Social Rights Bulgaria Publication Guidelines

About Social Rights Bulgaria

The Social Rights Bulgaria (SRB) is a project aiming to raise the awareness of Bulgarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs), social movements and individuals about their rights, to provide them with a forum to claim their rights and to participate in campaigns and common projects.

Information regarding the social sector in Bulgaria, the social policy on EU accession and government decisions related to the protection of people’s rights is being published regularly on the Social Rights Bulgaria website. By acting as a focus and source for specific information, the website can help to promote a sense of unity of purpose and the sharing of experiences among active Bulgarian social NGOs.

Republication, copyright and source

For republished articles, copyright information, sources and authors should be included in the post-scriptum of the article.

Most commercial news sites do not accept articles to be copy-pasted onto other websites. It’s usually best to provide an overview of an article by copying a few key sentences or by writing a short overview of the elements which are important to Social Rights Bulgaria and a link to the original.

Where possible, the author of the article should be contacted in order to get their consent to republish the article. This also has the advantage that the author might contact you in the future when he/she writes a new article, publishes corrections, etc.

Always respect the author’s copyright statement. It’s usually OK to republish a segment of a published article, but republishing a full article without the permission of the author is not recommended.

Some authors are sometimes happy to have their article published to a wider public, others sometimes have personal restrictions that should be respected.

Avoid “noise on the web” and rumors. If the source is a website, the article must include a direct link to the article, if possible.

News sources

Acceptable news sources

All news from SRB partners are acceptable. You can use the following list:

 NGOs press-releases regarding their projects, campaigns and initiatives (contact information and consent must be provided)
 Authors’ analysis (journalists, experts and others)
 BTA (Bulgarian Telegraph Agency)
 Sega Daily - Copy-pasting is explicitely fordibben! Summary of articles with link to the source is fine!
 Dnevnik Online Daily. We have authorisation to republish articles from their European Union section.
 Radio France Ineternational, RFI, mostly linking.
 Strategies magazine
 The Institute of War and Peace Reporting IWPR. They have a strict procedure for republishing, but linking is fine.
 Indymedia Bulgaria. Copyleft.
 The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network BIRN etc.

Unacceptable news sources

The following sources are unacceptable because of their lack of integrety:

 Tabloids: Труд (Trud), 24 часа (24 hours), Новинар (Novinar), Стандарт (Standart);
 news from unknown sources;
 politically polarised and nationalist news;
 anonymous sources.

To some extent, it is acceptable to quote that a declaration was made in one of those news sources, but only if the newspaper provides an exact quote.

Choosing the right section

There are 4 main sections for publishing of information, each of them having specific rules for publication. You can choose to publish your information in one of the following sections:

Section 1: News in brief

It is the most often updated section. It includes short updates from Bulgaria about the evolution of the social rights. These are short non-editorial news about the evolution of policies, past events, NGO projects, governmental or corporate statements, demographic facts etc. related to social rights in Bulgaria.

News should always include the following items:
 Title (descriptive enough, but not too long)
 Text
 Source + link to the source (name of the author and/or organisation if any)

Section 1: Events

This section contains news about future events (conferences, campaigns, funding opportunities deadlines, workshops, demonstrations etc). Past events should go either in News or Analysis (depending on their editorial character), as they do not encourage the readers to participate in the event, but give feedback from it. The article must be useful to the reader, not to the organiser.

International events should include some more precise information on how Bulgarians can participate or how it is relevant to Bulgaria. For example, does the event provide financial help for traveling? Is it a world event which completely ignores Bulgaria or Eastern European countries? etc.

The event should contain the following information:
 Title starting with the date of the event (ex. 7-12 September: Balkan Youth Festival to take place in Sandanski). If the title of the event is very cryptic, some context words should be included.
 Text, including: title, location, date and organiser of the event. If possible, more detailed information regarding its aims, participants and deadlines (who can apply, who can be contacted for more information etc.)
 Source + link to the source (name of the author and/or organisation if any)

Section 3: International news

Short updates about the evolution of social rights in the world (preference given to neighboring countries, EU etc). It should have some link with Bulgaria but at the same time it should provide some diversity of views. Topics: major (past) events, good practices, etc.

In English, articles should have some link with Bulgaria. For example, news about major events such as WSF or WSIS are “international news”, but they can include a Bulgarian view of the event. Otherwise, there is not much point to publish about Everything.

International news should be published in the same form as the News in Brief (see above).

Section 4: Analysis

Editorial articles, NGO/social movement statements, results from research sent by other NGOs/social movements, analysis, opinions, interviews etc. are being published in this section. They are usually not too brief, and they last on the first page longer that the rest of the section items.

Part of the articles are "syndicated". This means that they are automatically published from other websites on SRB (and they usually appear with the logo of the other website). For information concerning syndicated articles, please refer to the section about Syndication.

Articles should always include:
 Title
 Short description (which appears on the first page): 1-2 key sentences about the article. Mention the author name and organisation/source in the short description.
 Deck (or chapo): 2-3 sentences that summarize the article in an interesting way, summarise the aims of the article, provide historical context or background, or explain the link with Social Rights Bulgaria. The “deck”’ and “short description”’ may be the same, since the deck is shown before the article text, while the short description is shown on the front page, in list of articles or in the newsletter (e.g. where the article text is not).
 Text of the article
 Author: in the first line or in the very end of the article. If there is background info or contacts about the author, it can be put as a footnote.
 Source + link to the source
 Related articles: Put in the article post-scriptum field.

Please avoid copy-pasting a list of unformatted contacts! If necessary, use Spip lists or use the sign! For example:

Keywords

The keywords facilitate the reading, and also the search on the website. Apply ContentType keywords as necessary and you should add them to each section article you publish. You can add one ore more keywords to your article, which are relevant to your text.

The keywords divide the content into thematic groups, which feature every time that a reader clicks on an article. For example, the GenderRelated keyword makes it possible when someone reads an article with this keyword, to see a list of all the other thematic GenderRelated articles in a column next to the text.

Syndication

From mid-February 2005, Social Rights Bulgaria uses syndication from other websites as a source of information for articles displayed in the Articles section shown on the front page. This means that articles published on the syndicated sites does not need to be copied or republished, but simply that their syndication item should be validated by an administrator from the private area of the site.

Syndicated articles show the title, authors, date and short description. When the visitor clicks on the title or on the "read more’’ link, the visitor is sent to the website who published the article.

At the moment, syndicated sites include:

 Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation
 Gender, Education, Research and Technologies
 Information portal for people living with a disability
 European Social Forum CEEC working group
 Women’s Information Technology Transfer

We are in the process of including more websites. We encourage administrators of other websites with similar aims to submit their RSS feeds.

Typography

Authors should do their best to respect typographic rules in the articles they submit, according to the language of the article:

 the use of correct quote symbols, for “English”, „bulgarian“ or «French» (note: for French, Spip automatically puts a nonbreakable space before/after the quotes, so it is not necessary to do it manually);
 phone numbers in Bulgarian should be formatted using the format “02/123.1234”, all other phone numbers are considered international, therefore must be written in the format “+123.333.1234567”, where 123 is the country code and 333 is the city code (if applicable).

Rights of the site editors and administrators

Administrators have the right to alter, refuse or remove articles, even after their publication. Administrators may modify the formatting of submitted articles, but the modifications must be mentioned in the forum associated to the article (in the private area). Administrators may not modify the content of published articles without the consent of the article author.

Anyone can create a personal account for the Social Rights Bulgaria private area for publication. In exceptional situations, administrators have the right to close the account of an editor, without prior notice.