HELP NEEDED, PLEASE, NEWSHAWKS!

Dear Newshawks,

A few days ago a reader sent a note asking why there were so many
duplicate postings of the same story from the same source.

The answer is simply that we receive so many news items that they are
posted by a team of editors, each receiving their own share. The
duplicate items arrive, sometimes, a day or two apart.

Most duplicate posts are caught. But the reason some are not is
because some are posted to editor@mapinc.org with something other than
the article headline in the subject line of the email message. It is
critical to the process that the headline, and only the headline (and
not in all caps) be the subject of the message. State codes and other
information is not needed (the editors will add the appropriate codes
and identifiers).

Our roboeditor software starts the duplicate checking process by
looking to see if the first forty characters of the subject line match
a previous item sent to editor@ in the past few days. If it finds a
match, it sends the item to the same editor who received the first
item so the editor may verify if it is an actual duplicate.

But when the headline is not used in the subject line the process does
not work - roboeditor sends the item to whichever editor is
appropriate in our workload sharing process.

We all look over all the posted news items, but none of us can
remember every headline over a several day period with between 30 and
50 items being posted each day. We do, however, tend to remember the
items we, as editors, post - and thus we can reduce the duplicate posts.

Thank you for your assistance!

If you are new to newshawking, or would like to help, please see the
basic instructions at:

http://www.mapinc.org/hawk.htm

While the instructions suggest that you check to see if the item has
already been sent, doing so is not necessary with the improvements in
duplicate checking in our roboeditor software. But if you are
newshawking by either typing or OCRing an item, making the check can
save you time.

Also, once you know that a source is in our roboeditor database, it is
not necessary to use the lead lines copyright, contact, website,
forum, mail or fax as roboeditor supplies them to the editing/posting
team. You can check to see if your source is in the database at the
following URL. I usually use the location dropdown to check a state or
country's sources for the one I want.

http://www.mapinc.org/resource/email.htm

Thank You, Newshawks, for all that you are doing!

Note that the stories of several of our long time newshawks are now
linked from:

http://www.drugsense.org/dswvol.htm

Richard Lake Sr. Editor; MAPnews, MAPnews-Digest and DrugNews-Digest
More than 24,321 Drug-Related News Clippings in a SEARCHABLE database!
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/