Hospital Newsletters
Can I reprint published news stories in a non-profit newsletter?
I work for a state psychiatric hospital. My patients want to start a newsletter and have requested current events as part of the newsletter.
Can I reprint stories that I get off of the internet if I cite them? If not, where can I get news stories? I’m low on time and can’t rewrite a bunch of stories…
No you can’t – not without permission. (assuming you’re in the UK – if not, please disregard this post as the law is different in different countries)
Stories on the internet, whether on the BBC or other newspaper websites are the copyright of the BBC or whoever wrote the story (or their employer)
There is a urban myth that stuff on the internet is copyright free or may be used as long as it’s credited. This is absolutely not the case! (any more than a joyrider can escape prosecution for ‘borrowing’ your car if he leaves a thank-you note)
Of course, some websites do have small print that say you can use their material providing appropriate acknowledgement is given. If that’s the case (and you are confident they wouldn’t have taken material that is someone else’s copyright) then you are absolutely fine
Your best and easiest course of action would be to simply ask for permission. Write to the editor of your local newspaper and ask if you can reproduce some of their stories, either from their paper or website – whichever it is you want. Make it clear that you would credit the newspaper with a prominent thank-you in each edition of your newsletter.
Of course it’s unlikely that a media organisation would sue a hospital, but getting a court order to desist is not going to improve your day 
Hospital Newsletters
Improving Opens of Your Email Newsletters: 4 Tips
Email newsletters are a great way to communicate with your subscribed customers and recipients. However, communicating through a newsletter is a very specialized skill and cannot be considered to be an act of simply typing out news in an HTML format and sending it out to many customers. There are considerations of style, format, objective, and what the reader wants that has to be considered.
Open rates are a measure that are used to judge the effectiveness of an email campaign. Open rates are measured as the number of mails opened by the recipients against the number of mails sent to the recipients. This measure is calculated by the download call sent to a server from an embedded image tag in the email. There is some debate about how effective this is as a measure and metric but this is still the prevalent metric. So, what are the methods of improving open rates bearing in mind the considerations of creating a newsletter?
1. Style: Writing style tends to be a frequently overlooked fact when it comes to mass production items like newsletters and bulk emails. The problem fundamentally lies in not being able to fundamentally give a spirit or voice to the communication. One of the elements of style of email newsletters to bear in mind is that they have to contain a style of voice just as every orator and key note speaker has.
2. Format: Formatting a newsletter is also a crucial part of the equation. The governing principle of formatting a newsletter is to not cram all the possible text into the newsletter itself but rather to create interesting slugs that will then redirect one back to a base website to read more detail. This also has a special significance in strategy because the sales spiel will also be on the website and because of this there will be no gap in the flow between this and the actual sale. In addition, when formatting a newsletter, remember the basic 70:30 rule of images to text. This will allow for better intuitive communication with the recipients.
3. Objective: Newsletters can either be created as a news dissemination service or can serve as an advatorial – a mixture of an advertisement and an editorial. Therefore, it is important to consider what your actual objective is. Advatorials can be in the form of an article on an item like hair loss, which then moves on to promote the new therapies of a hospital in treating hair loss.
4. What the readers really want: The readers are sometimes barely considered when making a newsletter. This means that when you create email newsletters, remember to consider that many email clients do not allow the display of images in an email and that some customers may have bandwidth restrictions that may also make viewing newsletters difficult. This simply means that you should have an adequate amount of text that communicates the basic idea and that the main message should not be embedded solely in the text.
About the Author
“Henry Cass is a best practices activist and advocate for Benchmark Email ( http://www.benchmarkemail.com/resources/OtherResource/Email-Newsletter ) a leading Web and permission-based service for sending
newsletters
”
Why do I get mail addressed to my in-laws at my house???
We only have the same last name, no same first names and they live about 200 miles away and have never lived where we live. Most of it seems to stuff like from AARP and hospital/medical newsletters but this gets aggrevating. How did they get our address with their name???
You can talk to your letter carrier about it. If they know, they will not deliver mail with other names but your own. Or you can call the post office branch that your carrier delivers from and talk to the carrier supervisor. He might help you figure out how that could have started.
DAD – HIS INTERNMENT SERVICE AND 21 GUN SALUTE WITH TAPS ON A BUGLE
