Pubdate: Sat, 31 July 1999 Source: Media Awareness Project of DrugSense Contact: http://www.mapinc.org/ HELP NEEDED, PLEASE, NEWSHAWKS! Dear Newshawks, A few days ago a reader sent a note asking why there were so many duplicate postings of the same story from the same source. The answer is simply that we receive so many news items that they are posted by a team of editors, each receiving their own share. The duplicate items arrive, sometimes, a day or two apart. Most duplicate posts are caught. But the reason some are not is because some are posted to with something other than the article headline in the subject line of the email message. It is critical to the process that the headline, and only the headline (and not in all caps) be the subject of the message. State codes and other information is not needed (the editors will add the appropriate codes and identifiers). Our roboeditor software starts the duplicate checking process by looking to see if the first forty characters of the subject line match a previous item sent to in the past few days. If it finds a match, it sends the item to the same editor who received the first item so the editor may verify if it is an actual duplicate. But when the headline is not used in the subject line the process does not work - roboeditor sends the item to whichever editor is appropriate in our workload sharing process. We all look over all the posted news items, but none of us can remember every headline over a several day period with between 30 and 50 items being posted each day. We do, however, tend to remember the items we, as editors, post - and thus we can reduce the duplicate posts. Thank you for your assistance! If you are new to newshawking, or would like to help, please see the basic instructions at: http://www.mapinc.org/hawk.htm While the instructions suggest that you check to see if the item has already been sent, doing so is not necessary with the improvements in duplicate checking in our roboeditor software. But if you are newshawking by either typing or OCRing an item, making the check can save you time. Also, once you know that a source is in our roboeditor database, it is not necessary to use the lead lines copyright, contact, website, forum, mail or fax as roboeditor supplies them to the editing/posting team. You can check to see if your source is in the database at the following URL. I usually use the location dropdown to check a state or country's sources for the one I want. http://www.mapinc.org/resource/email.htm Thank You, Newshawks, for all that you are doing! Note that the stories of several of our long time newshawks are now linked from: http://www.drugsense.org/dswvol.htm Richard Lake Sr. Editor; MAPnews, MAPnews-Digest and DrugNews-Digest More than 24,321 Drug-Related News Clippings in a SEARCHABLE database! http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/ - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake