Editorial Policy

As with our work over at WWR, our editorial policies are pretty straight-forward. In a word, you can sum our policies up as honesty. In more words, honesty means that we’re committing this to you:

  1. We will never charge for editorial coverage. While we do accept advertising, the advertising and editorial teams are separate and firewalled. If we accepted pay for articles, then our independent voice and view on things has disappeared, and we’re not being honest with you.
  2. Likewise, we do not accept sponsored posts. The content that appears in our articles are our own thoughts and ideas, and to present advertorial in that guise is disingenuous and dishonest.
  3. We never intend to keep the products we review. They come in on a loan basis, we check them out, do our photos and article, and then we return them to the manufacturer. In this way, there is no trade of “goods for service” that could unduly influence our reviews.

Again, this is the high-level of how things work for our policies. If you’re a brand that would like us to take a look at something, or perhaps cover a new release, here’s how that all works.

Hands-on Reviews

Up above, we covered off on some general rules on how we handle reviews, and should give you some level of comfort with our process. More specifically, here’s the general flow of our review process

  1. Reach out to us and we’ll see if (a) it makes sense to cover the product and (b) who on the team is best-equipped to review your product
  2. Send the product on over to us (we’ll let you know where to ship it)
  3. We spend time with the product, testing it out as it’s meant to be used.
    1. Along the course of this, we’ll do photography for our article.
    2. We may also have photos popping up on Instagram during the review cycle – UNLESS the product is under embargo, in which case we’ll keep it under wraps
  4. Once we’re done testing it out and getting our thoughts together, we’ll write the review and schedule it.

Once we have things scheduled, we’ll contact you to return the product. You can expedite the process by including a return label in the initial shipment, or simply email one once we’ve wrapped up.

A quick note on timing, as well. We generally reserve up to a month’s time with any given product, to ensure we can give it the attention it deserves. While we certainly have worked more quickly than that, 1 month is about the most time we’d normally anticipate needing. This is to level-set expectations for you, as well as help you plan your review strategy.

News Articles / New Launches

Hey, you’ve got something new coming down the pipeline, and you’re excited about it. We get it, we probably are too! If it’s not quite ready for us to go hands-on with (or you want to talk to us under an embargo restriction) we’d be happy to do so. We just ask for a few things from you:

  1. Photos ? these should be at least 1200 px wide, as many as you?ve got; we?ll figure out what makes sense for our writeup
  2. Pricing and release date ? with out these two pieces of info, it?s hard to know if what we?re talking about is vapor or reality.?
  3. Tech specs and background ? these should be part of any well-crafted press release, and form the foundation of our article
  4. Availability to answer questions ? we don?t always have questions, but if there?s a point we need clarity on, we?ll want someone we can talk to about it.
  5. Embargo (if applicable) – what date and time is the embargo being lifted?
  6. Let us know as soon as you can about your cool new thing. We like to have some lead time to get things together, and that can be tricky to do if we’re hit with an email 2 hours before something launches.
    1. That said, we’re not monsters. We know life happens, and we’ll work with you should things slip and the notice is not quite as advanced as we might prefer.
    2. IE, tell us when you can, be it 1 month or 1 day before something is released. We want to hear about your cool new product!

Wrapping Up

That covers off on the most salient points and confusion (both from brands and readers) that we’ve run into doing product reviews and news items. If you feel there is something not addressed here, please do ask! We’ll let you know our stance, and then we can get this page updated to help out others.