Connectively Wire Editorial Guidelines

1. Why the bar is here

Every release published through Connectively Wire carries the Connectively name. It lives on connectively.us, and it travels under that name to our syndication partners and to the search engines and AI answer engines that index it. Journalists come to Connectively for credible expert sources, and they extend that credibility to what appears under its name only while the ratio of useful to useless stays on the right side. That ratio is the product. It is the reason a release from a 40-person company gets read by a reporter at a national outlet.

So the guidelines below are not mainly about legal risk, though some of them are. They exist because a release that reads like an advertisement costs something, and the company that sent it is not the one who pays. The next member’s genuinely good announcement gets skipped, by a reporter who learned last Tuesday that a Connectively Wire headline is not worth a click, and by partners and answer engines that start to weigh the source less. Protecting that is worth more to you than any single release you will ever publish through it.

The practical version: write something a reporter could turn into a story without calling you first. Almost every rule here follows from that one sentence.

These guidelines form part of the Connectively Wire Distribution Terms and are incorporated into them by reference. Where a guideline is a hard prohibition, it appears in clause 4.2 of the terms as well. The version in force is the one published here when you submit.

2. What gets approved

Start here, because the positive case is shorter than the list of prohibitions. A release with these six things almost always clears review on the first pass.

• A real news event. Something happened, or will happen on a stated date: a launch, a funding round, a hire, an opening, a result, a study, a contract, a filing, a milestone with a number attached. If you cannot write “Company X announced today that…”, there is no release yet.
• The company named in the headline. The organisation issuing the release, in full, inside the first 65 characters. Reporters scanning listings, feeds and search results read the left edge of a headline and little else.
• One attributable quote from a named person. Full name, exact title, organisation. Make it say something only your company could say — “we are excited to announce” is a quote nobody has ever printed.
• Sourced statistics. Every number carries a source, a date and a sample size, with a link where one exists. This is the single most common reason a release comes back.
• A monitored media contact. A named human and an inbox somebody actually reads. A phone number is optional but helps: a reporter on deadline gives you one hour, not one day.
• Rights-cleared assets and permissions. Images you own or have licensed, with a caption and alt text on each, plus written sign-off from every person quoted and every company named as a partner or customer.

The two-minute test. Read your headline and first paragraph aloud to someone who does not work at your company. If they cannot tell you what happened, who did it and when, the release is not ready — and no amount of distribution will fix that.

3. Rejected and accepted, rule by rule

Fifteen rules, each with a real rejected headline and the version that would have run. The examples are composites of releases our editors actually see. Search or filter to find the one you need.

4. Language and sensitive topics

Some topics are not prohibited so much as conditional. Here is where the lines are, and what we will ask you for.

Strong language

Vulgar language is permitted only where it is part of the actual name of a campaign, product, event or trade show — never for emphasis, and never because it is how the founder talks. Where it is permitted it must be censored in the ordinary way (Bull***t), it must not appear in the headline, the subheadline or the summary, and it must appear no more than three times in the body. If the point cannot be made without it, make a different point.

Topic	Position	What we need from you
Strong language	Conditional	Part of a proper name, censored, absent from headline and summary, three uses maximum.
Pornography and adult services	Not permitted	No exception. Sexual health, medical and policy topics are fine when written clinically.
Illegal drugs and paraphernalia	Not permitted	No exception, including “grey market” products sold across state lines.
Medical cannabis	Conditional	Lawful in the issuer’s jurisdiction, the programme or licence named in the release, and no consumer-sales language. Business, clinical and regulatory news only.
Therapeutic psilocybin	Conditional	Lawful in the jurisdiction, or conducted under an approved clinical trial or state programme. Name the regulator, the programme or the trial identifier.
Gambling and betting	Conditional	Licence number and jurisdiction stated. Corporate and product news only, no odds or sign-up promotions.
Supplements and health claims	Conditional	Claims within FDA rules, no disease-treatment claims for unapproved products, substantiation on request.
Firearms and ammunition	Conditional	Corporate, manufacturing and policy news only. No sales offers, pricing or purchase links.
Political and advocacy content	Conditional	Issue, campaign and research news accepted. No fundraising appeals, and no content attacking an identifiable candidate.
Class-action and investigation notices	Conditional	Accepted from the firm of record, with case details. Some syndication partners decline them — see section 5.

Conditional does not mean slow. In most cases the extra check is one email, and the release still crosses the wire on the date you chose. Send the licence number or trial identifier with the submission and there is nothing to wait for.

5. Syndication partner restrictions

Every release travels beyond Connectively through our syndication partners, including the Notified and GlobeNewswire network. Those partners apply their own rules on top of ours, and we do not control them.

Connectively approval is not partner approval. An editor here can clear your release and a partner can still decline it, usually for a category reason rather than anything you wrote. We cannot appeal on your behalf, we are rarely told why, and a partner’s decision is not grounds for a refund or credit (terms, clauses 2.5 and 3.4). The release still runs on Connectively Wire, still gets its permanent release page and still appears in your newsroom.

The restrictions that catch people most often:

• Yahoo does not accept releases from third-party law firms about class-action lawsuits or investigations involving publicly traded companies. This is a standing category block, not a judgement about your filing. Firms in this category should expect their release page on Connectively Wire and their newsroom, and should not count on Yahoo reach.
• Securities-related releases face additional checks. Earnings, offerings, mergers, material events and anything carrying a ticker may be held for verification at partner level, and some partners restrict transmission in the windows immediately around the US market open and close. Build an extra day into your timing.
• Links are capped and cleaned. Several partners limit the number of outbound links, strip tracking parameters, reject shorteners and redirect chains, and drop links to destinations behind a login or a paywall.
• Formatting is not guaranteed downstream. Partners may truncate a long headline, convert tables to plain text, drop images below their minimum size, or publish text-only. Write so the release still works with no images and no formatting.
• Partners run on their own clock, not ours. Transmission starts when you cross the wire, but each partner ingests and publishes on its own cycle. Most copies appear within two hours; some feeds are batched and land the following morning.

6. How review and scheduling work

From submit to publish, with the money position at each step. Nothing is charged until an editor approves, and the only timing decision you make is the moment your release crosses the wire.

1. 1

You submit In review Instant

The release leaves draft and enters the queue. We place an authorisation on your card for $250. Nothing is captured, and if the release never gets approved, nothing ever is.

2. 2

Automated pre-check Seconds

Machine checks first, because they are instant and they catch the boring failures: headline over 110 characters, missing or generic media contact, a statistic with no source nearby, ticker format, dead or redirecting links, images without alt text, prohibited phrases. Anything it finds comes straight back so you can fix it without waiting in the human queue.

3. 3

A human editor reads it Target: 1 business day

An editor reads the release against these guidelines and, where relevant, asks for substantiation: the survey methodology, the countersigned partnership letter, the licence number. Business days are Monday to Friday, excluding US federal holidays.

4. 4

One of three outcomes

Approved Your card is charged and the release is locked to the wire time you chose. Status moves to Scheduled. Approval never moves your date — there is nothing to be full.

Changes requested Back to you with specific notes tied to specific lines. Nothing is charged. Resubmit as many times as you need at no extra cost; resubmissions go to the same editor and usually clear the same day.

Rejected We will not distribute this release. The authorisation is released and nothing is charged. See section 7 for what to do next.

5. 5

You cross the wire The date and time you picked

Your release page goes live at connectively.us/news-releases/{slug}, is featured on Connectively Wire and its topic listing, lands on your newsroom at connectively.us/news-releases/{company}, and starts transmitting to syndication partners. You chose this moment to the quarter hour in your own timezone, and nothing about approval moves it. This is the release’s published timestamp, and it is the point of no return.

Up to sixty minutes before it, you can still reschedule to any other date and time at no charge and with no re-review, or withdraw for a full refund. Inside the last hour, the release is committed.

6. 6

After distribution

There are no retractions, corrections or removals once a release has crossed the wire — see section 7 of the terms, which explains exactly what can and cannot be undone. Proofread before step 1, not after step 5.

Editorial review pauses on US federal holidays. For the rest of 2026 that means Wednesday, November 11 (Veterans Day), Thursday, November 26 (Thanksgiving) and Friday, December 25 (Christmas Day). A holiday never moves your wire time: the page publishes and syndication runs as scheduled. If you need a decision before one, submit earlier.

7. If your release is rejected

First, nothing has been charged, and nothing will be. Second, most rejections are really “changes requested” wearing a bad mood, and clear in a single edit.

Changes requested means the release is fixable and we expect to run it. Fix only what the note flags and resubmit; your wire date and time are held while you do, so as long as the resubmission clears review before your wire time you go out exactly when you planned. Rejected means we will not run this release in a form we can foresee — the subject matter is outside what we distribute, or the problem is the premise rather than the copy. A rewrite is welcome, but it is a new submission.

The six notes our editors write most often, and what fixes each one:

1. “This statistic needs a source.” Add who produced the number, when, and how many people or records it covers. Link the methodology or the original study. If it is your own internal data, say so explicitly.
2. “We cannot find the news event.” Identify the thing that happened and put it in the headline with a date. If there genuinely is not one yet, hold the release until there is — a release with no event does not improve with editing.
3. “Confirm the partnership with the named company.” Send the countersigned agreement, an approved quote, or an email from their communications team. Or rewrite the claim to describe the relationship you actually have.
4. “This reads as a bylined article.” Remove the byline, convert first-person copy to third person, and move the argument into a single attributed quote. The release usually gets shorter and better.
5. “The media contact is not a person.” Replace info@ or press@ with a named human who will answer. Confirm the inbox is monitored for the next thirty days.
6. “Headline exceeds 110 characters.” Cut the clause after the comma. Everything after it is almost always the subheadline, and it reads better there.

Appealing a decision

Reply to the editor’s note within fourteen days and say why you think the decision is wrong. A second editor who has not seen the release reviews it and answers within one business day. Their decision is final. Appeals succeed most often when the original problem was a missing piece of evidence — a signed letter, a methodology page, a licence number — rather than a judgement call about news value. If you are unsure whether something will clear, ask before you write it: newswire@connectively.us. Pre-submission questions are free and answered faster than appeals.

8. Formatting and length

Recommendations, not rejection criteria, except where marked required. They come from what actually gets picked up.

Element	Specification	Why
Length	400–800 words	Under 400 usually means the news is not there. Over 800 and the second half is not read, including by machines that rank passages.
Headline	110 characters max required	Company name inside the first 65 characters. Listings, feeds and partner sites truncate; reporters scan the left edge.
Subheadline	160 characters max	Optional. Add a second fact rather than restating the headline in different words.
Summary	300 characters max required	This is what appears in Connectively Wire listings, in feeds and in search results. Write it last, when you know what the release actually says.
Dateline	CITY, State, Month Day, Year	AP style abbreviations: SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Aug. 10, 2026. We add it automatically from your issuer profile if you leave it out.
Structure	Lede, detail, quote, support, key facts, boilerplate, contact	The lede answers what, who, when and where in one sentence. Everything after it is optional to a reporter on deadline.
Quotes	One ideal, two maximum	Full name, exact title, organisation. No unnamed spokespeople. A quote that any competitor could also have said adds nothing.
Key facts	3–6 bullets	Self-contained, checkable facts with figures and dates. This is the block most often lifted verbatim, by reporters and by answer engines.
Links	3–5	Descriptive anchor text, no shorteners, no tracking-only redirects, destinations that resolve without a login. Partners strip anything else.
Media assets	JPG or PNG, 1200px+, under 10MB	Caption and alt text on every asset required.
Boilerplate	50–80 words	Identical wording every time, ending with your website. Consistency is what lets an archive and an answer engine connect your releases to each other.
Media contact	Name, title, email; phone optional	Name and email required on every release required. A phone number is optional.

9. Writing for AI citation

Every release includes AI-search structuring. Here is the part of it you control, which matters more than the part we do.

We publish every release with schema.org NewsArticle data, clean semantic HTML, a permanent URL, a public feed and a machine-readable key-facts block, and we do not block AI crawlers (terms, clause 8.3). What markup cannot do is make an unclear sentence quotable. Retrieval systems pull passages, not documents, so a sentence that only makes sense in context will not be used. These six habits do more for citation than any structured data we add.

1. Put the entity and the fact in the same sentence.

“Cascade Robotics raised $64 million in a Series C round led by Anders Park Ventures” is citable on its own. “The company raised the round” is not: pulled out of the page, it names nobody.

2. Name entities in full on first use, every time.

Full legal name, then the short form, plus the ticker or the domain. Machines resolve entities from strings, and “Cascade” alone matches a dozen companies.

3. Attribute numbers inside the sentence that carries them.

“According to a survey of 1,204 US warehouse managers conducted by Cascade Robotics in May 2026” travels with the statistic. A footnote does not. Answer engines strongly prefer numbers that carry their own provenance.

4. Write the key-facts block properly.

Three to six one-line facts, each self-contained, each naming the company. This is the block that gets lifted, by a reporter building a brief and by a model building an answer.

5. Answer the obvious question in one sentence.

If the news is a price change, put the old price and the new price in the same sentence. If it is an expansion, put the previous count and the new count together. Do not make the reader assemble the answer from two paragraphs.

6. Date everything explicitly.

“This year” and “recently” age badly and strip the fact of its usefulness the moment it is quoted. Write the month and the year.

None of this is a trick played on a machine. It is the same discipline that makes a release usable by a human reporter forty minutes from filing, which is exactly why it works on retrieval systems too. A release written to be quoted gets quoted.

10. Terms, composer and help

Where to go from here.

Distribution Terms and Conditions

The binding agreement: billing and refunds, the licence you grant, the no-retraction rule and liability. These guidelines are part of it.

Read the terms

Write your release

The composer checks headline length, statistic attribution and contact details as you type, so most of this page is enforced before you ever hit submit.

Open the composer

Ask before you write, not after you are rejected. If you are not sure whether a topic, a claim or a headline will clear review, email newswire@connectively.us. Editors answer pre-submission questions within one business day, and it costs nothing.

Connectively Wire Editorial Guidelines · Last updated October 20, 2026