Drafting our Editorial Policy

It's Thursday today. That's good news for anyone who embraced the 4-day workweek. For everyone else, we're only one day away from all emails starting with "Happy Friday!" 😅

Seriously, someone needs to come up with a new, better Friday greeting. If you have any suggestions, let us know.

Today is also a National Peanut Brittle Day. Things are getting out of hand. We just had a peanut butter day two days ago! How cocky is this nut going to get? Reigning supreme with its own emoji and all. 🥜

What about other nuts and their brittles? Almond brittle deserves some love too and so does the pecan brittle, our personal favorite. We demand nut equality!

We're putting almond milk in our coffees today as a sign of protest.

Here's your daily dose of delight in under 6 minutes. 👇🏽

Heather Shaw is the Tok of the town. She's taking the internet by storm with her uncanny resemblance to the comedy king of the 90's, Jim Carrey.

But don't be fooled. She's not just a pretty face with a familiar grin. Heather is a comedic genius! Her jokes about her limited career options due to genetics will have you in stitches. Her profile is an inspiration for anyone to steal like an artist.

One day, when you're thinking back to the golden age of comedy, you'll ask yourself: Remember the comedian that looked like Heather Shaw? What was his name again?

Inmates are taking the phrase 'doing time' to a whole new level, by taking online classes from behind bars. The appeal to learn computer science is off the charts!

Here's the interesting part. These classes aren't being offered in the prison curriculum. The inmates are using contraband smartphones to take online programs like Harvard University Professor David Malan's CS 50. 👏🏽 How's that for dedication!?One inmate even leads a group chat of 300 other prisoners, all taking the same computer science course. Just epic!

But wait, it gets better. Harvard understands the needs of their users. To make the course more accessible, all of the CS50 videos and materials are downloadable for local use. 🤩 Perfect for when the signal gets patchy.

As our team expanded, we started attacking the endless list of overdue Asana tasks. One of them was to create our official editorial policy. If you're crazy enough to launch your own newsletter or other publication online, you need one too.

🤖The Gist by ChatGPT: Editorial policy is a set of guidelines and principles that are used to govern the content published within an organization. It sets standards for accuracy and quality, as well as guidelines for topics, language, and tone. It also sets standards for ethical reporting, including guidelines for conflicts of interest, privacy, and fairness. The editorial policy also sets out procedures for handling complaints and corrections to published content.

It gives our readers a transparent view of how we choose what to write about. Our partners and sponsors can use it as a clear starting point when interested in collaborating with us. And it helps explain where we stand to job candidates and the press. Everybody wins.

But before you start hyperventilating about the process, here's our playbook on how we did it.

We're not going to pretend that everything cool we come up with has been brought to us by a stroke of divine genius. We have creative minds that need inspiration. And this time it came from this enviable Editorial Policy by Elevator. We read it and immediately thought: that's some good good $#!t!

That—together with single-origin Kenyan coffee—got Susan's creative juices flowing. She took the main idea from Elevator and inserted our personality, values, process, and mission. She added a bit about affiliate links and how we plan to work with sponsors.

The first draft was scrutinized by our merciless editorial squad. Because, the work gets better with every new pair of eyeballs.

We ran it through Hemingway App—which told Susan she was trying to sound too clever #StoryOfHerLife. To solve the issue, we cut the clever until the readability score clocked in at Grade 5. Then we improved the flow while making sure that the edits preserved the initial juice. Dayyum! Finally, when we all agreed that we "love it", we were ready to rock.

We uploaded the final–final version to our internal documentation system and announced what we've been up to in Slack. It keeps everyone in the loop. Then, in line with our idealistic commitment to sharing knowledge, we gave you the whole process here. Lucky you!

We put a link to this editorial policy on our website and newsletter footers. Check it out here. Then reply and let us know what you think.

Thirty years ago, Aardman—an animation studio—created Wallace and Gromit, the cheesy inventor and his furry side-kick. Their unique animation style put them on the map and won them a lot of props, including an Academy Award, BAFTA and an Emmy. Woah!

Instead of using fancy CGI animation, Wallace and Gromit stuck with old school stop-motion. That's exactly what it sounds like. The animators physically move and photograph clay models one step at a time to make it look like they're moving. That explains why it took them 15 years to announce their latest project. 🤪

Get ready for the most anticipated, top secret adventure of the century. The best part? It's premiering on Netflix! Just don't hold your breath, it's not coming till 2024.