Well, I welcome the idea of making a journalistic competition, but the proposed format of the competition has some serious flaws.
1) First of all I wouldn´t tie up the competition only to theme "weekly story summarising of the most important events in eRepublik". There shouldn´t be any limits regarding the subject of an article. There are a lot of great articles which don´t have anything to do directly with the current events. The only limit I would put is that the matters of the articles have something to do with the game and articles with external themes should be excluded.
2) Often a picture says more than a 1000 words. Don´t put any limits regarding the number of words an article has to have. And also don´t limit the number of pictures.
3) The articles could be written in any language, but there SHOULD BE AN ENGLISH VERSION too, if the original article isn´t written in English.