The West Coast Leaf is a quarterly news publication covering
California and the West Coast's growing cannabis community.
West Coast Leaf invites submissions of photos of interest to our readers, and articles up to 500 words. Let us know how you want to be credited for your submission. West Coast Leaf will in all cases try to respect the integrity of your submission; however we retain full editorial control to edit and modify submissions to fit our requirements of space and tone. For the sake of disclosure, we request that you describe your relationship to any organization, such as being the director of a political organization or affiliation with another media group. We may choose to publish that information along with your byline to establish credibility. We reserve our right to excerpt material so as to make salient information available to our readers or to decline to print any submission at any time at our sole discretion.
Suggestions: Cut to the chase. Respect your reader's intelligence but don't expect them to know too much about your topic. Lead with your strongest and most compelling point, the one thing you want every reader to understand and remember. Avoid using questions, especially rhetorical questions. Do not quote yourself. Don't give your opinion, quote somebody else stating their opinion. Avoid using terms like, "pot, weed, dope, stoners" or any first person interaction unless it is essential to the context. Preferred terminology includes "cannabis, medical marijuana, therapeutic use, personal use, adult use, medical cannabis dispensaries, cannabis dispensing collectives, private use, marijuana offenses, "
Specifications: Articles should not exceed 500 words and contain no personal attacks or expletive profanity. The tone and style we use are standard news format reports, that means they are written in an active format, in the third person, with the most important information stacked in front of the article as the rest of the information flows from most important to least so as to facilitate cutting it shorter as space demands. Answer the basic questions a reader will expect to get from you: Who did what to whom when and where. Here's why it's important and how it occurred, according to your source of information. Details follow in order of importance or interest.
Punctuation and Style: Sentences should be brief, clear and declarative with active verbs and clear subject / object interaction. Two short sentences are often better than one long sentence. Dates are inherently boring and should never be used at the beginning of a sentence. Dates are abbreviated like so: "Feb. 2." Avoid unnecessary punctuation and especially exclamation points. Put punctuation within "quotes." Use a single quote to identify "a 'quote' within a quote." After you give a person's full name, from then on refer to them by last name only. The first use of any acronym should follow the spelled-out form within parenthesis, as in "West Coast Leaf (WCL)." Never use ampersands (&).
Photos: Try to capture a strong image that will be appreciated from arms length; too much going on makes it hard for people to capture an impression. Crop your picture to the most interesting part. A photo with strong colors and a captivating image can often encapsulate an event better than a panoramic view incorporating numerous objects. Frame your photo to avoid clutter and group important elements together in case the photo needs to be cropped for space; for example capture a group of people standing close together rather than spread out into several clusters, unless the background is the key element. If you know how to format your image, make it 300 lpi in CMYK for color, or 300 lpi in grayscale for black and white. If you don't know how to do that, don't worry about it the first time, just send us your jpeg or PDF up to 1MB in size and we'll do our best. But if it's going to be a regular thing, you should learn how to format your photos for print media, anyway, and we'll expect you to do that.
Click on the link below and attach your jpeg or PDF image to the email it will generate. Send your article pasted into the body of your email and also attach a copy in MS Word or text format. Sorry, we cannot read WordPerfect documents and do not have time to clean up PDF text submissions.
Click here to send an email to our submissions editors