Sometimes I just want to shoot myself in the face.

The diaries exist for several reasons. They help build a sense of community. They provide a way for us to identify new contributors. They sometimes cover things that the contributors miss or didn’t think about.

Nothing is more frustrating that seeing news break, looking in the diaries and someone has posted on the subject (at this point I am thinking #WINNING), opening the diary and finding a couple of lines of text and that’s it. Sometimes it is worse, someone has simply cut-and-pasted extended text from another source… in excess of Fair Use.

Here are some baseline rules.

1. DO NOT INCLUDE IMAGES. Various bots are available to copyright holders to search for unauthorized use of their images. Salem Communications is a for-profit entity and using unauthorized images can cause them problems.

2. BREAKING NEWS. In your own words: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and significance. In one paragraph. Follow this by a link and blockquote. This is important in cases someone wants to use your article on the RedState Facebook.

3. OTHER DIARIES. This is a good primer on what I look for. Other contribs look for different things but they will be pretty close to this.

4. SHORT DIARIES. Don’t do them. They are rude. A one sentence diary pushes another diary off the front page. If you do it, you’ll find you can no longer post a diary.