The Zero Hedge Contributor Guide

The Zero Hedge Contributor Guide
July 2009

Congratulations!  You have obviously managed to impress us somehow, or maybe we were really over-served that night.  Whatever the case we are happy to have you on board.

Contributors will play an increasingly important part in the Zero Hedge family as, together, we develop the best and most cogent content in the financial world.  We expect that being featured on Zero Hedge will expose thousands of readers to your content and material.  That, of course, is the point.

A few words about posting material to Zero Hedge:

The Contributor Page v. The Front Page:

Contributor submitted material is posted by default to the contributor page, and linked in our sidebar under "New Contributor Articles."  Your articles are subject to reader ratings and popularity tracking.  Occasionally, the senior staff at Zero Hedge will be taken by a irresistible urge to promote your content to the front page.  (This typically happens in the wee hours of Saturday morning after some binge drinking).  In addition, registered readers have the option of subscribing to your feed directly and getting it in RSS format.

Posting Mechanics:

To post an article, click on the "New Story" link on the left-hand side of your screen.  This will bring up an editing box with a series of fields.

"Title" should be self explanatory.  If not please e-mail marla @ zerohedge immediately to have your contributor status revoked.

"Tags" should be used to enter relevant key-words related to your article via a comma-separated list.  This is important because key-words are parsed into the Zero Hedge master glossary and can be referenced by readers.  Use title caps in tags, i.e. "Rule of Law, Housekeeping, The Nature of the Beast."  We would prefer you use at least 4-5 tags for each post.  An auto-complete feature will help you narrow in on tags we've already used.  There are a number of synonyms already entered for popular acronyms (FDIC, CDO, etc.) but articles should be tagged with the full-length version.  (i.e. "Federal Deposit Insurance Corpoartion" and not FDIC).  For the most part, however, you won't have to worry about common tags and acronyms.  The Zero Hedge site scans new articles regularly and pulls any words or phrases already in the glossary and auto-adds them as tags.  The auto-tagging engine is pretty smart too.  If you have "FDIC" in the body of your article it will add "Federal Deposit Insurance Corpoartion" to the tag list.  The best way to deal with tags is to type in the first word of the full term and see if the auto-complete field fills it in for you.  If not, type in the full term and it will be added to the glossary.  We regularly go through and add common acronyms to the glossary.  The auto-tagger will then go through all the old posts and pull the full term into tags.

In short:

1.  Avoid acronyms.

2.  Use title caps.

3.  Check to see if the full term auto-completes.

4.  Remember that the text will be scanned for auto-tagging.

The "Teaser" field is the field that will show up on the front contributor page.  If your post is promoted to the headline section of the front page, it will display there as well.  Generally, the Teaser is lifted from the first paragraph of your post, but you can write anything you like that you think will summarize the content and generate interest.  Images can be placed in the teaser field, but generally it is best to leave them 125x82 pixels or smaller.

The "Body" field should also be self-explanatory.  A full WYSIWYG editor has been provided for your convenience.  It can be disabled with the "disable rich-text" link below, if you wish to view the HTML directly.  Enjoy!

File attachments may be uploaded with the relevant dialog.

Publishing options allows you to publish and unpublish your story if, for example, you want to take it offline to edit or otherwise hide the content.

The "Authoring Information" section allows you to change the time the "Posted on" field displays.  If you edit your post it is generally wise to clear out this field before you hit save.  This will reset the post's creation time to the current time and cause RSS feeds to show the post as "UPDATED."

Your post may be scheduled for publishing with the "Scheduling options" fields.  Remember to set your time zone in the "My Account" section of Zero Hedge.  Please note that the granularity for posting schedules is about 5-10 minutes.  Don't panic if the system doesn't get your post to the minute.

Be careful not to lose posts via a lost connection or connection reset while you are writing.  Generally, for long posts, its best to compose off-line and then paste into the body section before saving.  We are experimenting with an "autosave" feature, but for now caution is the better part of valor.

A Word About Content:

Zero Hedge is focused on uncommon analysis, insight and raw data.  Our primary goal, as expressed by our tagline, is to reduce the survival rate for financial enigmas.  Failing this, your post should be hysterical.  Meet either of these criteria, destroying a financial enigma or being hysterical, and the crowd will love you.  Win the crowd, win your freedom.

Adding Pictures:

To add a picture to your post, place your cursor in the main body where you'd like to insert the picture.  Select the picture icon on the toolbar.  (It looks like a tree).  To the right of the URL field is a little blue and red icon.  Press that.  You are presented with a file browser window.  If you've previously uploaded a picture, you can select it here.  If not, you can use "upload" to upload a new picture to the Zero Hedge server.  Once you've uploaded, you can resize if you wish.  Some standard sizes we recommend:

For teasers/thumbnails: Width 125 pixels.

For the main body: Width: under 400 pixels.

For screenshots of Bloomberg, etc.: Width: Under 800 pixels.

A special note about Bloomberg screenshots:

See the last line of the Bloomberg screen?  "SN 705..." etc.?  That's a serial number linked to the subscriber.  If they sent you this screenshot, they've violated their terms of service.

This subscriber was smart:

That's safe to post.

Keep screenshots like Bloomberg in .gif form.

Everything else should be in .png if you can manage it.  .jpg compression is unpredictable.  Just avoid .jpg files if you can.

If you want to include a picture in your teaser so it shows up on the front contributor page, copy paste the HTML image tag for a small (no more than 125 pixels wide please) version to your teaser.  There, isn't that pretty?

Use the "Appearance" tab to change margins (a right margin of 10 pixels and a left margin of zero works well for pictures that are in-line with text) and set "alignment left" to keep pictures looking nice when wrapped with text.

If you have questions, email marla @ zerohedge.

Good luck.  We're glad to have you.