The season has started, the first big UCI race has been run, and that means for the next four months, here at Cyclocross Magazine, we’ll be working day and night to make sure that results, photos and race reports from hundreds of races get posted in a timely manner. Whether your race is grass roots or UCI, we are happy to shine the light on your event.
To do this, we rely on promoters, photographers and contributors to provide us with the results, reports and photos for all but the biggest races. Because of the sheer volume of races, updating quickly can be nearly impossible. With that in mind, there are a few ways that you can help us make sure that we publish your race results and photos as quickly as possible.
We love all cyclocross racing, and are happy to showcase anything from UCI to grassroots races, so send us your reports and photos from races big or small!
In general:
- Email all reports, results and photos to news [at] cxmagazine.com
- The more information you provide (and the more in keeping with the policies listed below the information is), the faster we’ll be able to publish it.
Photographs:
- Please make sure you have permission to send us photographs. Include the photographer’s name. Non-watermarked photos are preferred.
- Captions are incredibly important here, since without them, it takes staffers at CXM hours of pulling up names to correspond with race numbers and it can be difficult/impossible.
- Include captions in the IPTC data section for Captions, especially if you know the names of the racers. This can save us hours of work. To do this, simply go to File Info in Photoshop or, for free software to edit, use XN View and edit IPTC tags in the MetaData section.
- If you aren’t able to change captions, please provide captions with corresponding photo titles (i.e photo1.jpeg = “Ryan Trebon in the lead on the first lap.”)
- Keep sizes small! Again, using XN View can quickly resize photos (all at once) to an easier to work with size. We prefer photos to be roughly 1000×700 pixels and should be under 500 KB, certainly under 1 MB. 1600 pixels wide is ideal.
- If you have a large gallery, zip the files and send one email, rather than 20 with attachments. Files are preferred to links to sets.
Race Results and Reports:
- Excel spreadsheets are best if you can put a column of racer names, rank and any other data you think is important. Alternatively, emailing a link to your results would be helpful. Put all results in one sheet, not separate sheets.
- Reports in Word documents or pasted into the body of the email are preferred to a Google doc. If you submit results, consider submitting a brief report, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer!
- Send us your cowbell profile URL so we can do a proper byline. Huh? If you aren’t a member yet of our cyclocross-crazy forums and social network, join here: //cowbell.cxmagazine.com
