At EurekAlert!, we take a great deal of pride in our human focus. Very few of our operations are fully automated, all submitted news releases get reviewed by at least one live person, and most interactions users have with the site are with our talented and conscientious editorial team rather than an AI chatbot or phone recording.
This focus applies to more than just our customer service, however. You might be aware that the news releases featured on the EurekAlert! homepage change once or twice a day, and that too is a human-curated task performed by our editorial team who look for certain traits in news releases that make them more attractive for being featured in a homepage update. To know more about the characteristics we look for and how to increase the chances your own news release gets featured on the homepage, read on!
#1: An interesting and high-quality image
6 of the 11 total slots on the EurekAlert! homepage support images, and these releases with eye-catching images have stronger opportunities to grab wandering attention. With that in mind, if you want to grab our attention, a compelling image goes a long way.
When choosing releases with images to feature, we’re mainly looking out for:
- Interesting and eye-catching subject matter: astronomical photos, pictures of animals being studied, captures of microscopic viruses or bacteria, anything that depicts the actual living science. Many of our users seek out science news to see glimpses of novel and impressive things they might not see otherwise, and any image that can directly show those scientific processes gives its associated news release a big leg up for homepage inclusion.
- Good image aspect ratios: We have a limited amount of space to work with on the EurekAlert! homepage, so images that are much wider than they are tall or vice versa may not get considered even if they meet all the other criteria. Aim to use images that have a landscape orientation.
- Simplicity and clarity: Scientific diagrams and graphs can be useful to have in a news release, but they’re often too detailed to read well in the thumbnail versions displayed the EurekAlert! homepage. Simpler is better when possible: vivid colors, sharp resolution and clear depictions of something you can tell the shape of from without having to zoom in are what we want on the homepage.
#2. A short, descriptive, and meaningful headline
This is the other half of the equation when drawing eyes to homepage content. An interesting image brings in more initial attention, but the headline also plays an important role in getting users to follow through with a click to your content. Like with images, we’re looking for release headlines that most successfully boil a release down to its bare essentials: not just “what is the research?” but “what’s new and interesting about the research?” and “why does this research matter now?”
Consider the following two examples:
“(Institution) researchers publish paper in leading cancer journal”
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this headline, it describes what literally happened and highlights the prestige of the cited journal. For the passing reader though, it’s not specific enough to draw much attention. Why should they care when they’re not themselves a researcher at the institution?
Compare that to another example on the same study:
“(Institution researchers) find a biomarker that may lead to easier detection of breast cancer”
Much more specific, descriptive, and relevant to more audiences. Breast cancer is something that sadly has directly impacted the lives of many people, and the odds of those people clicking through to the story go up significantly if they think the research might one day be relevant for them or a loved one. Headlines that answer this “why should I care?” question become much more attractive for homepage inclusion from our end.
Headline length also comes into play here: while headlines on EurekAlert! are limited to 255 characters, anything on the upper end of that tends to take up a bit too much space (especially for image releases where the headline can cover up much of the thumbnail image). Too close to the lower end though and you run the risk of not communicating enough to catch attention. Best to aim for something around the happy medium, between 60-75 characters or so. This guidance for writing headlines is also applicable to making your content more optimized for search engines.
#3. Timeliness
When making our homepage updates, we try whenever possible to include only the most timely and recent content. While our eligibility guidelines specify a cut-off of 90 days for cited publications, when considering homepage inclusion, we tend to look for content within the 30 day range.
This is not to say that anything older would or could never be considered for inclusion if the release is attractive enough on other criteria, but if your goal is to have your release featured on the homepage, posting your content as close to the date of the research publication or other related “news peg” provides a significant boost even before the content of the news release itself comes into consideration.
We hope these tips help you understand our editorial considerations for homepage featured content curation! If you ever have any questions about this or any other aspect of EurekAlert!’s editorial operations and policies, please reach out to us at webmaster@eurekalert.org.
For a view into the more personalized tastes of the EurekAlert! editorial team, sign up for the #EurekAlertStaffPicks newsletter where we curate a roundup of our favorite releases published on the site each week!
