Your spreadsheet contains the list of students, and details about them, that will appear in your hometowners. It is a .xls or .csv file that can come from anywhere: the Registrar’s Office, department heads, honor societies, professors, or even coaches.

The information in your spreadsheet will be inserted into your template to create unique news releases about your students. Every record in your spreadsheet will get its own hometowner online and be delivered to the media as either a single format or multiple format news release.

Your spreadsheet should only contain details about the students you’re planning to send news about. For example, if you’re sending a Dean’s List announcement, your spreadsheet should ONLY include a list of students who made the Dean’s List.

Your spreadsheet should look something like this:

Each line in your spreadsheet will contain details about an individual. These details can vary depending upon the amount of information you have available to you. You will want to make sure that all of the data you plan on using is in your spreadsheet. Some of these fields could be:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Hometown
• State
• High School
• Parents
• Major
• Minor

You can include any information you’d like in these columns – you can even fill them with full or partial sentences. 

readMedia requires every spreadsheet to have a column labeled “postal_code”. The Hometown Newsmaker uses this column to match each student up with newspapers in their hometown. If your column of zip codes is labeled incorrectly you will not be able to upload your spreadsheet.

You'll find a sample spreadsheet below.

NOTE: If your spreadsheet has multiple worksheets in it, you will want to delete these blank worksheets before uploading your spreadsheet.