Laurie1956

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 20:28, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

The Sofia Petrova Roberts Story: Lost Between Two Cultures

Please read and address stylistic issues within this article. You are new here and we want to help you report on this (and hopefully, future) stories. Please let me know if I can help in any way. At this point, the article is quite long and appears to ramble and lack focus. This might be one of those times where one story needs to be sliced up into multiple articles. Hang in there!! --Bddpaux (talk) 03:38, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Given the sources, the article would fail newsworthiness. The better thing to do is find sources published in the past 48 hours and work from there. Unless the story is refocused on a recent news event, then even breaking the current work into two parts will not assist in getting an article on the topic published. --LauraHale (talk) 08:09, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I've merged the two versions of the article (under different names) into a single file with the edit histories of both. Mostly, that means that on the talk page there's all the reviewer feedback about both versions.

We really want to help folks who want to learn to do news reporting; but there are things we, as a project, are not —see WN:NOT— and one of those is, we aren't a place to write about the past. This article is about things that happened well in the past. When an article is published, it has to be about something that just happened (see WN:Fresh); once it's published, it has a permanent place in our archives, but it's an archive of articles that were news at the time they were published.

The article you've been working on isn't about something current, so in its current form it's not news and isn't going to work out. We're willing, as I say, to help you learn to write news and get it published, but the question is, what are your goals here? Do you want to write news about a certain kind of stories? Do you want to write news about this particular story? The broader goal is likely to be easier, but we can advise you how to proceed in any case — only, we'd give different advice depending on your objective. --Pi zero (talk) 23:07, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

I too echo that it seems you're quite passionate about this issue. However, let me also refer you to WN:NOT. Many people (me, included) have certain "pet" topics. That's actually OK.....journalists who make huge salaries working for huge news outlets have favored topics also....there's no crime in that. However, your long-term success here will be built around your desire to function AS A JOURNALIST. If you have that desire (and just a tiny bit of tenacity) you can do many good things here. We report on FRESH news here. You may need to write a longform article about this young lady, her family, her ordeal....etc. etc. etc. That endeavor, however, might not function here. Feel feel to visit my talk page (just click the word 'talk')......you'll see below, next to my screen name....and let me know how I can help you in any way. One of my favorite mottos about working here (in terms of working on stories) is: Get it, write it, submit it and move on! That's what a journalist does. Having no intention to insult you here, I will ask you this about this situation: are you intending to report the story, or do you want to become a part of the story? If your goals are altruistic, there're many means by which you can engage in that, but those types of actions can sometimes create a sticky wicket here. --Bddpaux (talk) 19:08, 25 November 2013 (UTC)