Submission Guidelines

On-Topic: Anything that Chicagoans would find interesting. That includes more than local news. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that stokes one's intellectual curiosity about what's happening in Chicago.

Off-Topic: Most national stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon pertaining to Chicago. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

In Submissions

Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important.
If you submit a link to a video or pdf, please warn us by appending [video] or [pdf] to the title.

Please don't post links with short urls. They obscure the true source of the story.

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.
If the original title ends with the name of the site, please strip it off, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.
You can make up a new title if you want, but if you put gratuitous editorial spin on it, the editors may rewrite it.

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

In Comments

Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't sign comments, especially with your url. They're already signed with your username. If other users want to learn more about you, they can click on it to see your profile.

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or egregiously offtopic, you can vote it down.

Click here to discuss these guidelines in this thread.