With our new magazine format and website, NSSA-NSCA has the opportunity to include reports from many of your shoots, along with photos. While we will have writers covering the largest of sporting clays and skeet events, we’d love to recognize some of those that we won’t be covering ourselves.
If you participated in an event, especially if you shot high-quality photos, you are invited to send us a shoot wrap-up.
We will be including some shoot reports in our printed magazine, some on ClayTargetNation.com, and some in both places. We also expect – especially when there’s a good selection of photos – to use some abbreviated wrap-ups in the magazine with a link to a longer article and photo gallery on the website.
In addition to shoot wrap-ups, we’d like to hear about other important news, especially perfect scores and other reasons that warrant kudos.
While we do not expect our members to be professional writers and photographers, we’ve compiled some pointers that will help you submit your best material, increase its likelihood of being published, and help us process it efficiently. Here are some points to keep in mind:
- Be timely. Plan to write your article as soon as possible following the event. With magazine content deadlines about two months before the cover date, a long delay in submitting your news will make it out-of-date before it can be published.
- Include the basics. Cover all the basic W’s: who, what, when, where, why. We do not have staff to do additional research, so we must depend on you for all the facts.
- Get the facts correct. Make sure the winners are listed right, names spelled correctly, full name of the club given, etc.
- Writing tips. Write your article first, then give it a title. When starting with a title, many people tend to treat it as a first sentence and leave out important facts from the actual first paragraph. Also, write in third-person (he, she, they) rather than first-person (I, we). Please, no inside jokes that most readers won’t understand. Write it as a reporter rather than a participant, assuming the reader knows only what you are telling them.
- Shoot high-resolution digital photos. Shoot and send us photos in the highest possible resolution or largest size your camera allows. If they are not high-res, they probably won’t make the cut for the print magazine but may be suitable for ClayTargetNation.com. Sorry, we cannot accept photo prints.
- Plan photography in advance. Consider having a professional photographer or an accomplished hobbyist to photograph important events. If possible, write captions or identify the people in the photos. On the website, we can create photo galleries, so if you have lots of good ones, it’s fine to send as many as you’d like. If you didn’t shoot the photos, be sure to tell us who did so we can give them credit.
- Email it to us. Send us the story, photos, and any additional information in one email to CTN@nssa-nsca.com, with the name of the shoot in the subject line. If attaching large photos requires multiple emails, send as many as you need to but please be sure the shoot name is in the subject line of each. Because of the volume of email we receive, it’s easy to get materials mixed up if they aren’t properly labeled. If you have large files and have access to Dropbox, you may share your materials with skerr@nssa-nsca.com.
- Include contact info. Always include the name and email address of the person submitting the information and who reported the event, if it’s different. We may need to contact you with a follow-up question, and we want to credit the person providing the material.
Submissions will be edited. Please be aware that we will edit your submissions to present them in the best way possible, as well as for space considerations. Also, we cannot promise that every submission will be published, although it is our hope to use as many as possible.
We look forward to receiving and publishing your shoot coverage, photos, and news! Contact us at CTN@nssa-nsca.com with any questions and your contributions.
