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Content Submital Guidelines

Newsletter Title: The Safety Compass

Background

The Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Safety Compass newsletter is an outreach source to share and provide the latest in program delivery, best practices, research, training, regulations and legislation designed to help improve and establish a more productive national and local safety program. The Safety Compass also provide resources for implementation, networking, applicable tools—more importantly, unify the overall highway safety community efforts and involvement.

Content submitted to the Safety Compass will be considered for publications based on timelessness, priority, relevance and overall highway safety program objectives. Therefore, every story/article submitted may not be published during the approaching issue cycle, but possibly in a later issue. All attempts and considerations will be given to all submitted content for publication. To help the audience of the Safety Compass capture the essence of your submittals, we would appreciate your efforts to communicate through a balance of text and visual elements—providing photographs, charts, graphs, and other illustrations with proper captions. Please ensure the best quality images/high-quality photographs and/or illustrations.

A team of editors, safety experts along with safety leadership will review all submittals to determine the suitability of the story/article as it relates to highway safety objectives. Authors will be notified and/or contacted on the status of the submittal—and need for more information if necessary.

Audience and Focus

Recognizing that our readership— federal, state, local, academia, international transportation community and the transportation industry at large, etc— have very little time for discretionary reading, it is extremely important that the Safety Compass seeks to provide interesting and useful articles with some distinct life saving relevance. The story must “inform,” and be effective, conversely, intriguing, and easy to comprehend. Therefore, a major emphasis of your article should be on the significance of your project or subject, results of research and/or lessons learned, and the applicability of these lessons learned to other states, agencies, etc. Use a balance of technical and everyday plain English as much as possible. In order to maximize outreach, your message must be clear and simple for effectiveness. All readers are not experts in your field, and if they come across several terms they don’t understand, they’re likely to quit reading your article.

Submittals are open to the highway safety community (federal, state, local, academia, FHWA partners and other highway safety organizations etc).

Circulation Frequency

The Safety Compass will be published quarterly.

Media of distribution: The Safety Compass will predominately be distributed electronically. Via email, and it will be posted on the FHWA Safety website. Occasionally, special issues will be printed for additional outreach.

Timeliness/Deadlines

The newsletter is distributed the third week of March, June, September and December. The deadline for stories/articles is two months prior: on or about January 1, April 1, July 1, October 1, and respectively.

Story/Article Elements

A complete story/article should consist of:

Title with the author’s (or authors’) name and professional title
Employer/ organization/office, state etc
The article/story itself (length 500 to 4000 words)
Contact Information (mailing address, telephone and fax number, and e-mail address)
Reference dates, time and place of subject matter
Provide supporting visuals, (clearly label supporting visual elements, description and photographer’s name, if appropriate.

If the article has been previously published or presented publicly, provide the following additional information: the publication or forum in which the information has been presented, and the date of publication/presentation.

Article/Story Specifications

Provide an electronic copy in Windows-compatible Microsoft Word on CD, or e-mail electronic version to Janet Ewing (janet.ewing@dot.gov) . We generally retain all supporting visuals, however, we will return any or all materials upon request.
Support visual formats preferred: JPG, EPS, or TIF.
Do not embed graphics, tables, or figures in the text file. Save graphics, tables, and figures on a disk and/or as separate electronic files.
Avoid trademarks and brand names in the text unless such mention is required to ensure the proper understanding of the text. The newsletter neither endorses nor wants to appear to be endorsing specific products, manufacturers, or contractors.
Provide a list of all photographs, tables, figures, and other illustrations with a complete caption for each. Cite all tables and figures in the text in the same sequence as the tables and figures appear. Do not substantially repeat in the text any information that is clearly represented in the table or figure. We willnot use footnotes or endnotes.
Articles/stories submitted by authors employed by federal, state, or local governmental agencies must include a letter of transmittal from the author's supervisor, endorsing the publication of the article. The applicable office director must also endorse articles by authors within the Department of Transportation.

We can assist you if you want to have a story composed and need some writing support. In addition, all articles will be edited as necessary. Therefore, before you consume a great deal of time developing and writing an article, contact the editor, Janet Ewing at (202) 366-8029 or Janet.Ewing@dot.gov to discuss the concept and scope of the article.

Submission

Submit the complete article/story package to:

FHWA Office of Safety
Room E71-105
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, D.C. 20590
Or Email to: Janet Ewing, Editor-in-Chief, at janet.ewing@dot.gov