Every publication on this network runs a fraction of what crosses the editor's desk. TechDailyBrief sees roughly forty pitches and press releases on a typical day and publishes five or six stories in a typical week. That arithmetic is the job.
The four questions
Before anything else, a story has to answer four questions. Is it new to the reader? Is it specific? Can we add something the press release does not say? Would the reader send it to a friend? Failing one of the four ends the discussion.
In practice: a phone launch with a spec bump fails "new to the reader" unless the bump changes something you can feel in your hand. A pet food recall passes all four before breakfast, and so does a hotel that quietly doubled its resort fee. The questions do not care about the topic; they care about the reader's morning.
What we cut
- Rewritten press releases. If we add nothing, we run nothing.
- Listicles built backward from an affiliate link. Picks earn their place first; the commercial side comes second, always labelled.
- Anything the assigning editor would not read to the last line.
- Stories that serve the writer's contacts instead of the reader.
If the editor would not finish it, the reader never starts it.
How a story gets in
- The editor picks the story and writes the reader's question into the brief.
- The writer drafts against that question, not against the press release.
- A second editor reads the draft as the reader would, red pen out.
- After publication, the piece is checked again a week later for corrections and updates.
Why publish the process
Readers deserve to know how a page gets made, especially a page that carries advertising. The same standards hold across all three publications, which is the point of running them as one network with shared rules. The model behind that is covered in the niche media network explainer, and the paid-work side in how we label sponsored content. Spotted an error in anything we ran? The fastest fix starts with an email to the editors.