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We appreciate your efforts to advance your company's or client's public relations positions. The following is intended to explain our policy with regard to PR pitches, and the ways in which we would like to work with you.

NewsFactor Network values your news, feature, and contributed article ideas. However, our publication structure is rarely, if ever, able to take advantage of PR pitches, as explained below.

The single, most important contact between our reporters and you is, in our view, your ability to quickly connect them with a newsmaker or expert source to provide comment on a breaking news story, or in the context of a feature report that we initiate.

Please do not contact us by phone or fax, unless you are responding to a specific inquiry from one of our reporters or editors. Please allow us to initiate the contact.

How we select news for coverage

We publish news on the Web continuously. Our editors decide which news stories we cover, based on their analysis of the overall quantity and significance of the day's top stories. We also automatically analyze our readers' choices of articles, and we gear our coverage to their choices.

Over the past several years, our readers have demonstrated interest in news from companies with whom they are familiar. The companies of greatest interest to our readers include "household names," as well as other companies that advertise on our publications, because our readers are most familiar with their brand-names.

Our research has shown that our readers have very little interest in news releases about minor software upgrades, personnel announcements, or customer acquisitions.

Please note that we incur costs with regard to each article we assign for coverage and, for this reason, we focus on stories that most closely match our readers' interests.

How we develop feature topics

Our editors meet on a regular basis to discuss new technologies and emerging trends in the context of brainstorming feature ideas. Some of those ideas are then approved by management, and budgets are set for production. Some of those features are also slotted for publication in print, in addition to -- or instead of -- our Web-based publications.

As a practical matter, we rarely, if ever, have incorporated PR pitches into our feature budget.

The features we choose to develop contain a "hook" or a specific attraction for our readers. Their headlines must be able to attract readers when seen on a magazine cover at a retail outlet.

We regularly interview industry sources for comment in our features.

Policy on contributed articles

We do not accept contributed articles because they tend to be explicitly or implicitly self-promoting and, therefore, are met with skepticism by our readers. There are also potential intellectual property complications to be considered, and we have concluded that the gain rarely justifies the downside of using contributed material.

However, we do consider publishing regular columns from upper-level management of household-name companies, analyst firms, universities, or government agencies, as well as other institutions. If you represent an extremely well-known source who would like to be considered for writing a column about general technology trends and how they affect society, we would be glad to consider your suggestion.

Policy regarding embargoed news

We ask that you do not send us any announcements that would require an embargo. We are able to cover important news within hours of the time it breaks, so we do not require advance notice. We will consider any announcements sent to our newsroom as public knowledge at the time we receive such information. Please do not expect us to withhold important news from our readers, nor to set up an internal bureaucracy to track each company's specific embargo schedule.

As for products that we may wish to review in advance for print publication, we can accommodate specific arrangements on a case-by-case basis.

Product reviews

Our readers strongly favor reviews of products from leading vendors and typically shy away from reading reviews of products from vendors with whom they are not familiar.

Best way to reach our audience

We ask that PR professionals connect our reporters to newsmakers or expert sources for comment on breaking news or upcoming feature articles. Please allow us to initiate the contact.

We have found that companies are most successful when they use a variety of marketing approaches, including PR, advertising, direct mail, etc. Therefore, we have found that a PR-only approach is not very effective, because there tends to be little or no interest on behalf of our audience with regard to the marketing announcements of companies with whom our readers are not familiar in the first place.

However, companies that combine traditional marketing approaches of both PR and advertising are extremely effective in bringing their message to our audience. For information about advertising, please click here.