"Please Print this Article"

Often people e-mail me and ask me to “print this article in the next available issue,” or “place this story in Credit Union Times.” Not to be sensitive, but this is a bit insulting for any publication, especially one that prides itself on news judgment. Let’s set the record straight. Credit Union Times does not place stories or publish news releases that are submitted. We take press releases and use them as a basis for a bigger news story where we conduct our own interviews, do our own research, etc. For smaller items, the news release may be the fodder for a news brief, people item or other small items written by staffers. In short, all that credit unions and vendors have to do is e-mail in their press releases and consider themselves covered. Mandates to “publish this article” don’t help your cause. One of the common mistakes marketers make is requesting that we inform them when the item runs, or if it won’t run. If we did that, we wouldn’t get anything done. Credit unions have evolved into tremendous marketers, and as such we literally get hundreds of press releases a day from credit unions and vendors serving the market. If we responded to each of them, we’d be hard pressed to put out an issue. It’s up to the marketers to scour the issues to see if we deemed it newsworthy.