It will help you to get your news accepted for publication in Information Security Bulletin as well as on www.isb-online.net if you follow a few simple rules as laid out below. It is important to understand that ISB is NOT a trade magazine but a professional journal. We carry a small news section into which we accept information from - in order of priority - (NOW()) small and new companies with innovative products who cannot afford to advertise; (2) companies that currently advertise in ISB and; (3) other companies. The range is wider with regard to our much larger news section at www.isb-online.net.
1. Please use email ONLY, not snailmail or faxes - and above all, please DO NOT SEND HARD COPIES OF EMAILS. Printed information sent without prior agreement will not make it to the editors (we have editors in England, Germany, Holland, Ireland and the USA), nor will it get read. Sorry, we do not have the capacity to re-type or OCR printed information. Also, we do not download information from web sites. All textual information should be submitted as PLAIN ASCII without any formatting or text markup information (see 3 below). Illustrations, including photos, should be .tiff (32 bit CMYK, 300 dpi at intended reproduction size), .eps (including a 72 dpi tiff header, text saved as curves), or .cdr (including fonts).
2. In the subject line of your email, please state the precise subject of your release, e.g. "News Release: Bigandmighty Inc releases Gobsmack 3". This should be formatted so that automatic filters can pick it out. At this stage we have no humans reading your email. Please use NORMAL PRIORITY for all pr messages. Using a higher priority for trivial email abuses the priority system on the Internet and cannot be considered good netiquete. Needless to say, messages received with a high-priority attribute and found to contain just pr will not find their way into our columns or onto our site. IMPORTANT NEW INFORMATION : We now use intelligent spam filtering so you MUST include the word 'news' or 'press' in the subject line of your message, otherwise it will probably not make it through. We do NOT quarantine messages filtered out - they are simply deleted.
3. ALWAYS include the text of the release in the BODY of the email message, NEVER as an attachment. Attachments are automatically deleted and will not be read. Failing to follow this rule is a major reason for news releases being deleted before reaching an editor. Attachments generated by MS Word, etc, are deleted at our firewall boundary. This is also true for all email messages containing HTML. We do make an effort to bouce such mail back to you but cannot guarantee that this will always happen. IMPORTANT FORMATTING INFORMATION: Your releases are for formatting by a machine, not for reading by a human, so forget what you learned in school. Text lines should be single-spaced, not double-spaced. There should be NO hard new-line characters except at the end of paragraphs. There should only be ONE space character after a full stop (period). There must be no embedded characters which should not be printed, e.g. '>', or markup information (like bold or italic). There must be NO HTML, just plain ascii text in a single font, e.g. 11pt Arial.
4. The FIRST paragraph of the release should clearly state why your release is more important to the readers than the other 200 vying for the same spot in our journals (we have space for around 0.5% of the news releases we receive).
5. The body of the release should not exceed 200 words. The information should be precise and concise, exclusively technical, containing no quotes from 'important staff' (what CEOs opine is absolutely immaterial to us - we listen to Technical Directors and Chief Scientists). It should preferably be in German if intended for the German edition of ISB, otherwise in English.
6. Information Security Bulletin is a PROFESSIONAL (technical) journal, so please include a TECHNICAL
contact person, NOT a pr person, in case of supplementary questions. In general we do not have time to talk to pr staff or agencies. If a release does not include a contact person who can answer technical questions authoritatively, and we have such questions, it will be dumped. The printed edition and the e-book edition do not publish financial and strategic company news or news about persons, e.g. promotions or staff changes. We do not publish case stories at all.
7. Include name, address, web address and email addres of the MANUFACTURER in case of a product release. We do not mention local (e.g. UK or German) distributors or representatives. ISB is an international professional journal with subscribers in more than 90 countries, and the information we publish in our news columns reflects this fact. The German edition of ISB is oriented towards the German-speaking parts of Europe. Messages that fail to list a manufacturer's URL for further information will not be included but normally returned with a 'no URL' error message.
IMPORTANT: If you wish readers to be able to click through to your client's URL then it must be CORRECTLY FORMATTED in the news release - "http://
8. We are always interested in discussing the submission of papers (and books) for publication. Please consult the ARTICLE FAQ on www.isb-online.net.
9. NEVER follow up press releases by telephone. You cannot reach any editors by phone at all.
10. Send releases to or . Do not include an attention name please.
11. The majoroty of this information is of a general nature and simply good practice. If you follow it your releases will be more successful everywhere!
In the text above we have assumed familiarity with the publications. If this assumption is incorrect in your case, please request a media pack from our .
Updated 2004.02.05