So You Want Your Work Featured In The Reynolds Media Lab?
Excellent. If you’re a student at the Reynolds School of Journalism, we want to showcase your work and promote it far and wide. That being said, we want to make sure it meets certain standards.
First things first.
Why should you submit your work for publication on the Reynolds Media Lab?
- It’s edited and reviewed by Reynolds School staff to ensure it reaches our high editorial standards and your work is the best it can be.
- It will be seen by hundreds of Reynolds School followers across several platforms.
- You can submit your work for awards once it’s published.
Here is a step-by-step guide for preparing work to be featured within the Reynolds world.
Step 1: Create a Medium account, if you don’t already have one. Even if you have a Wordpress on which you actively blog, Medium is a good platform for cross posting and it’s the only way to get your work in front of our hundreds of Medium followers.
When you create your account make sure it’s complete, with a profile picture and links to your social accounts. Pro Tip: If you connect your Twitter and Facebook accounts with your Medium page in settings, you’ll get a bunch of followers.
Step 2: Build your story within Medium. Use large photos, link back to the organizations you reference, embed your videos and make it beautiful (consider the Bold Italic for inspiration). Here’s a good article about writing on Medium and how to get the most out of the platform.
To be considered for publishing all stories must:
- Have a descriptive and SEO friendly headline.
- Include a one or two sentence teaser.
- Include at least one quality still horizontal image, with caption. Here are the preferred sizes for Medium. Please make sure you have the rights to publish the photo and you provide proper credit.
- Write in AP style.
- If the piece is primarily visual (photos, video, VR) include a 100 to 500 word blurb about your project.
- Post from a complete Medium profile (profile picture, contact information, etc).
- At the bottom of your story, add a page break — click the + button and select the circle with two dashes in it. Under the break include the professor and class and a brief description of the assignment. Put this in italics.
EXAMPLE: This story was written for an investigative reporting class with Professor Smartpants at the Reynolds School of Journalism. We were required to interview different members of the secret guild of jelly bean flavors as well as pull data sets from the United States Department of Unicorn Surveillance in an attempt to find a correlation between the quantity of popcorn flavored jelly beans in an average bag and unicorn sightings. The assignment was particularly difficult because none of the jelly bean high masters wanted to talk on the record and the Department of Unicorn Surveillance doesn’t exist.
Step 3: Publish your story, and tag it RSJLab, and any other relevant tags (VR, documentary, investigative, design).
Step 4: Take your story link and send it to either/or: melodystone@unr.edu and usnico@gmail.com. One of us will add you as a writer and request to republish the story.
Make sure your Medium account allows people to contact you.
Once you accept and we do some light edits, in line with RSJ guidelines, all the while keeping the essence of your story and presentation intact, your story will be published.
Here are instruction on Medium to help guide you through the process.
