Join our free seminar, How to Write for the Observer

Somewhere around 800 people have contributed to the Heights Observer since its first issue in April 2008.

It sounds like an impressive number to me.

On the other hand, it represents just 1.2 percent of the 66,000 people who live in the Heights Observer’s service area of Cleveland Heights and University Heights.

So we have room to grow.

If you’ve ever considered contributing an article to the Heights Observer, you may want to sign up for our upcoming online seminar, which we have cleverly titled “How to Write for the Observer.”

The seminar is free, on Thursday, Jan. 21, 7–8:15 p.m. A registration link is at the bottom of this column.

It will cover four main topics:

1. What the Heights Observer publishes
2. How community organizations can leverage it
3. How to submit contributions
4. A simple process to make writing easier
   
   

As a warm-up to the seminar, here’s some information to help you understand the Heights Observer.

• It’s published by nonprofit FutureHeights with a goal of helping to keep Heights residents engaged and the Heights community connected.
• Everything we publish is contributed by members of the community. And anybody in the community is welcome to contribute.
• We don’t pay for editorial contributions.
• We limit our content to information that’s directly relevant to the communities we serve. If it’s not about something or someone in Cleveland Heights or University Heights, it’s probably not for us.
• We seek to provide news and information about the Heights community that’s not available elsewhere, and to support dialogue about things that matter to our readers. (We don’t have a policy against publishing poetry, for example, but we’re not a literary journal and we rarely do it.)
• The Heights Observer strives to be an agnostic platform for people who have information to share with the community—such as opinions about local political issues, articles about school events, coverage of meetings and forums, and profiles about Heights residents who do interesting things.
• Everything we publish gets reviewed by an editor, for a few reasons: It helps keep order; it makes the job of writing easier for nervous contributors; it identifies errors and omissions; and it’s part of a mindful approach to publishing.
  
  

If you think you have stories about the Heights to share, and you want some more insight on how to get started, please consider this an invitation to join our seminar.

It’s free, but you have to register. Here’s the link: http://bit.ly/HOwrite21.