About CitizenWire

Hello :-)

Hello, and thank you for your interest in CitizenWire.com. Our site officially “launched” on August 1, 2010, and we’re still tightening some bolts and fixing some widgets here and there. Information on this, and other, pages may be updated and finalized during August Sept. 2010.

What is CitizenWire ?

CitizenWire is a news site where citizens like yourself can be a “local reporter,” for your town/city, or a columnist writing about topics that interest you, or even self-promote your company, product, service, or even yourself as an industry expert (opinion leader). We follow A.P. style and you will be able to post your own press releases (but no advertorial allowed) as long as you have real news to announce, or start a column about your favorite topic or regarding your particular expertise.

To keep content clean and legitimate, everything is moderated by professional editors; this is not a free site to post paid content, “news spam,” or fake articles you’ve been paid to write on behalf of clients.

CitizenWire™ is an online social news portal published and managed by Neotrope®, a content publishing and entertainment company, based in California, established in January of 1983. Neotrope was an Inc. 5000 company in 2009, has had an A+ rating with the BBB since 1997, is listed with Bowker for ISBNs, with the RIAA for ISRCs, and is a member of GS1 (able to generate barcodes), among other things. Company CEO, Christopher Laird Simmons, is a member of the PRSA, and ASCAP, and has been a professional journalist since 1984 (see link below to our staff page, for more about our team). No services from Neotrope are offered or sold on this site. This site is its own entity and does not secretly promote any brand or agenda.

PLEASE DO NOT e-mail us press releases, story ideas, tips or similar, as we cannot use such content and it will be considered spam (unsolicited e-mail). We also have no interest in link exchanges, or selling keyword ads inside of our content. Advertising information will be available after the formal launch.

How does it work ?

There are basically three kinds of accounts around here, and you will generally only have ONE account, depending on your job or other factors:

1) Citizen Journalist — Article or column account: with this type of account you can post articles about your interests, travels, expertise, or similar. Think of it like a blog, but on a site where a LOT more people will see what you do, including having it syndicated to many other sites in our network. With this account, the byline for each story is yours. This is totally free, and you simply need to contact us and let us know what you want to write about, and we’ll set up an account for you.

2) Citizen Local Reporter — With this account you are a local reporter for your own U.S. town/city (typically one or possibly up to three zip codes), and can write about events, happenings, businesses, people, and the like. If you happen to be part of your local Chamber of Commerce or Travel Board, this might be ideal to help write about local events your organization is involved with. Once you’re aboard you become our official CitizenWire “local reporter” for your town. News runs under your byline. (Note: see the banners on our site “1,000 local reporters wanted,” for more information.)

3) Business Promotion — Press release account: with this type of account, your company would be the source and have the byline on each page that you post, and the author page would be a bio of the company, not the person(s) posting news. Must be actual news, not attack pieces, “my brand is better than your brand,” advertorial, or similar. There is an annual fee for this type of account only, so that we can “moderate” the news to ensure it is both accurate and newsworthy.

For all account types, you will have a log-in and password, and using your real name or company name will have either a story byline under your name, or the byline under your company name (one or the other, not both). If you’re familiar with blogs like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, or similar Web-based applications, you will be right at home (in fact, we use a highly modified version of WordPress here). So, you simply write your press release (or article — but more on that later) offline (not on the site), and then clean up your text by removing double spaces, and then simply paste into a new post in your account. You can choose keywords which are automatically inserted for SEO purposes, and you can choose tags for your company, product, person name, city and state. We expressly do NOT allow content posted solely for SEO/SEM purposes, link farming, “peppered” link content, or similar.

One image will be supported, to start, under 10kb, and generally no larger than 300×300 pixels, jpeg format (Web .jpg). Video is fully supported if hosted on YouTube, Vimeo, or similar O-Embed compatible stream. Similarly, Flikr and other elements can be included.

All content is moderated and must be approved before it will be shown live. This helps us ensure quality of content. And since all our team members are professional authors, working journalists (not just bloggers), and accredited public relations professionals (meaning, we have degrees and not just have taken a class someplace or read a book on the subject of PR), the level of our content shall remain high at all times.

What kind of news can be posted ?

We will have a detailed list of the kind of news that is acceptable and the various kinds which are not on the sign-up page (soon!). We won’t allow stock pumping, multi-level marketing, body part enhancement, legal allegations (attacks), political action committees (PACs) run by a man and his dog in his garage, or similar nonsense. We’ve been in the news business for nearly 30 years, so we KNOW what is news and what is crap. We prefer the former to the latter, as you might expect.

Who can sign up, and where ?

Only U.S. based individuals and/or companies can sign-up to be part of CitizenWire™, and there will be sign-up and log-in buttons at top of each page once we’re ready and have the nifty video tutorial in place, and other juicy good stuff. In the meantime, you may contact us using the “contact us” link at bottom of each page, if you would like to set-up an account. Remember, this is only for U.S. citizens and companies, located in the USA.

Who is CitizenWire … who is running things ?

You can learn about our editorial team, here: citizenwire.com/about/staff/ .

We’re a real company, not just a Web site, with nearly 30 years of credibility in the publishing, marketing, and entertainment business. This means we do what we say we will, and we do it well, baby! Hopefully you will find what we’re doing here to be interesting, and consider hopping aboard.