NEMS Writer Guidelines



The New England Music Scrapbook is dedicated to gathering, organizing, and reporting information about popular music acts, past and present, with a strong connection to the New England region. Many people contribute to the work of this organization, as time permits, particularly by providing information and illustrations. A smaller group of us work together as a standing team.

The New England Music Scrapbook started a free e-mail newsletter in February 2003, and we're in need of writers as well as volunteers who could send news items, band information, Web-site addresses, and all kinds of other material, every now and then. We know from experience that this does not have to be a big time commitment. A lot of people send us valuable and much-appreciated information, and their time spent on it ranges from maybe as much as an hour or more every once in a while all the way down to as little as a few minutes a year. If you are interested in writing or might be able to send us occasional information, please contact us via our contact page and we can talk it over. You may use the same address to subscribe to our newsletter or to request a sample copy. Lately, as soon as we can after sending our newsletter, we've been posting it at our Web site. Each issue has a unique address, but the following page

www.oocities.org/nemsnewz/news.htm

will automatically transfer you to the current issue. This is where most of our energy is going these days. Why not take a look to see whether this is a thing you'd like to be a part of?

In addition to writers, we could also use someone with basic computer skills who could help us compile each newsletter issue.

This is a non-commercial, all-volunteer, not-for-profit enterprise. (In fact, this Web site has never had a financial transaction of any sort.)

This site includes profiles, articles, and reviews of music acts - past and present - that are based in New England, got their start here, or are otherwise closely connected with some part of the six New England states. Our inclination is to include rather than to exclude. There have been and there may continue to be a few examples, though, that are too much of a stretch even for us.

Our newsletter has taken much more of our time than expected. Since starting the newsletter a year ago, we have posted very few artist profiles of the size that we've done in the past. If you're considering contributing a profile, please think in terms of it being published in our newsletter. We believe that newsletter features generally should be 500 words in length or shorter. Above 500 words, we have reason to believe we lose many readers. We do make some exceptions; but we're not looking to make more exceptions, we're looking to make less. So please do your best to keep to a word limit of 500 or less. And it would be a really good idea to contact us before getting started.

It's doubtful we'll ever have time enough for acts other than those that we think are/were really good or which have been, for some reason, particularly important. We do document the ups and downs of careers; but the rule of thumb is that if we don't have mostly nice things to say, our efforts would be better spent on another subject.

Writing for the Web is quite different from writing for print. Most visitors find our pages by searching on rather specific topics via a search engine. Thus, including a lot of specifics - details - increases the chances that 'Net surfers will find our articles in the first place. When such information is available to us, I've made it a point to list the names of band members (and now I'm often adding instruments played, including vocals), dates each group formed and disbanded, exact titles of records, names of record labels, years of release, call letters of the principal radio stations that broadcast the act's recordings, names of venues played, career high points (sharing a bill with a big star is a common example) and low points (record deals gone bad come up all too often) - that sort of thing.

We encourage artist contact links, such as Web addresses or business e-mail addresses.

Anyone who has browsed the New England Music Scrapbook will know that we generally cite our information sources, much like a college research paper. Personally, I would do it that way anyway; but it is worth adding that quite a few of our visitors are scholars doing serious academic research; and they, like us, value knowing where information comes from. When you're reminiscing, of course, you are creating a primary source; and it would be helpful to include your byline.

We've steered clear of the use of coarse language, with few exceptions. One of our newsletter issues included a link to an alternative weekly record review of an album with a swear word in the title. We included the title, curse word and all; but this isn't going to happen often.

Our pages are generously hosted by Yahoo! Geocities and are subject to their terms of service. Their service agreement may be found at www.oocities.org.

We have been able to use some contributors' writings exactly as they were submitted. Other writers may have spelling and typing skills that are still waiting to bloom. At times I've felt the need to guess what was intended and then ask permission to publish my interpretation.

Our time devoted to this enterprise is pretty much stretched to the limit; and our Web hosting comes with technical limits of its own. We simply can't follow up on every idea or lead that people send us. We have accomplished a lot, but we know we can't do it all.

Please get in touch if you have questions.

-- Alan Lewis revised February 4, 2004






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