOGUE COMMENTARY
We love hearing from readers, but please don't send attachments or other crap we don't want. To get past our filters, please send only plain, uncoded text. Our website is obviously a labor of love. We give it virtually all our spare time, and work our asses off tryting to make Unknown News a site worth visiting. But our time is limited, so ... PLEASE READ THESE FRICKIN' GUIDELINES. See, if you're following our friendly guidelines, you're helping us, and we love ya. But if you're not following these guidelines, you're wasting our time -- you're making this website worse instead of better. And we have no patience for that. As soon as an incoming email seems to violate these guidelines, we stop reading, hit the delete button, and move on to the next email, with no reply and no regrets. People who repeatedly violate the guidelines are simply repeatedly wasting our time, so we'll auto-filter their emails into the trash. With that introduction out of the way, here are our guidelines for . news . dialogue . and commentary. And here's what you might need to know about the basics of journalism, bylines, chitchat, copyright, disorganization, feedback, hate, hidden URLs, how many is too many, investigative journalism, language, length limits, quality and quantity, reality, rewrites and change-of-hearts, sites we won't link to, and wingnuts.
NEWS DIALOGUE COMMENTARY
1. Our beat is 'unknown news' -- news from credible sources that hasn't received the attention it deserves. We're not interested in the same news that's being covered everywhere else. 2. We do not link to 'news' from nutball sites. Our credibility is on the line: Every news link must trace back to a mainstream professional journalistic site or to an alternative source or reporter we (Helen & Harry) trust entirely. 3. "If it bleeds it leads" is the media's mantra. We have a different perspective: Personal tragedies are rarely news beyond the victim's friends and family. 4. Other 'news' that isn't news includes . poll results . news conferences . politicians making speeches . talking heads talking . backstage political squabbles . announcements of government statistics . et cetera, ad nauseum -- unless there's something truly surprising in there somewhere. 5. Please look at Unknown News once in a while. Seriously. It makes our heads shake side-to-side, but most of the news-link suggestions we receive are suggesting links we've already linked to. 6. We only include material that really grabs our attention. And you're much more likely to get our attention if, instead of just sending a link, you tell us what you think of the news behind the link. Also, we'll tend to take your suggestions more seriously if you send one or two or even 3-4 link suggestions, instead of twenty, thirty, or 150 at once. Cut through the crap: That's what we love, what we need, and what we like best. 7. If you're sending your comments along with excerpts from an article, please make it really, really obvious which is which. Don't make us scratch our heads and pick through every paragraph to separate your wheat from the Boston Globe's chaff. 8. Many media websites let readers "send an article (or an "e-postcard") to a friend." Please don't -- we don't want to be on newspapers' spam lists, and anyway, many of these sites send their articles as attachments or with encoding ... so they get filtered into the trash. 9. We welcome press releases, but we don't welcome wastes of our time. And while we don't appreciate the thought, we don't want to receive a junk e-mail every time you update your website. So when we receive a press release or other announcement that doesn't interest us, future emails from the same source will be filtered straight into the trash. (We seem to receive fewer and fewer press releases...) 10. News from months or years ago is rarely of interest, unless a rerun would shed light on some aspect of more current events. News link suggestions should be sent to unknownnews at myway.com. (If you send news to one of our other email addresses, we'll still get it ... just not as quickly.)
NEWS DIALOGUE COMMENTARY
"Dialogue" is what we call our "letters to the editor." 1. We publish incoming emails that, in our opinion, add to the dialogue. That means, primarily, emails responding to something that's appeared on Unknown News, or emails about topics that would interest us and our readers (which, with only rare exceptions, does not include flying saucers, tin-foil hats, conspiracy theories, Nikola Tesla, who killed JFK, technical details of the World Trade Center's collapse, Skull & Bones phobia, and so forth). The dividing line, between what we'll publish and what we won't, is whether it makes us go "Hmmm." It's a subjective standard, but if you're trying to meaningfully discuss something tangibly related to our general topics of freedom and/or current events, we'll almost certainly publish your comments. 2. It's rather important that you let us know what the hell you're talking about. Feel free to respond to anything we've published, recently or years ago. But we've published thousands of pages, so please please please please PLEASE cite the URL, or at least summarize what was reported or said. Sadly, because we've been wasting more and more time in fruitless inquiry with people who don't send an URL ...
| UNKNEWS: Please send the URL of the page you're talking about ... READER: What's an URL? UNKNEWS: It's a web address, that long string of characters that starts http://www.unknownnews ... READER: You don't know your own web address? |
... if you don't include an URL and/or we can't quickly figure out what you're responding to, we'll hit the delete button. 3. Our dialogue section is for dialogue. It is not a frickin' bulletin board, and it's not a place where you can publish your weblog, free ads, daily list of links, or idiosyncratic sermonettes. We won't publish: . forwarded emails . emails addressed to someone else . press releases, petitions, mass mailings, etc. . advertising disguised as dialogue (believe me, we can tell) . entire articles or lengthy excerpts you've cut-and-pasted from elsewhere . lunatic emails or material that's wildly off-topic (unless it makes us laugh) . "Johnny One-Note" stuff (serialized emails reiterating the same points over and over again) . comments that amount to endorsements of the status quo (hint: the status quo isn't working) . today's amusing anecdote that's already in everyone's email in-box and on-line at 171 websites . anything with more than 3-4 links, unless you've coded the links yourself (coding links takes time we don't have, and besides, the name of the page is "Dialogue", not "Lectures"), . long and/or rambling commentary unrelated to anything on this site (e.g., your lengthy opinions about the Vice President's wife's new dress, or elaborate theories about who really killed JFK or engineered 9/11) . anything else, if we don't see your point, or if we don't see what it adds to the dialogue ("conversation between two or more persons"). 4. Dialogue is usually published verbatim, but we reserve the right to edit for clarity, length, or privacy concerns. We strongly recommend you proofread and spellcheck your email (because we probably won't). No rewrites, please, and no "change of heart" requests. Don't ask ME to fix YOUR mistakes after you've sent something in -- it's a pain in the ass and a waste of my time. Fix your own damned mistakes, please, by simply reading what you've written, and sending it when you're done writing it, not before. 5. We usually edit out the sender's last name, email address, or anything else that would tend to uniquely identify the author (if we slip up, please let us know). But if your email is unambiguously intended only to annoy, insult, or threaten us, we'll publish all the details, and leave it on-line forever. We won't tolerate hate material. We don't enjoy knocks on the door from the Secret Service, so we won't publish or tolerate "jokes" about killing the President (or anyone else), ambiguous calls for the people to rise up in violent revolution, etc. Yes, we're willing to be imprisoned or killed for the things we believe, but we're not eager to be imprisoned or killed ... for the things you believe. We won't tolerate hecklers, dim bulbs, cranks, kooks, or people who otherwise waste our time. We might delete and permanently block such emails instantly, or we might (if we're in a good mood) try to coax something coherent out of unreasonable emailers. But life is short -- we won't try for long. Three strikes, you’re out. Please note, assholes and idiots are not guaranteed three strikes. If we're in a bad mood or you're an especially smelly asshole, you might get only one strike before you're out. 6. We welcome and encourage disagreement, especially from people who think we're wrong and want to explain why and how. But you're in our apartment, not in a bar, so we expect the dialogue to be cordial. We also recognize, sadly, that many people are too stubborn or simply too stupid to discuss political issues cordially. Our standards aren't particularly high, but we utterly, absolutely, and wholeheartedly reserve the right to put troublesome types out of our misery. 7. We ask readers, please, to send no more than one email intended for publication daily. We cheerfully help readers toward this goal by publishing no more than one email per person daily. 8. If you send cut-and-pasted comments as if they're yours, or send other people's comments with no attribution and no hint they're not yours, this is called "plagiarism." It's tacky, and it'll get your future emails filtered directly into the trash. 9. Here's a rule you didn't expect: Please don't use the symbols "<" or ">" unless you're coding HTML (see below). Use ( and ) or [ and ] or { and } instead. Why? Because < and > are cornerstones of the code that builds web pages like ours. If you use "<" or ">" as text and we don't catch it and fix it, it'll almost certainly make what you've written look all wrong. 10.Yes, HTML may be included in your email, provided it's correct, and provided it's limited to the commands listed on our HTML page. Fixing your code doubles our work, so if you're coding, please make gosh-dang sure your coding is correct. We also ask nicely that HTMLers don't screw with our general styles, 'cuz screwing around makes the page confusing to readers. Our general format? . What you're saying appears in plain text, with occasional italics or bolding for emphasis . Lengthy quotes appear in italics, with indenting . Our responses appear in bolded italics. Coding to generate graphics, animation, sound, or change font color or size, etc., is not allowed, and it'll get your email automatically deleted. Dialogue should be sent to unknownnews at myway.com. (If you send dialogue to one of our other email addresses, we'll still get it ... just not as quickly.)
NEWS DIALOGUE COMMENTARY
1. We love publishing original commentary. But due to time constraints, we only publish writers we're familiar with. Sorry, but we have to know our writers well enough to know that they're not nuts, won't prove "difficult" to work with, won't send eleven rewrites, their facts will be factual, they won't go shriekingly insane when someone politely disagrees, etc. And how do we get to know you? Usually, our best new writers start as letter-writers, on our dialogue page. You're very much invited to participate there, and get to know us while we get to know you. 2. Sorry, but we simply will not respond to writers who: . won't read or follow these guidelines, or . won't allow their work to be edited in the slightest, or . won't communicate with us when there's a problem, or . otherwise make themselves ass-pains. 3. We only include material that really grabs our attention. Generally, this means an opinion piece must say something startlingly out of the ordinary. It's not important whether we agree or disagree with anyone's commentary. If we only published what we agreed with, we'd be our only byline. 4. Check your facts. Cordially, with all the affection in the world, facts are rather important, and our credibility is on the line with every article we publish. If the "facts" cited in your article are less than factual -- if you don't know the difference between millions and billions, or you refer to Canada as America's neighbor to the south -- we'll assume you're a little slow or just not trying very hard, and we don't publish articles by authors who are slow or not trying. 5. Any article published by Unknown News is subject to editing for clarity, grammar, and style. Material should require a minimum of tinkering to be presentable: . Like any reader, we're far more likely to take an article seriously if it's written and presented seriously. . Please use standard spelling and grammar rules for American English. . Please proofread your article before sending it. We recommend reading your article to yourself, out loud. . If you don't spellcheck or proofread, and you send an article full of exactly the sort of mistakes these simple tasks catch, we will understand that you don't give a damn about your writing (or our time). . Use common, everyday English, not lots of insider jargon or gobbledygook. . If complicated terms are necessary, define them in your article. . The first time you mention someone, tell us who he/she is. For example, "Albright said ..." is wrong and confusing unless you've established that you're referring to Former Secretary of State Madeline Albright. . Similarly, all unusual acronyms must be defined the first time they are used -- don't tell us about the FYWZGG without telling us what it is. . We welcome criticisms of the world's so-called leaders, but prefer they be referred to by name, not by infantile insulting nicknames. The Vice President, for example, is Dick Cheney, not SuckMyDick Chainy. We don't refer to President Bush as Bushie-Gooshie-Between-the-Ears. This has nothing to do with "respecting" such leaders, as most deserve no respect at all. It has everything to do with respecting our readers. Criticism requires thought; insults do not. . We have fully functional funny bones, but we're usually in "serious mode" while working on the website ... so if you're sending something that's intended as satire, parody, or comedy, please don't assume we'll "get it." Tell us, flat out and up front, "This is satire." . If you'd like to say a few or a few dozen words "about the author," please do. If you'd like your email address published, so readers can contact you, let us know. Elsewise, we generally publish articles as "by first-name last-initial," with only our email address for feedback. 6. We love and enjoy reading other weblogs and alternative publications, but we don't have any time or interest in duplicating their work. Thus we reject all "multiple sublissions." We also scratch our heads, wondering about authors who submit an article to several or dozens of weblogs. I understand the desire to see your work published and read, but I never have and never will understand this desire to see one's work published everywhere. 7. No rewrites, please, and no "change of heart" requests. 8. If you're sending something that's date-sensitive -- a deep think-piece on Arbor Day, for example -- we suggest you send it at least a week before Arbor Day. 9. We rarely link to or publish petitions or "open letters" to politicians. It's a waste of time, since we don't believe anyone on the receiving end cares. 10. Send original articles as plain, un-coded text, in the body of your email -- not as an attachment. Remember, our software automatically deletes all email with attachments. Commentary links and original commentary should be sent to unknownnews at myway.com. (If you send commentary to one of our other email addresses, we'll still get it ... just not as quickly.)
All this may sound stern, but these policies leave us much more time to patiently peruse, ponder, and publish material sent by our actual readers, instead of by spambots and imbeciles.
And, of course, we break our own rules when we feel like it... A bit about the basics of journalism: The bare-bones basics of journalism is: who, what, when, where, why and how. We're amateur journalists, but that doesn't have to mean half-assed, so if you're participating here, we do ask that you provide the basics. If you're quoting someone, we'll need to know who. If you're saying something, we'll need to know what. If you're referencing a website, we'll need to know what website. Et cetera. Whether intended as news, commentary, or dialogue, emails lacking the bare-bones minimums of journalism will be disregarded. What this means is, we don't have time to interrogate emailers who play cryptic games, who allude to more information than they can reveal, or who otherwise don't or won't provide the simple basics. A bit about bylines and pen names: Authors "roll their own" bylines, and we don't keep records of who's who, so please tell us your desired nom de plume, each and every time. A bit about personal chit-chat with the folks behind Unknown News: Readers who raise thorny personal or philosophical questions but don't want their comments published will almost certainly get only a brief reply, if that. We're sorry, but we simply can't be electronic penpals. Our replies are usually brief. When we receive especially compelling, heartfelt personal emails that require a long, heartfelt response, they go into our "urgent, must reply" file ... and we sincerely hope we'll get to them ... but we rarely do. Personal correspondence is not our strong suit. A bit about copyrights: Authors retain the copyright on their works. We hold only the right to on-line publication and -- someday, eventually -- an off-line "best of" collection for fundraising purposes. Sometimes, love is not forever, but once you've given us the right to publish, you can't take it back. This means that if or when we write or publish or link to something that offends you, we're not obligated to take a day off work and promptly wipe the website, deleting each and every word you've ever sent, just because you demand it. A bit about our disorganization: Please don't send multi-part emails, serialized articles, or anything that won't make sense all by itself (without referring to background material sent separately). We're far too disorganized to keep track of more than one email at a time. A bit about feedback: Some of our readers and writers fear their government, as anyone who knows anything about government should. For this reason, we keep no records of who’s who or how to get in touch. We have no files to seize. This puts some people's minds at ease, but it also means we can’t forward emails to our authors. So if you’d like to get in touch with one of our writers, or if you’ve written something we’ve published and you’d like to follow the feedback, the dialogue page is your best bet. A bit about hate: We won't tolerate hate material (i.e., all or most ____________s are lazy, sick, inferior, or deserve a lesser lot in life). And we'll be the judge of what's hate material. A bit about hidden URLs: We can't guess why, but some websites prefer to hide their internal URLs, or change their articles' URLs after a few days, or even a few hours. The Canadian news site "canoe" is a perfect example; most articles people find and send from "canoe" are long gone by the time we get your email. If you've found a good article at a rapid-shuffling URL site, you must either figure out the super-secret, internal, long-lasting URL, or tell us plainly how you got to that internal page. We really don't have time to play hide-and-seek, so if we can't find what you're quoting or referring to, and find it quickly, at the URL you've sent, we'll honor what seems to be such sites' intent, by not putting up a link. A bit about how many is too many: This website is our hobby and our passion, but we do not post everything anyone sends. We're not stenographers. If you're sending more material than we use, you're probably sending too much. If you're sending a parade of links that all lead back to one or two sources, that's just advertising. If you're sending an extended series of commentaries about the excessive tow fees in Raymond, Missouri, please die. We sometimes need to eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom, so we can only publish the items that interest or infuriate us most, or make us chuckle loudest. A bit about investigative journalism: If you have completed serious, credible investiagtive journalism, we'll cerrtainly consider publishing it. Sadly, though, time precludes us from conducting in-depth investigative journalism about each and every atrocity known to humanity. There are lots, but we can't live our lives, prep and publish this website, do our real-world activism, and pretend we're investigative journalists. We're Helen & Harry, not Woodward & Bernstein. A bit about language: Tragically, we are fluent in English, and no other language. Some people are offended by naughty words, such as fucking asshole or dicklicking shithead. We're not easily offended, and we consider such words part of the poetry of the American language. A bit about length limits: We don't have length limits, because when you need 10,000 words, you need 10,000 words. Generally, though, briefer is better, and more people will read a few hundred words than a few thousand. Also, please remember that we're not your employees: The longer your submission, the longer it will take me to prep and code it. At some unpredictable point, if what you're written isn't excellent enough to justify my extra time and work, submissions may be delayed or discarded. A bit about quality and quantity: If you're sending several link suggestions, please send them all in one big email, instead of several little ones. Quality trumps quantity, though. If you're sending more than 3-4 link suggestions daily, unless we're using virtually everything you send you're probably sending too many, or too many reruns. If you're unsure what we're looking for, don't be shy about asking. A bit about the reality of running this website: We don’t publish everything we write or find, so we can’t promise to publish everything you write or find. We’re low-level worker-drones doing the website in our spare time, and time is limited. We receive literally dozens, sometimes hundreds of link suggestions daily, and we're always in a rush, so if you're sending an article that's subtle, or requires a reader's slow, thoughtful rumination, we probably won't "get it" unless you write a paragraph or two yourself, and explain why this article is worthwhile. For example, a link to an article headlined "Gummi bear sales projected to decline" is a link we probably won't follow to an article we probably won't read unless your email tells us why we should. Similarly, if you're sending a link to something long or complicated -- the complete text of a legal document, for example -- please summarize it in your email, or we might miss the significance of Section 4, subsection B, Item 17." A bit about rewrites and 'change-of-hearts': Folks unfamiliar with the work of web-coding sometimes think it's an instantaneous process, as easy as cut-and-paste. It's not. HTML coding can be a little tedious, and we do it by hand, with no prep-aid software. It can take half an hour (or longer) for us to proofread, edit, prep, and HTML-code an average, uncomplicated article for publication. An article with lots of special effects (bolding, italics, or links to insert) takes longer ... sometimes much longer. And we're happy to do it, but please don't ask us to do this work twice. If you send rewrites, or have a change-of-heart and ask us not to publish something after we've prepped it, you're taking large chunks of our time and flushing that time down the toilet. Of course, we understand that these things will happen, but if these things happen repeatedly with the same author, we're likely to ... remember the source. We reiterate: Please don't send what you've written until you're done writing it. A bit about sites we won't link to: We won't link to nutball sites. This includes: . sites with permanent pictures of space aliens on their main page, or prominent illustrations of an eyeball in a pyramid . sites with names like TinFoilHat, or my-dentures-pick-up-shortwave-broadcasts.com . sites where a recurring theme is the Illuminati, the Bilderbergs, how the planets control our lives, the Trilateral Commission, the wit and wisdom of Lyndon LaRouche, or anything else which falls beyond the realm of things which make sense . sites where the agenda is offensive, or where we can smell an agenda but we can't quickly figure out what it is, or where we get a gut feeling they're bonkers . sites where the layout or lack-of-proofreading debunks the text . sites that seem less than credible for any reason. Even if it looks genuine, we will not present news from sources that induce snickering. No exceptions. And your credibility is on the line, too. Once you've sent us "news" that Drew Barrymore shot JFK, it's unlikely we'll take your next suggestions seriously. We won't knowingly link to websites that spam us. And you bet your ass, that specifically includes weblogs that add us to their daily mailing list without asking us. We won't knowingly link to websites that do automatic downloads, publish ads designed to look like internal warning messages about your computer, disable the 'back' function, try to reset your home page, or do any such dirty tricks. Sorry, we can't link to 'Geocities' or other sites which allow free web space but severely constrain the number of visitors allowed, because ten minutes after we put up the link, the bandwidth limit is exceeded and further connections are blocked for the day. We won't knowingly link to websites that publish hate material. We won't link to articles in Arab News detailing how bad Jews are, or articles in Jewish News detailing how bad Arabs are, or etc. Everyone's entitled to hate to their heart's content, but we're not interested. Booooring. We won't link to "think tanks" or advocacy sites designed for "true believers." There's nothing unexpected at i-love-guns.com or guns-are-bad.com; you know what the article's going to say as soon as you see the web address. If any of this crap slips by us, please do let us know. A bit about wingnuts: Life is short, and the time we give the website is huge but never as much as we wish it could be. For this reason, we're impatient with wingnuts -- an old-school term for the deluded and dingbatty. If you send "link suggestions" to deluded or dingbatty sites (the Martians are coming, RFK shot JFK, racial or religious or ethnic or gender supremacists, advice straight from God, etc.), with notes suggesting that you take such stuff seriously, we'll never take you seriously again. --Helen & Harry Highwater your Unknown News hosts There's much more than this at Unknown News. |

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