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Contributor Guide

Thank you for volunteering to submit articles to the Gratiot News.

Your Profile

Your most important first step—after clicking on the invitation link we sent you, setting your password, and logging in—is to construct your profile. Here's some guidelines:

  1. Use your real name. Our site promotes truth and authenticity. When you use a pseudonym, some may be legitimately concerned that you won't suffer real-world consequences for promoting false or duplicitous material.
  2. Add a recent picture to your profile, by clicking on the big black dot at the top of your profile and selecting a file cropped to show your face. Authenticity. Don't use a picture of your dog or your child.
  3. In your biography, list a few ways that readers might know you. If you work in a local non-profit, political group, college, or company, it's usually wise to list the organizations and your role. Stating affiliations upfront alerts readers of a potential bias, but also establishes honesty and identifies how you contribute to the community. It's possible that your employer might restrict you from listing the company affiliation in your bio; in that case, it's OK to omit them.
  4. You have the ability to list social media accounts in your profile. If your work on the Gratiot News could improve your career prospects, be sure to have a updated LinkedIn profile and link to it here. If you are an influencer, aspiring or established, link to the social (or traditional) media accounts that include your work (YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Medium, Facebook, your own website, etc.)

Your Writing

We want you to write to benefit our readers. Here's a perspective statement you can use to focus your writing:

As a reader,
I want to quickly understand the problem, how it affects me, how similar problems were addressed locally in the past, what people are doing about it, and how I can help,
so I can use the news to improve my life and the lives of my friends.

We emphasize "compassion" as a valued skill in our writers. Can you imagine yourself in the shoes of a local resident of Gratiot County, dealing with daily challenges in housing, schooling, career, education, bureaucracies, etc.? If so, your writing can motivate that resident to read your article, and potentially motivate them to take action.

The first thing in your article should be a "lede," which is a sentence that immediately sparks the interest of the reader. It should summarize the most important aspects of the article. Here's a great article on writing your article's lede, from NPR: https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-training/2025/05/31/g-s1-65833/a-good-lead-is-everything-heres-how-to-write-one

Your article in the Gratiot News should emphasize local activities, problems, and solutions. You can write articles on national issues, but you should quickly inform the reader of the local effects of those issues. If there our readers can't find any practical local effects, you should submit your article to a different news site.

Connecting a modern event with local history can also motivate readers. An article on E. coli levels in the Pine River might discuss how Alma's State Street Dam allows water to fester. That dam was put in place to support a wood mill from loggers. At this writing, Healthy Pine River is funding a study about tearing that dam down to clean the Pine River and restore water recreation. Few citizens know about the dam's origin, but rural news researcher Elizabeth Jensen reminds us that rural readers like understanding the bigger, historic story.

Make sure to describe how locals are currently coping with the problem. The big advertising-supported news sources often benefit from nurturing helplessness in their readers: it keeps readers from doing things about problems, but attentive to advertising. This news source should be a source of inspiration and motivation to take action to make our lives better.

And finally, if there are actions the reader can easily take to help out, mention those things.

We want citizens of Gratiot County to engage with the community and make wise decisions, which will lead to their greater happiness, harmony, and success for them and all of us.