Publication Guidelines

To make Digital Shroud the best publication we can, here are some guidelines.

Getting Started

If you’re new to Medium, first have a look at this “Write a post” post, which will help you get your bearings.

Next, check out this three-minute guide for best practices to writing on Medium. A few key takeaways: try to communicate clearly; emphasize your post’s original insight; and include an interesting image.

Another note on images: Check out this post to make sure you’re getting the most out of images.

I’d also encourage you to make use of the formatting possibilities on Medium. Embed links, use bold and italic and lists, and so on. Experiment!

So much for writing. We’ll also be reading each other’s work throughout the term, and Medium provides some additional guidance on how to interact with other stories: clapping on articles, leaving meaningful responses, and highlighting your favorite passages.

Where to Get Images

When people create things like words and images, under copyright law they own those words and images. Even when they post these things online (broadly speaking), they still own the right to control how those words and images circulate. This means that just because you find some words or images online (such as via a Google Images search) doesn’t mean you can just use them.

This goes for all of our writing, including for class essays, but it’s extra important to consider when we also have a public audience.

So, when you use images in your Digital Shroud posts, you need to be careful. At the very least, give credit (in the caption) to the owner of that image and put a link to where you got the image from. If you want to be on the safe side, you should use license-free images or ones that are licensed with Creative Commons.

To find good images for your posts, you can still use Google Images—just be sure to select “labeled for noncommercial reuse.”

But if you’re looking for some higher quality images, check out this post from Dustin Senos, “Stock images that don’t suck,” where you’ll find a list of more than a dozen sites where you can find great stock photos. I myself often use Unsplash. You’ll see that some of these sites don’t require any attribution, so that’s nice. Just be sure to pay attention to the rules for each individual image you are using.

Credit

Many of these guidelines were adapted from Molly Wright Steenson’s syllabus for Journalism 676 at University of Wisconsin–Madison, which in turn was adapted from David Carr’s “Press Play” course at Boston University. Links have been updated, as many of the original links no longer work.