Here are the new guidelines that must be followed if you would like to see something posted to the Irish Squash web site. You must now provide it in a specified format or it won’t get posted.
It is commonly commented that we are not providing sufficient coverage for various events – our professionals, our teams our leagues or whatever. Usually the squash office gets an e-mail with something like “this team won” or “Arthur won the PSA event in France” or “Irish Team are competing in Hungary”, “can you put up the results from this”. This format doesn’t provide enough information to provide a good post or item on the website. It means that the person uploading the information to the site has complete discretion to just put up what is provided. There are far too many news items and not enough resources for one person to do this properly.
If the information is provided properly it can be put up the site quickly and will be more useful. This just takes a little effort on behalf of whoever knows about the item.
The title should try to include the name of the event and have a hook to try and get the readers interested. E.g. “Arthur wins World Championships in London”
This is a summary paragraph that will tell the reader a synopsis of the item. It should draw in the reader and make the article interesting. “In what was one of his finest professional performances Arthur took pushed the former World Number one to his limits in a roaring reception in the auditorium…”.. you get the idea.
Ideally this is a summary of the event – and it might be possible to get this from another source if it is a big event. Our readers want to know about the winners and about how our players competed and anything interesting that may have happened. This should be more than just “John won 3-0”.
Article Background
Is there any background information you can provide about this tournament or event to help the reader? Just because you know the people involved and that we have won the event for the last 10 years doesn’t mean everyone else does. Who won it last year? What was it like last year? Is it it better now? Are there old rivalries we should know about?
Nearly everyone has a camera on their phone and definitely someone at the event took pictures. We Need pictures. Gather the pictures.. find them on the websites, copy them and then attach them to the item to be posted! All sorts of pictures can be good – action shots, including those of the venue and the crowd.. things that help capture the experience not just the trophy collections.
Much as we would like to think that we know everybody in the World of Squash in Ireland – trying to work out who is in a picture and how to spell their names correctly is another task that should be carried out by you when you submit the article. If you don’t know who they are in the picture how can we know what name to put beside them?
