Community

Being an Futurehealth Volunteer Editor

 

Editors play a number of roles. First, posting links to news and op-eds on other sites and finding and recruiting new writers.

 

An editor can focus on one or more subject categories or locations, or can focus on certain media sites. You can give give as little as ten minutes a week of your time and still help make a difference.

We need people to cover different:

-subjects: areas you are fascinated with and want to share information on -issues: you are passionate about and want to persuade others on -locales: places you live or love and where want to create your own news and op-ed forum for. Build a community, county web page that covers the news YOU think is important. Cover your local politicians, legislation, activist events...

-media: We need editors to help us make sure we are linking to the best articles for all the progressive and mainstream websites. If you regularly visit particular sites, we'd like your help linking to the most important articles they run. Once we see that you have a good feel for the content we are looking for we may promote you to trusted author status. Then, your articles and the links you submit go live immediately, not into the queue. You basically, self-edit.

If you are regular, keep in touch, continue to post appropriate content, then you can be promoted to queue editor status. This gives you access to the article queue, where unsolicited articles which people submit are managed, through a control panel. You are then among a smaller group of editors who evaluate articles and links that have been submitted for publication. You can approve an article or, if you're not sure about it, add comments that only the editors in the queue see.

Once you start as an editor, you will begin coming in contact with writers. The hardest thing is rejecting articles and dealing with irate writers. These are rare, but very annoying. Some complain they are being censored. Some try to argue you into accepting their article.

Usually, once you start working the queue, you'll be using form letters that you add personalized comments to. Sometimes, if an article is too folksy or chatty, or too short, or personal, you'll post it as a diary, rather than outright rejecting it. Sometimes you'll reject an article but ask for changes so it will be reconsidered.

And sometimes, you just outright say this article is rejected. We don't want it. Bad writing, bad editing with no spell checking or grammar checking, stale, oft repeated ideas, bad formatting, particularly no paragraphs, are common reasons. After a period of time, you will be given authorization to select articles to be main headlined.

As you grow into your individual role as editor, hopefully, you'll develop your subject or local area focus, bringing in, recruiting writers, building the site's coverage of the subject(s). You may chose to attend conferences on the subject using an Futurehealth press pass (usually just an email or letter.) You may get yourself on or find yourself invited to participate in conference calls or projects.

Or you may start projects- educational, advocacy, activism... Feedback- feedback on how to get the website control systems, article displays, etc to work better is always welcomed and quickly responded to. Keep in mind that google news spiders most of our articles. That means we reach many people who are not regular readers of progressive sites or the blogosphere.

One of our editors comments: Futurehealth is a great way to connect people with ideas and other people but it gives you an active way to be involved and making things happen. It offers the potential to connect with literally millions of cyber-readers. Contact me if you would like to become a volunteer editor.