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News Reporting Guide [In Progress]

Lord Gareth

UO Content Editor | UO Chesapeake & Rares News
Alumni
Stratics Veteran
Stratics Legend
Wiki Moderator
News Reporting Guide [In Progress]


Programs Used For News Reporting

UO Journal Converter is a vital tool because you are not going to remember everything that is said. For example if you needed to add a direct quote from Elder EM Dudley you do NOT want to paraphrase, you want exactly what was said word for word. The journal converter will save anything anyone says on your screen along with item emote such as *The Keg released Noxious Gas* [Download Link]


When you open the journal converter all you have to do is hit the search button and type “Elder EM Dudley” and click “Highlight All”. This will highlight everything he has said and you may even find lines that you missed due to ICQ or the phone ringing.

Gimp 2.6 has tons of basic and advanced features for you to use. This program will give you high quality pictures and allow you to crop, resize, layer and animate images. I don’t expect you to be producing award winning game graphic pictures but you should be able to pick up on the basic features (I have used this program for two years and I don’t even know how to use everything) [Download Link]


News Report Pictures
First and most importantly this News Team should almost never write a paragraph and then throw 20 pictures on it and call it a News Article. Besides it just making you look lazy in six months a site may stop hosting your pictures and then were stuck with a paragraph and 20 “image has been removed” boxes.

Try to snap shot as many pictures as possible so when you go to choose which ones you want in the story you will have options. You don’t want to get stuck with a bad picture after typing up a great section.

Do your best to not have pictures with 10 character names spamming the screen. The picture should be a visual aid for what you have written not who was there. If you want to show who was there then pull the names from your journal converter and do a list for In Attendance.

If a picture shows an overview of the area but is 800x800 select the area inside of the golden outline which is your “Game Play Area”. We don’t want to see your spell icons, health bar, journal or task bar. Once you have the section highlighted
-Hold Ctrl and Hit C
-Click File > New > 539 width 340 length
-Hold Ctrl and Hit V

[Picture Highlighted]

[small picture]

If you want the entire screen and the image would be larger than follow these steps.
-Highlight the area
-Hold Ctrl and Hit C
-Click File > New >
(If the area you have selected is say 838x678 you will want the Width to be around 400 or less. The Gimp program will resize the Length for you.)
-Hold Ctrl and Hit V
-On the tool menu click Scale Tool [Left side fourth button down]
-Scale the image to 400x400 and anchor image
-Click Filters > Enhance > Sharpen [Use best judgment for sharpen number.
If you don’t like the Sharpen
-Hold Ctrl and Hit X
 
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