Suggestions and guidelines for submitting SCFF Newsletter

Thank you for being a volunteer contributor to the award-winning Santa Cruz Fly Fishing Newsletter.  Without effort and content from the membership, there would be no newsletter at all.   Below is information to make it easy to get your article into the newsletter.

Timeline:

3rd Sunday of the month:  Articles need to be submitted.

4th Wednesday of the month:  Newsletter editor has reviewed all articles.

4th Friday of the month:  Online and print newsletter is created.

Newsletter is sent out over the weekend.  

Article Submission:

Articles are submitted online at:  https://www.santacruzflyfishing.org/newsletter-submit/

There are specific fields in the form and below are explanations of what they are and what to do.

First & Last Name  (Mandatory fields)

Email (Mandatory)

Indicate which month the article should be published:

You can submit an article ahead of time and we will put it in the correct newsletter.  If you do not indicate the month, we will put it in the next newsletter.

Note for newsletter editor

Please let us know if there is anything, we need to get your article to look correct on the online and print newsletter.  For example, if you could not find a picture, you could describe what kind of picture you think would work best.


Article Category:

Helps us determine where to place the article.  Take your best guess of where if it’s based on the categories below.  (the editors reserve the right to move an article to another category).

Section

Description

Monthly Meeting Program

Speaker info.

Fly Tying Class

Information on the monthly fly-tying class.

Fly of the Month

Instructions on how to tie a fly.

President’s Line

Monthly musings from the club’s president.

Reel News

Newsy items like upcoming fly shows, other organization fund raisers, lost and found, press releases of interest, reminders of getting fishing licenses at beginning of year, etc.

Membership Notes

Information on new members, board update (i.e. treasurer’s update).

Conservation Concerns

Information on conservation issues that affect fly fishing waters and fish stock.

Gearing Up

Full description of the fish out and some information of what you need.

Monthly Raffle

Items that will be raffled off at the next club meeting.

Cartoon

Fishing funnies.

Bait for Thought

Quotes. life lessons, and inspirational stories.

Lifelines

Survival and safety tips.

Recipe of the Month

Cooking recipe of interest to members.

Fishy Tales

Letting the membership know about individual’s fishing trips.

Gone Fishing

Reports from official club “fish out” trips.

Cast of Thousands

 items for sale, looking for items, free giveaways

Article title:  (Mandatory)

Catchy titles are best

Author byline:

Enter your name as you would like it to appear as the author byline in the newsletter. For example,  “Conservation Director Jo Smith.”

Article Text:

This is where you paste in the story as simple text.   Text bolding, underlining, font type and size will not be seen by the editors.  If you want to have specific formatting, please let the editors know in the above field:  “Notes to the editor”.    Finally, please try and paste the article without a paragraph/carriage return at the end of the article.

Article Summary:  (New Field)

We are trying to work around email length limitations imposed by Gmail.  To allow all articles to appear in the email, we are limiting the email text of the article to the first 40 words OR a brief description of the article in less than 200 characters or about 40 words.   This field is where you would put in your description.  (Note:  On Windows, I use a free text editor Notepad++ that counts characters as you type)

Source: (Option, rarely used)

If the article submission is from another website, here is where you would enter the URL address.

Featured Photo

Please try and include a photo/image for every article.   The editors have been spending a lot of time trying to find an appropriate photo for the articles.  I would be best if you could submit the article with an image.  Here are some

  • Please try and provide an image with permission rights for us to use.  
  • The image looks best if square.  
  • The image should be more than 640 by 640 pixels (i.e. more than 100 kb in size).
  • Should be a JPEG, PNG or GIF.
  • IF you cannot find an image, then in the field “Notes to the editor”, let us know what kind of image you would like to see with the article.  This will help us try and source one.

Additional Photos

More photos are great!  May not use them all in the printed newsletter, but all of them in the online version.   If the photo is supposed to be located next to specific paragraph, please let us know that in the field “Notes to the Editor”.

Again, thank you for making the SCFF newsletter a “must read” every month!