Help:How to Contribute to News Aggregation
If it's out there and it's worth knowing, it's already on Pindula
Pindula Today is a news aggregation service that simplifies news for ordinary people by summarizing it in simple mobile size updates. A typical update should be readable by a non-sophisticated person within 30 seconds.
How we do it
- If it’s worth having on Pindula, we should have it on the site within 30 minutes of it being made available online on main news websites.
- Target is for a single article to take at most 10 minutes to post, and therefore do at least 5 new articles an hour
- We verify before posting:
- To ensure that readers using our news service can rely on us, we only aggregate from reputable news sites.
- We also ensure that even when we cover news from social media, we ensure that the news has been corroborated by reliable sources.
- We keep our emotions and our biases out of the news and help the reader by objectively summarising the news. We remove the propaganda and let the reader just consume the summary of what exactly happened.
- We don't just take the title of the news and dish it out to our readers, we read the news and pick up the stuff that's worth knowing from the article. So a news summary on Pindula, may actually come from a specific part of a news article that the original source didn't focused on (something hidden down inside the article). Sometimes a news article on Pindula comes from several articles, an example is this article
What we're not
- We are not a political platform. We take no sides. We just present what's out there by intelligently reading and creating simple to read summaries out of it
- We have no original journalism here. We don't go out and create original stories. We just help deliver it in a simple to understand format for the internet reader.
How we source News
Feedly
Use Feedly.com and download the app too. Create a feed called Pindula News Sites and add the basic notable sites. We have these sites available for import into feedly in this file: Here.
Remember to add new news sources to this list as you discover them. This list is never complete. A short test to check whether a site is worth adding or not is to ask yourself if the content provided by the blog has national interest or not, whether the information is credible, whether person behind the blog is notable enough for their opinion to matter.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts helps you get alerted when Google finds new content on the internet for a certain word. Using the Zimbabwe keyword, you can Set a keyword for Zimbabwe and for you to be alerted via email “as it happens”. One set, monitor the email constantly.
Add notable pages to Interest Lists based on categories, e.g. called Pindula News' - Politics.
- Politics
Be sure to follow those that are influencers and have them 'show first'. Here are the steps to 'see first':
For a Page
- Click on the person's name
- Follow the person, if you are not friends already
- Hover over 'Following' and select 'See First'
For a Profile
- Like the page
- Hover over the Like button or click the down facing arrow
- Under 'In Your Newsfeed' select 'See First' and you're done
TweetDeck
Add notable twitter accounts to Twitter Lists based on categories, e.g. called Pindula News - Politics.
- Politics
- Follow
Be sure to follow noticeable accounts who are always updating on certain issues. Mainly the journalists that work at various publications:
Scan any WhatsApp group that you are a part of checking what news people are sharing. People who are on the ground usually have insights as to what is going on. Check these groups every 30mins.
Creating Great Titles
How to Summarise
- Say the a summary of what happened in an introduction of not more than 2 sentences. Total words should not exceed 100.
- Provide a quote from the news maker in the news.
- If the aggregated news is from a social media conversation, provide a summary what another party in the conversation said and also their quote.
- Provide links to where readers can read more. If the news has been covered by more than just one organisation (which is usually the case) provide links to the other versions of the news or other reading that will help the reader consume more about the summarised content.
- Post the content to Pindula social media
