@ioi

Thank you that will help a lot!

Uh, these submissions aren't looking very professional. Check this one out:
http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=3904

• "Nintendoeverything reports that The title allows..." (Either do nintendoeverything.com or Nintendo Everything; obviously he forgot to delete the capital "T" when he copied and pasted)

• "Satoru Iwata unveil the latest add-on for the Wii Remote"

• However was used in two consecutive sentences, but that appears to have been fixed.

• On top of all that, the article is very unclear. It keeps on talking about Nintendo's "title" (the word's use makes no sense in this context), when all it's talking about is a few ideas that are being implemented in software Nintendo is developing for the Wii.

• Finally, there's no link to the original site that posted the news.

Looks like it was poorly written and poorly edited. If this was in the forums, no big. I'm not going to jump on anyone for it. However, that's a news piece that's on the front page. It should look professional and clean.

ioi said: @tarjeel - I agree - we need to be more careful and vigilant when accepting news stories from users. By the way, like the avatar

Thanks, hopefully my next car will have one on the back. :)

I don't know what you've got in place, but maybe give one person (or two depending upon how many submissions there are?) the role of looking over those news articles, and really fixing them (or sending them back)?  When I go to the news section, sometimes I hardly notice the difference between user-submitted news and normal news; some do it really well.  Other times, though, it's embarassing.

Another thing I thought of was to make a template of sorts to make sure it looks cleaner?  For example, have boxes for the source URL and the text the link is going to say (you know, the stuff in between <a> and </a> (<a href="link>HERE</a>).  I don't know how much potential there is with a template, but it's just an idea.

Eh, I'm not a huge fan of this.

We have a flood of news and I can't keep track of articles that VGC does themselves (sales related.)

Contributed news should be posted under general news, so you can always head to the news section and filter on anything besides general news and sort by most recent. Also, you can filter the popular stories right on the front page to get sales, features, or reviews.

Also, I think we are working out the kinks right now. We seem to be getting a flood of junk and as contributors get better at this hopefully we can have higher quality submissions (i've seen a few questionable ones) and hopefully we can weed out the non-news.

And it seems that it may work. I've never used it before.

Personally, I'd love for users to be able to submit a link to a news story and have VGC contributors write it up themselves. Having just anyone and everyone write it up is too risky. I dont want to proof read all day.

^ unless you start getting paid

there is nothing stopping you from re-writing the whole thing

I know.  But I would have to read the whole article and judge whether I should re-write it all.  =P