Please note: we focus on daily news and therefore do not distribute an editorial calendar.

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.

CIO Today 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.

Since we incur costs with regard to each article we assign for coverage, we focus each day 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.

As a practical matter, we rarely, if ever, have incorporated PR pitches into our feature budget. However, we always interview well-known industry sources for comment in our features and news stories, and therefore appreciate your ability to put our writers and editors in touch with expert sources when we initiate the contact.

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 and product reviews:

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 system to track each company's specific embargo schedule.

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 editorial team:

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.

Again, we want to reiterate that our editorial team does not accept inbound phone calls except for return calls. All other editorial contact is handled via email, through our site(s).

We do not publish our editors names or email addresses, and it is not necessary to add us to your email distribution lists for press releases. We have immediate access to all news through the Web.

Best way to reach our audience:

We have found that companies are most successful when they use a variety of marketing approaches, including PR, advertising, conferences, direct mail, etc. We have found that a PR-only approach is not as 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, with both PR and advertising, are extremely effective in bringing their message to our audience. For information about cost-effective advertising options that may be well-suited for your company or client, please click here.