Writing to the web using Medium
Here is a quick, meta guide on using Medium for publishing your stories.
Step 1: Log into Medium. You can create a Medium account or just log in through your Google, Twitter or Facebook accounts. Once you’re logged in you’ll get to the above landing page. To start a story, just click your photo (if you logged in via Facebook, Google or Twitter) or whatever is in the far top-right corner, and choose “new story.”
Step 2: Now I can start writing my story. You can start your story with a clear 5–10 word headline placed in the “Title” area of the page. Below the title, you can enter your up to 20 word summary. You can type your summary right below the title where it says “Tell your story.”
Step 3: Following the lead of BuzzFeed or Vox, let’s add a photo right under the summary. All you have to do is hit enter. You will see a plus (+) sign to the left of your cursor. Click it. You will see:
To add a photo, click the camera. You can also add videos (from services like YouTube or Vimeo), embed codes and breaks. Once you select the photo to post, you will notice you have a number of display options. Play around with them.
REMINDER: Make sure you add captions to your photos.
Step 4: Once you add your photo, you can start typing the body copy for your story. Remember short — one to two sentence — paragraphs.
You might also want to format some of your text, such as adding links. Select any text and a formatting menu will pop up (see above). From there you can add links, block quotes, etc.
Step 5: Now all you need to do is publish the story. Click the publish button in the top right and you’re done.
REMINDER: If you are using stock images, you need to find a legal photo to use. We’ll talk more about more rights later in the semester, but for now we’ll using some filtering options in Google to find copyright-free photos.
Step 1: Go to Google Images, and search for Solomon Islands.
Step 2: Click the “Search tools.”
Step 3: Then click the “Usage rights” button and select “Labeled for noncommercial reuse.” Once you click it, Google will update the image search with only images you can use for class assignments.
