Managing a Guild Newsletter

Is it possible?
Do you even have the time to make a guild paper? Before you consider this, you first off need to decide how often you want your newspaper to come out anyways. You can, of course, make a new one whenever the mood strikes you. However, it is usually best to update this at a set time. You could make one every week, month or even just 4 times a year. Creating a new newsletter more than once a week will firstly be very time costly and secondly not very effective as people preffer to have lots of time to read everything through. Else it would just be a waste of your efforts. Now to get back to the time question. The more you space out your newsletters, the more time you will probally have to invest into a single issue. However, as you will have less issues, you will, in total, be spending less time on it. Inorder to write up a quality newsletter, you should expect to spend at least an hour on it. Often, you will face creativity blocks and spend up to half your time trying to get rid of them ;).

What's the purpose
If your sure you can consistantly continue to release your newsletter, the time has come to decide upon your newsletter's purpose. Is it to inform your guild members of what is going on in your guild? Or maybe you would love to offer a bit of entertainment for your loyal members. You might have figured out how to beat that new game and want to pass that knowledge onto your members. Prefferably, you have a mixture of these reasons. That'll make the read most interesting to your visitor. Either way, write down all the things you would like your newsletter to do. For example: welcome new members, inform about guild rules, explain a game, tell a joke, and interview important members. You should decide upon these catagories before you start writing. It would be best to select these catagories ahead of time. That way, you have an overview of what you want to do and don't get sidetracked as easily.

Setting up
Once you have decided on your topics, you should figure out some of the basics. Are you going to be doing this by yourself or maybe count on some of your council members for support? If so, be sure to ask them and make sure they are able to commit themselves to this. The next step would be finding a layout for your newspaper. I'd advise you to put it on a petpage since this is most convienent to your visitor while still offering you a fair range of freedom. You can either design your own layout or go with a premade. Usually, petpage layouts will do great for this cause ;).

Writing it up
Time to being to put all of your great ideas onto paper -- well, computer screen. Begin by simply typing everything up somewhere, prefferably a wordpad or word document. Remember to save your files every now and then just incase your computer crashes or something of the like happends. You will want to write detailed guides, since these will be up for quite a while. Checking your grammar and spelling is another must -- this will represent your guild and you really don't want to embarrass yourself now do you?

Afterword
Of course, the key to success is, here, as in most things, originality. Try to come up with your own ideas, and work on improving your newsletter all the time. Also, everyone has a different taste, remember that ;). I hope this guide has helped you, and feel free to contact me with any questions or comments.
~ Kathrin