To engender a sense of uniformity across all news posts, this guide will be something each news poster can turn to when in doubt about specifics within their posts.
Title of News Post
- The first word and all proper nouns in the title are capitalized.
- Titles should convey the necessary information, giving the reader a good idea of what they’re in store for, but at the same time be as short as possible. (E.G.: “Nintendo creates spin-off, Dark Link main character” rather than “Nintendo creates a spin-off of the Zelda series and gives Dark Link his own game”)
Body of News Post
- News posts should always begin with an image of no more than 220 pixels in either width or height and justified to the left via the CSS code “newsleft”.
- The first paragraph or two act as a teaser, setting the reader up for the meat of the story which is placed after the jump. Sometimes the meat is just a YouTube video, or an image, sometimes it is a long quote from a developer–these are always placed after the jump (“more” tag).
- After the “meat” of the story, there is a short closing paragraph often with the writer’s personal opinion on the story. Then an invitation to leave relevant comments below.
- Long-form works titles (films, books, video games, television shows) should be italicized.
- Short-form works titles (songs, chapters within video games if they’re structured as such, episode of television series) are placed within quotes.
- Series titles (movie series, book series, video game series) are neither italicized nor placed in quotes.
- Full titles should be used as much as possible. Rather than Wind Waker we would want to write The Wind Waker except for when the sentence is already calling for a the before The Wind Waker (in which case we’d leave off the second The). Similarly with A Link to the Past.
- Acronyms should not be used. Rather than LoZ simply use Zelda. Also, there is no need to write The Legend of Zelda: before Skyward Sword, etc.
- Refrain from using jargon and slang as much as possible. No emoticons.
- Pay special attention to the names of things like websites and consoles. GoNintendo is not Gonintendo, YouTube is neither Youtube nor youtube, deviantART is neither DeviantArt nor Deviantart nor deviantArt. The GameCube is neither the Gamecube nor the Game Cube. The Wii MotionPlus is not the Wii Motion Plus. The Wii U is not the WiiU. Cel-shading is not “cell shading”. It’s “Wii U GamePad” not “Wii U Game Pad”. When in doubt, check to see how an official source spells the name (go to deviantART.com and look at your brower’s tab for how they spell it) or check Wikipedia.
- Numbers under ten must be spelled out.
- Long quotes (in an interview, etc) go within “blockquote” code, listed in WordPress HTML as “b-quote” and also italicized (because it just looks that much nicer).
Source Line Each news post must end with a source line. The source, however, may not be the place that we obtained the story from (that would be the “via”) so we’ll want to source where the story originated and then source the via. For example: we read on Kotaku that Nintendo is giving Dark Link his own spin-off game, but Kotaku got this post from IGN, so the source line would look like:
Source: IGN (via Kotaku)
With a hyperlink on IGN taking them to that original story and a hyperlink on GoNintendo taking them to that story. If we received this news tip from one of our commenters or forum members or via an email, we’ll want to thank them in the source line. For example:
Source: IGN (tipped by BastianTheAwesome)
Updates When new details come along that we’d rather just fit into a recently published story rather than write a brand new one, we edit the existing story with “(UPDATED)” at the end of the title and then in the body of the news post at the end (before the Source line) place: “UPDATED [the time]CST [the date]: [Whatever the amazing cool new piece of news is]”.
