Editorial Policy

Over the past year and a half, Liza's little blog empire has been growing remarkably. Daily Gotham really took off thanks to several highly contentious Brooklyn issues (development issues, arson issues, race issues, and some particularly divisive primaries). For me it was a pretty dizzying rise that included quite a few heated exchanges between the DG editors/writers and other bloggers, political organizations and partisans of particular campaigns. At the end of it, we were credited with (perhaps given TOO much credit) defeating a Congressional candidate who raised $1.8 million and had assumed he would win as the only white candidate in a majority black district where the black vote was split among several black candidates. At the end of it we also had earned the respect of many who at first hated us. The president of one local club we took on who coined the phrase "I'd rather be flogged than blogged" after we took her club to task for disenfranchising a large group of new members recently welcomed me onto the board of the same club. Gatemouth, a local NYC blogger who really slammed us at first, wound up having us as his defenders when he was attacked. One State Senator we have slammed claims to be a loyal reader.

So, somehow, and I really am somewhat clueless how we did it, we became noticed on DG in a very short period of time. Put another way, we were successful.

During that whole time I spent far more time on DG than Culture Kitchen. But Liza asked me to be a managing editor for CK. Since then, through the efforts of Liza and the editors, CK has been growing as well. And has been noticed.

Slowly but surely I am updating the editorial and style guidelines. This section on style is still in progress, but please take a look at it.

When you write a comment, start a forum topic or submit an article at culturekitchen, you are not just contributing your writing. You are also taking part in the publishing process.

In this book you will find the dos and donts of prettifying your work.

I had to shut off a few features on the site, especially after we got slammed with traffic during the Brangelina saga. Now that things have calmed down and I have figured out what was crashing the server, I can turn features on and do some promotions.

So that means that all the people who joined culturekitchen as far back as April and had not been granted member privileges, now you've got them.

I have promoted some members to contributor status. And I have set in place a community promotion system or "mojometer" that allows all members to vote to move posts by non-editors and/or contributors to the front page. Yes, it's not just me who can move stuff to the front. In one way or other the whole community can do this now.

I will be writing about it later today, just giving you the heads up.

If you have not been granted anything other than unmoderated commenting rights, then please, holler here in the comments. And also let me know of any technical difficulties you might be having. I know Lorraine was having trouble posting this morning but I can't find what was happening.

Anyhow, hollaback y'all!

There are many ways to contribute to culturekitchen than just blogging. Here's a run down of some of what's available on the site :

1. Quotes
   When I don't have time to blog about a bit of news, I use the Quotes form to take good excerpts out of articles and have them rotating in the QUOTES block that appears towards the bottom of the left side column on every page. Some have images, some don't.

   It just occurred to me to use it to also excerpt good posts from other bloggers outside of our site. So use it, please, especially if you don't have time to blog about a good post you've read from blogs we don't have in our blogroll.

2. Image Galleries
   After the last fix our image galleries got all screwed up, but when they are working, they work marvelously.

   If you'd rather open a photo-essay gallery instead of a blog, just make your case and we will do that for you. We have here a wonderful source that gets massively hit through the search engines ready for the community.

3. Recipes
   Yes! After a test run, the recipe module is working again (that's a shout-out to Jeffrey). A girl doesn't just live of ideas. She needs a good, hearthy portion of Chocolate Mousse Pie to feed her soul too.

Have you ever wondered how you can help get the word out there about your contributions to our blog? Well, look no further. This list is meant to break down some of the features we have on the site that should help people spread the word about how y'all are contributing to any or all our culturekitchen blogs.

I refuse to give The New York Times the hard earned Google juice and page rank I have earned with my blogs. When I checked out their new design I noticed their "Most blogged" box linking to .... no blogs. Excuse me? How can you know it is most blogged if you don't show who is blogging to you in the first place?

Well, I'm glad I am not the only one who noticed.

[via New York Times faux "most blogged" list -- what a bunch of leeches. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog]:

Just when you think the NYT is starting to get it they create a "Most Blogged" list *without* the back up data of who's blogging the stories!!!

Come on NYT... would it kill you to link to a blog!??!?!?!

Let me get this straight: you'll mine the data from the blogosphere to make your list, but you won't reward the blogosphere by linking back?!?!?!

That makes you a bunch of leeches--you take but you give nothing.

You see, the more we link to them, the not only the more traffic the get, but the higher in Google ranking they will be. And that is worth money. A. LOT. OF. MONEY. Jason Calacanis knows this. That's why he calls them leeches.

So boo to them.

Washington Post, on the other hand ... Thanks to Technorati, they get my heart-felt, "Yeah!"

Sure, they effed up royally with Ben Domenech, but at least they acknowledge the existence of blogs ... most importantly my blogs.

Other blog friendly publications?

Unfortunately we do not have a team of moderators to handle anonymous or unverified commenters.

Why should you register with our site? The answer is here.

1. ONLY EDITORS CAN MAKE CHANGES TO PROMOTED POSTS
First off, if your blog post gets promoted to the front page, unless you have front-page privileges, you cannot edit your post. If you do so, the updated version will be saved with your privileges and the post will disappear from the front-page. For that matter, make sure you send me or any of our editors the edited copy. We'll be glad to make the update.

2. ALL FRONT PAGE ARTICLES ARE NOW AUTOMATICALLY SHORTENED
I did this to fit more articles on the page. If you don't like where the system automatically shortens your entry you can always change it by putting the following bit of code (but without the spaces) under the paragraph or image you'd like the cut-off point to be:

< !--break-- >

Remember, no spaces if you want the code to work.

3. YOU HAVE TO GO TO YOUR USER PAGE OR WORKSPACE TO START A POST
The side bars were starting to get unruly and for that matter I decided to move the work sections to ... ahem ... your workspace and member page.

4. FEEDS ARE NOW IN A SEPARATE PAGE
In my quest to clean up the sidebars, I set up a page with links to all the varieties of feeds to the front page available to you. But we have other feeds as well.

Members cannot edit your blogpost after it has been promoted to the front page. Since you are not a Contributor or Contributing Editor, once you save it, the post will revert back to the "Counter Talk" batch.

If you want to correct grammar or anything else once the post has been promoted, please forward any changes to the editor who promoted the post.

Absolutely!

When you publish your blog, book reviews, recipes, event calendar, and other content with us, you are doing so under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike license.

You are free:

* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

by
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

nc
Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

sa
Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

What does this mean? In the event you or I get a contract to re-publish your content in any form, we need to get each other's permission.

Other than that, you are free to republish your content in any blog you decide to start. Just make sure we know about it so we can link back to you.

Editors
Liza Sabater
Founder and Publisher

Lorraine Berry
Contributing Editor

Jeff Langstraat
Contributing Editor

Administration
Mark Napier
Technology Administrator

Lynn Siprelle
Systems Administrator

Melanie Lee
Administrative Assistant

You can contact each editor directly by clicking on their names and using the contact form to send them a private message.

We are always looking for volunteers and interns. For more information, please contact us at internships [at] culturekitchen [dot] com

1. Contributors, editors and guest bloggers get to the front page.

Most of the time posts are discussed prior to publishing. Sometimes they are copy edited. But we rarely edit for content unless the writer asks for it.

Blog posting is very different than essay or article writing. Blogs are ideas and discussions in process. Blog posts are not necessarily finished products and for that reason they may contain errors, glitches or inaccuracies.

It may be text but consider a blog closer to speaking than publishing.

2. Members' blog posts can be promoted to the front page either by :
• Popularity: it gets voted to the front page by the community.
• Editorial decision: it gets promoted to the front page by one of the editors
• Request: Ask and ye shall receive.
3. Under no circumstance will we delete a post from this blog.

We do not condone censorship although understand why a person would choose to censor themselves. But deleting content as a form of censorship is not part of our blogging practice.

I was asked why do people have to register to participate in the site. At culturekitchen, you have always had to register in order to leave comments. With the old blogging software though, there was no commitment established between anything other than a name, a sometimes fake email and my light moderating of comments.

In communities, even anonymous members have an identity that sets them apart from other anonymous users. We do not demand full disclosure of your personal information, but we need at least a basic level of commitment for your participation in the site and that involves registering.

At culturekitchen, you may stay anonymous to the community but, as part of our editorial policy, to become a contributor, you have to publish pseudonymously. In other words, the publisher and editors need to know, under full confidentiality, who you are.

Still, we care deeply about your privacy and freedom of speech.