This page is intended to help track notable changes to this simple report dashboard, and to changes to reporting elements over time. Changes are noted in reverse date order, with newest information at top.
April 1, 2024 – Retiring BENZINGA Placement
Effective April 1, 2024 we are phasing out support for BENZINGA due to low quality, no longer appearing in search or news sites, frequent system breakage, etc.
Jan. 29, 2024 – Benzinga Broken Again
So, without insulting their lack of technical ability, Benzinga broke all our stories again (sigh) today, with every item returning a ‘UH-OH! 410 – The requested resource is no longer available and has been removed permanently.’ error. We have notified them that we will likely stop working with them since they cannot provide consistent publication of our news. They still have not fixed our news properly showing up in Google News or SERPS since their system “upgrade” couple months back. #shitshow 🙂
Jan. 20, 2024 – Tipp News Ohio Revamp/Broken
The online news portal Tipp News, Ohio and the Tippecanoe News newspaper have split, and the website is in midst of restructuring website to remove the newspaper content. Send2Press news should still appear under their “national” category as it has the past decade, however we have noticed their site is “messed up” as of Jan. 20 and undergoing rebuild for Feb. 1 relaunch.
Dec. 1 2023 – “Send2Press for Journalists” website retired
Originally launched in 2010, with a ‘self serve’ version of the Send2Press newswire service in 2011, which was then cancelled in 2013, has now been officially deprecated and retired. The past 10 years the site at Send2PressNewswire.com had a “no services” layout of our client news. More recently we set all news items, other than indexes, to redirect to the version of stories on Send2Press.com/wire/ to not appear as a spammy content clone site. As of Dec. 1 the site has been fully retired. Those curious can lookup the domain in Archive.org to view past homepage versions.
Nov. 2023 – HTMEDIA CHANGE
After 15 years, our partnership with HTMedia in India (publishers of Hindustan Times, etc.) has come to an end, due to change in their company direction. Our news stopped appearing on the public archive found in older reports in Sept. 2023. Effective November 15, they are no longer pulling our news into their platforms. Previously, they paid us a royalty to publish our news in their English newspapers; now they want us to pay them to include our news in their media platform. This is impractical for what they now actually do with their shift in company focus. What they do now is of little benefit to our clients.
Nov. 2023 – NEOTROPE NEWS NETWORK POLICY
As of November 2023, the Neotrope News Network is expanding it’s “no fly” policy on certain news topics, like legal news, religious news, politcal news, and “having a sale on tacos” (advertorial). This includes sites like CaliforniaNewswire.com, MassachusettsNewswire.com, eNewsChannels.com, etc. This policy transition will be fully implemented by Jan. 1, 2024.
Sept. 27, 2023 – BENZINGA SYSTEM BREAKS AGAIN
Well, for the third time in as many months, Benzinga has “broken” intake of our news, which is a paid placement. Basically, at this point we will stick with them, but we have no control over placement actually happening.
Sept. 25, 2023 – AP PHOTOS BETA ROLLOUT – UPDATE
One interesting side effect of emabling photos on AP syndicated sites is that some websites that pulled ‘text only’ news, are no longer pulling the versions with photos. Conversely, a wide variety of larger sites, including those with registration requirement, are running the news with photo, and also including on the AP “National News” page on their site, and in the “you might like” related national items undeneath stories. This change is entirely outside our control, and is related to which sites choose to pull which version of stories from the AP.
Sept. 15, 2023 – AP PHOTOS BETA ROLLOUT
Without boring you with technical nonsense, there has been long running intake bug in the AP plaform to show the primary (“featured”) image for each of our news items in all the AP newsrooms, and APnews.com, and syndicated sites properly. During week of Sept. 18 we are rolling out support finally across all AP systems.
Aug. 23, 2023 – BENZINGA Login to View + Apple News
Always a barrel of monkeys working with some of our content partners. So, apparently as of today our news shows up on the Benzinga content channel in Apple News. However, they also turned on a free membership requirement to view content on the main site. So, to read your own release, you will need to “log in” with Google or similar. Annoying, but it’s their site. We are told this new “feature” will not adversely impact visibliity in Google News, BING News, etc. UPDATE: looks like the abandoned the login to read option.
Sept. 2023 – S2P Photos on APNews.com Posts
As some of you know, AP had promised a simpler solution for intake of images on our content found on the APNews.com instead of an elaborate hack of Atom/RSS to emable that feature. So, after 3 years, and the overhaul of their public website, they have not updated their intake platform. Chris is moving forward with custom “hack” finally to enable this feature. The way the AP works, they will likely break this and finally update their intake platform without warning, but at least we’ll get that ball moving, finally. 🙂
Aug. 17, 2023 – HTDS/HT Media Public Site Broken
As of Aug. 17, the Send2Press/Neotrope public news indexes and client news search on the HTMedia website appear broken. This does not impact HT intake of our content for India/Asia markets, only the public facing pages on the internet. We have reported the issue.
Aug. 2023 – APNews.com Search Changes
With their new site revamp, AP no longer shows press releases in the main site search (e.g., from front page). You now need to go to the navbar, click the “…” drop down to go to “Press Releases” section, and search for prior releases (which are permanent) there. We had no advance notice of this change. As of Aug. 14, we have added a direct search link, based on “company name,” into the report for your convenience.
June 19, 2023 – MarketWatch Scaling Back Third-party Content
We were notified today that MarketWatch is suspending most third party press release content on their website. This applies to many newswire services, not just Send2Press. We will be replacing MarketWatch with BENZINGA in July. As of July, 2023, for clients using our “S2P+CISION” plans, news should still appear on MarketWatch for the forseeable future.
Feb. 1, 2023 – New Content Partnerships *CANCELLED*
Effective Feb. 1, we are rolling out a couple of great new content partnerships where all of our news (except “religion” or “adult”) will appear: first, BARCHART; and second, THE GLOBE AND MAIL // Cancelled due to misleading information — it turns out these placements did not show up in search, and were not searchable from the actual websites. So, we try not to post anymore “locked in a barn” or “ghost post” syndication, as it’s totally worthless beyond falsely inflating clip reports.
Jan. 30, 2023 – New Index for DIGITAL JOURNAL
As of end of January, Digital Journal is migrating to new backend CMS platform, and our “news index” URL/landing page will change effective immediately, to: https://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/news/send2press/index.html
Dec. 1, 2022 – GoMedia Network System Crash
The GoMedia Network appears to have had a system failure Dec. 1, and not working as of 9 a.m. PT, with pages returning a ‘500 server error.’
Nov. 15, 2022 – Google News Sortation Code Change
Google News has (sigh) again changed the custom code for searches in Google News, so our existing custom search “show news from site by date” no longer works, and “recent news from…” now showing news that might be from 2015 (or whenever), and not news from “this week” as intended. Chris S. will be fixing this as time permits during Dec. 2022 report updates.
Oct. 4, 2022 – MarketWatch Partnership Rollout
As of today our new content partnership with the MarketWatch website began to roll out in beta with couple of bugs related to inline image (working on it!). // UPDATED: Discontinued July 2023 due to change in the MarketWatch editorial corporate culture, without advance notice. *sigh*)
Aug. 25, 2022 – RIP News360
It’s official. The long running News360 app is no more. The company was purchased for its technology and rolled into a fintech solution for magazine publishers.
Aug. 2022 – Retirement of Google AMP Support
As of Aug. 1 we have started retiring Google AMP format support for our news portals. Like many publishers we have determined it’s not a good fit for our content since AMP pages run on Google servers and can track user activity, among other things. Since our sites have always been mobile-ready, there is little benefit in having duplicate versions of every page of content on all our platforms. We have started doing 301 redirects of story/amp or stort/?=amp etc. to the canonical permalink content as the ‘sole version’ of each page. Twitter stopped sending link to AMP pages in 2021. Google no longer ‘requires’ publishers to have AMP format pages for mobile indexing.
July 15, 2022: Google News Story Indexing Issue
Google confirmed indexing issue affecting a large number of sites. See article on Search Engine Land: https://searchengineland.com/google-confirmed-indexing-issue-affecting-a-large-number-of-sites-386526
*NOTE: this issue is still ongoing as of August 3, 2022 but seems to only apply to GOOGLE NEWS and not the main Google search. We are still seeing 4+ hour delays on news showing up, vs normal 5 minutes, as here: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=site%3Asend2press.com&oq=site%3Asend2press.com&gs_l=news-cc
UPDATE: As of Aug. 9, appears to be sorted out.
July 14, 2022: News360 Server Issues
We have noted the past week or so all news for our platform ‘stalled’ in the News360 app, and website version. Also, when we log in to their publisher platform, it is showing no content. Clearly a technical issue on their end.
UPDATE: As of August, site appears DOA. Not loading/not found as of Aug 5. Then Aug. 9 was putting up not secure warning in Chrome.
July, 2022: Advisor News Content Issue
We have noted during July that it seems to be about 50/50 whether the search link to the Advisor News website actually works (content gone one day, all back the next). Outside our control.
June 15, 2022: New Content Partner
We have added new content partner, ‘Headlines of Today,’ as found here: https://www.headlinesoftoday.com/author/send2press
March 15, 2022: Pinterest and Political News
We have noticed recently that Pinterest captures, confirms, but then fails to “show” any photo(s) related to news items of political nature. This includes election campaign news, and regional events mentioning a mayor or governor, especially in headline. Outside our control, obviously.
March 15, 2022: AP News Channel Partner Roulette
It looks like a number of sites no longer paying AP for news syndication, including the FOX5 Las Vegas outlet, among others, while a whole swath of new sites are pulling from AP, due to their daily world news coverage on Ukraine, etc. — so, some of the ‘logo search’ options in our report may go to dead end searches. Always use the custom Google Search option to find AP partner newspaper and broadcast networks “today” which can change over time, entirely outside our control.
March 7, 2022: AnyGator No Longer Pulling Our News
For a number of years AnyGator was pulling a snippet excerpt version of our news via FloridaNewswire.com. However, for some unknown reason they chose to stop pulling the news content as of today. We have reached out to them to see about pulling our news content directly. However, this site not particularly beneficial to 99% of our clients.
March 1, 2022: Removal of India-based State Spam News
We blocked the India-based news spam network, building a spam network of U.S. based sites like “California News Times” and “Florida News Times” among many others for low quality and paid promotion of non-U.S. based companies on fake U.S. news sites when not actually based in U.S. Junk sites come and go, and these need to go! 🙂
Feb. 14, 2022: MarketScreener No Longer Pulling Our News
As of Feb. 14, MarketScreener stopped pulling news from a number of sites, including ours, for not being pure business/finance news (we have a lot of entertainment and nonprofit news, etc.).
Feb. 1, 2022: Return of Digital Journal Content Partnership
After several customer requests, we’ve chosen to renew our paid partnership with the DIGITAL JOURNAL for all our client news. While this won’t “restore” any old content from past ten years they may have removed, they will be including all our news again moving forward. 🙂
Digital Journal news index for Send2Press: https://www.digitaljournal.com/author/send2press
Jan. 25, 2022: Dashboard Updates
The last week of Jan. 2022, Chris has made number of overdue updates to the report dashboard, specifically:
- Moving the Send2Press partner clips and Neotrope News Network clips into their own “tabs” for better organization and consistency.
- Adding some of the content partners to the “Send2Press Content Partner” tab which had been missing the past several months.
- Since Google News “quoted search” has kind of been messed up since November, Chris has added several additional search string custom links in the “Quick Clips” first section of the report. You might have to click all three to actually see more things due to how Google News is setup now. It seems they are moving to a cookie-based search preference thing, where a search string may vary by user, and not one for all.
- Additionally, a new “Where Did My Clips Go!” section “tab” has been added which outlines some of the changes for those coming back to, for example, revisit a report from 2020 or early 2021, to understand changes in syndication partners. Since most folks never read this Change Log page. 🙂
Jan. 15. 2022: Google News “Quoted Search” Still Broken
Sadly, Google News continues to have its longest technical issue in many years. Normal “quoted searches” like “company name” + “product” along with the [show duplicates] toggle should show several pages of press release content online for each news release. Since November, this has been mess. Initially they were showing results from all over web, including non news sites, or the company website. They fixed that eventually, but now not showing all results, even though the sites *are there* in Google News.
For instance, you should normally see: Send2Press original version, syndicated copies like TippNews in Ohio, California Newswire, Florida Newswire, eNewsChannels(*), Massachusetts Newswire(*), Publishers Newswire, Advertising Industry Newswire, MarketScreener, MENAFN, etc. And with our plans that include the AP, usually 10-20 syndicated items on newspaper and broadcast sites via the AP. (*Some sites in Neotrope News Network will have custom headlines to mess with Google SERPS.)
Dec. 15. 2021: PressRelease.CC Cease and Desist
We have sent the junk news site ‘PressRelease.CC’ a second CEASE AND DESIST notice today to stop cloning our news, taking our name off, and making it look like they issued the content. This is same dishonest tactic previously used by bozos like “EIN” and others who steal content from other newswires to make it look like they create it, to sell some service — and this is expressly noted as forbidden in our legal terms of use. One of the many reasons our images have a little “Send2Press® Newswire” snipe bottom right of the graphic. Upshot: we have nothing to do with these bozos, who are also then sharing the item on Twitter and elsewhere.
UPDATE: after threat of legal action from an L.A. based IP law attorney, one of our clients, the site appears to now be properly keeping our identification as issuing wire service intact, and retaining link back to original news page on Send2Press.com. Site is total crap and does not even load properly 90% of the time, but at least now it’s not using content “fraudulently.” #wheee 🙂
Dec. 7. 2021: GoMedia Network issue with Amazon Cloud
Looks like the GoMedia Network “down” serving ‘500’ code server failure messages, morning of Tues., Dec. 7, 2021. This kind of server/cloud infrastructure issue usually clears up within a few hours. Yet another reason why we chose not to rely on Amazon’s cloud back in 2016 and stick with dedicated hardware for another generation for our sites!
Nov./Dec. 2021: Google News Back-end Re-index Problems
Recently Google News (not main Google search) started doing their periodic once or twice a year (and in past years often around first week of November) big re-index of their back end for pulling in content via sitemaps from authorized/validated news portals. Well, as of the first week of Nov. 2021, we are seeing all sorts of problems doing “quoted searches with show duplicates” where sometimes only one or two sites shown, vs normal six pages of sites from AP, Neotrope News Network and Send2Press content partners around the world.
This is outside your or our control and will clear up once they get done what they need to get done. So, you may see very weird results where most of the normal tracked sites may not show at all, or some weird junk sites, or even company site shows up in Google News — when these ‘not news site’ results are mixed in from main Google search, NOT the news platform.
It will clear up in days or some oddball time like Monday 6 a.m. ET, or Friday 5 p.m. ET, based on prior years. Upshot: not a permanent implosion, and nothing to do with your or our content/news!
October 5, 2021: Beta Reporting for GoMedia Network
As of the week of October 4, we started to do some house cleaning on the report dashboard in prep for phase out of the Financial Content Network, while also ‘folding in’ reporting for the GoMedia Network. Ironically, they are having some service issues at their datacenter October 5, and so the new report section may or may not work for you. Hence the [BETA] notation.
Phase out of Financial Content Network – Oct., 2021
As of October 31, 2021 we will no longer support our content posting on the Financial Content Network (aka CloudQuote, MarketMinute, et al). Many years ago we added this platform only because some of our junior competitors, and even folks like PRNewswire/CISION used FCN to “bulk up” their supposed syndicated pick-ups, while being completely worthless placements. Specifically, we have always tried to disclose that these sites do not appear in search results, cannot be found in Google News (or Bing News, Apple News, etc.) and cannot be found by searching from the front page of sites as they are on hosted third-party sub-domains (e.g., markets.post-gazette.com), are generally not https (insecure and so fail Google mobile-ready and “https everywhere” efforts, etc.) — and really are total junk.
They are designed only to make it appear something happened with client news, with zero value other than inflating syndicated “pick ups” in reports. We have chosen to discontinue supporting this junk content in any way. Not only because it’s highly misleading in having any value whatsoever, but truly serves no purpose in making news available to media or public as you will never find it without having a direct link, and so (again) it’s completely worthless.
We will be replacing the FC Network with a similar platform (now in BETA as of October 1, 2021), but which can actually be indexed by Google (etc.), is on an index linked to from front page of news sites, and are generally different sites than those that syndicate all of our news via the AP (Associated Press).
June 1, 2021 – End of Support for DIGITAL JOURNAL
Due to “Digital Journal” doubling their cost for carrying our news, we are choosing to end our feed partnership with them as of June 1.
May 1, 2021 – End of Daily Opt-in Email Summary
After more than a decade, Google is “retiring” the Feedburner daily email summary of our news based on the main RSS feed. Once they switch it off, there will no longer be a daily email blast next morning of prior day news. You should instead follow our news via RSS, or on AP, Twitter, or Facebook, if you had relied on the daily email. The legacy ATOM feed via Feedburner will also be retired.
March 1, 2021 – Service Plan Changes
As of March 1, all Send2Press plans and pricing have changed. This has been done to finally cover cost of the AP partnership that rolled out Sept. 2020. Previous plans no longer exist in any form.
Jan. 8, 2021 – AP News Feed Updated with Headlines
Chris S. managed to fix the bug in the AP news platform where sub-headline for stories WAS showing in AP newsrooms, but WAS NOT the APNews.com website or syndicated websites. Fix should roll out fully for Jan. 11 news items and onward.
Nov. 5, 2020 – Frankly Network Retirement
• WE WILL BE ENDING PARTNERSHIP WITH FRANKLY DEC. 31, 2020.
• FRANKLY SECTIONS WILL BE REMOVED ENTIRELY JAN 1, 2021.
WHY? As the Frankly Network has gone from 150+ sites to barely 10-14 sites as of this Summer, we have chosen to discontinue our long-standing partnership. It’s no longer relevant, and the value of short-term paid placements on broadcast sites, has never been super useful for clients. We only included these to stay in line with the competitors who were advertising ‘guaranteed placement on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX’ (without disclosing the items would vanish in 30-60 days). With our AP partnership roll-out (with news placement on broadcast sites that actually show up in search and Google News), the Frankly content has become entirely irrelevant.
Nov. 4, 2020 – Media List Snapshot Updates
While our media database is updated regularly, we have had a long standing issue in proper export to Excel, which was finally fixed in October. Chris S. is now working to revamp all the media lists for daily media by email, AP newsrooms, trade media / periodicals, and the online syndication list for those who use any of these. It has been a bit embarrassing for us to have such “moldy” media lists for clients.
Sept. 11, 2020 – AP News Syndication Roll-out!
Our new partnership with the Associated Press began to roll-out to newspaper and broadcast ‘syndication’ today. This will now put most news onto 100+ legitimate websites, which are searchable in Google and Yahoo! and many also show up in Google News. Chris will be updating the report system during Sept. and October to add AP tracking tools. NOTE: newspaper and broadcast sites will “retire” press release content from the AP in 30-60 days as it is not content they created. APnews.com version should be permanent barring any technical issues on their site outside our control.
Sept. 5, 2020 – WP API Breaks the Thumbnail Screen Capture
Note: we have temporarily deactivated the little ‘screen shot’ thumbnail of your news page on our site, normally top right of report dashboard, as it stopped working. This element relied on the WordPress system from Automattic (the folks who make WordPress) and was done dynamically. We will revisit this for October if working again. 🙂
Sept. 3, 2020 – Frankly Continues to Turn to Mud Puddle
Well, sadly, the Frankly Network continued their slide into oblivion today, with numerous additional content partners booting them from their broadcast sites; apparently now Telemundo sites are gone (*sigh*). Frankly has gone from 150+ sites to now under 20 actual sites active, which is getting to be a joke (says Chris S.). We have given them ultimatum today as to whether or not to continue working with them. The worst thing is they give us no update on these issues, just suddenly links don’t work, as again happened this week. Really unprofessional company, er, frankly. 🙂
Sept. 1, 2020 – Revamp Social Clips Section in Report
Starting Sept. 1 we have phased out capturing social media clips by hand for the budget plans as insanely tedious, time consuming, and not cost effective to do anymore on the budget plans. We are still hand sharing to social accounts with tags, but now you need to go find the clips yourself in order for us to keep doing the sharing. The ‘Social Clips’ section is getting major overhaul for clarity, ease of use, custom searches, etc., to make finding social mentions much simpler than before. 🙂
Aug. 20, 2020 – AP News Platform BETA
Happy to report our beta “intake” testing during August with the Associated Press (AP) for both the AP News website/online system and the national daily media (“Data Features”) platform to 3600+ newspaper and broadcast news rooms in the U.S. is going very well after some initial hiccups (ironically, our news platform runs on modern code, while theirs is stuck in 2005). We expect a “soft launch” of our content in both platforms during Sept. 2020, with more of an official roll-out in Q4/2020.
Our plans and pricing will be changing for 2021 where we will soon have a “basic” plan and a “pro” plan for each distribution level. The legacy Premium plan will remain indefinitely but will not be promoted, since we’ll be pushing folks to look at the new “pro” plans, which are much more cost effective.
Aug. 16, 2020 – Hacked News Sites
In a bizarre issue, not seen before, we have found numerous small town newspapers (perhaps part of same network/publisher), have their systems hacked, and we’re up to four websites where the news@ email is coming back with a Word doc malware attachment as fake invoice.
For example,
news@rural-urbanrecord.com (collections@pioneerelabs.com)
news@presspublications.com (office@vereintempus.org)
We’re guessing that during the pandemic some newspapers have not been keeping up on security updates, and Russian hackers do try to constantly hack our news network sites. When this happens we immediately remove the publication from our database. Unfortunately, media contact info is in the press release emails, and so you may receive spam from the bots with fake reply to the press release headline in subject line, with newspaper email showing, but actually forged.
Aug. 15, 2020 – Start of Report Update
Chris decided to finally fix the broken links for Frankly Network, which started to go wonky in June, due to changes in their platform. Apparently, Frankly allowed a bunch of ‘junk’ newswires into their platform, and due to barrage of low quality content, Frankly lost contracts with a *lot* of website partners this year, hence the massive amount of dead sites. We’re moving a lot of stuff into the first clips [icon] section to make “at a glance” news location much simpler. The first revamp should be done by Sept. 1
May 2020 – Pandemic Media Responses
Please expect delayed response from media folk during pandemic, and some folks not working at all taking “leave” for unknown timeframe.
Some media replies from sending releases:
- (Car Magazine): Technically I’m on vacation this week but I will be checking email periodically and working part time.
- (Women’s Magazine): I am on indefinite leave and not checking email.
- (Radio station; May 11): Thanks for the email – I am off this week and will return on Monday May 18. I will not be able to respond to your message. Thanks. Be well and wash those hands!
April, 2020 – Financial Content Network Loses Sites
As of April, the FC Network seems to have lost partnerships with some sites, like Renewable Energy World. However, unlike Frankly’s system, FC at least redirects the page to their own system instead of dead link.
March 23, 2020 – Frankly Network Loses Numerous Sites
A number of broadcast sites suddenly left the Frankly Network this week. This includes popular sites like:
- https://www.nbc-2.com/category/325708/send2press
- https://www.abc-7.com/category/325708/send2press
- https://www.klkntv.com/category/325708/send2press
This is entirely outside our control, and impacts all newswire services pushing content via Frankly/WorldNow. All news releases previously found on these sites is now gone forever.
March 11, 2020 – Update to Financial Content Network
Over the past several years we’ve had a number of issues with The Financial Content Network (sites like Ask, AZcentral, Pittsburgh Post, etc.) pulling our content in properly, which is why their versions of our news would be missing multiple images, missing anchor links, missing inline video, etc. As of March 11 they are now pulling a new version of the feed; it will not have inline video, but will show multiple images if applicable, and will now properly show all links, including anchor links on words and brand names, etc.
Only initial issue is they do strip out the HTML like the h2 and h3 tags for sub-heads which is unfortunate, and the twitter share link using shortcode also not working on day one.
March 10, 2020 – BETA Test of New Instagram Page
While we ‘reserved’ the Send2Press page/URL on Instagram quite some time ago, it wasn’t until second week of March 2020 when somebody tried to hack our account, that we decided might be good time to try populating it a bit to see what happens. So, eventually we’ll likely auto-connect our FB posts to the account, but to start, we’re just randomly posting photos that look cool, or which are not just plain logos (upshot: no guarantee your images will appear here at this time during what we’re calling a ‘BETA’). To wit, https://www.instagram.com/send2press/
March 2020 – Updates to Neotrope News Network ‘TAB’
Since NEWSTAG seems to be stable now, we have added them back to the research links under the Neotrope Network “tab” in your report. Also, two other sites we decided to include, although not direct partners, are Verity Weekly (Florida), and News Break (California).
Reminder: we have no control over how certain sites “scrape” out content, sometimes from intermediate sources; e.g., Verity Weekly is actually scraping from our CitizenWireâ„¢ “orphan” news portal.
January 2020 – Goodbye ‘MIX’ Social Platform
Although we supported sharing to MIX social platform for one year after their takeover of the old StumbleUpon platform, we saw zero placement in SERPS and zero clients even being aware it existed. So, as of 2020, we no longer support it (basically waste of effort). We are instead focusing on promotion of PINTEREST, which has started to greatly increase traffic.
November, 2019 – Apple News “Skipped” Full Text Stories
It seems there is a “bug” in the Apple News API, where once in awhile a story with a Facebook URL which doesn’t pass validation, causes Apple to skip the story thinking the link to FB in release does not work, but obviously does. We have reported this in October, but it has happened couple of times in November as well. If your news is missing in the full text Apple News App in the Send2Press channel, only option would be to remove social links from within the press release and re-push.
It’s not feasible to manually check this per story; but if you note your story is missing, please let us know. Arguably the link to FB more important than having the text in Apple News (anybody using it?). 🙂
Oct 17, 2019 – MIX Social Network Crash
As of 5 p.m. on Thurs. Oct. 17, the MIX network (which absorbed Stumbleupon last year to launch), had a system issue, and all our content vanished after the pages and indexes in their system (topics like “books”) completely gone. They had a page working as of Friday morning, but all content since May is gone as well as indexes. They are working on it. We are not updating (posting) any of out content to their site at this time until they are back up and running.
UPDATED: turns out they had done some update where all our content went to “private” vs “public” and Chris had to figure this out as their tech support is not the best. In any case, content was public again last week of October.
Oct 16, 2019 – TippNews Ohio System Issue
As of Wed. Oct. 16, 2019 the TippNews Ohio news site, which pulls our content onto their “national” page began migrating their platform to a different cloud hosting solution. Content has not been updated there since Oct. 15. Site was completely offline morning of Oct. 18. They are working on it and hope to be back up by Monday Oct. 21.
UPDATE: the moved to new cloud provider. However, once in awhile they may still have a caching issue, which seems to be nature of WordPress + cloud hosting. Remember this site is not owned by Neotrope/Send2Press so we have no control over anything posted there.
Oct 9, 2019 – PressRelease-CC Junk News Site
We noticed this week a “junk” (low quality site) news aggregator pulling our news and removing our name from the dateline, kind of how MENAFN does. Initially they were also removing our name and required link-back at bottom in violation of our terms of use. This site is not a content partner, nor authorized to use our news. If they are trying to launch a paid newswire service using our content, we’ll complain to their hosting provider, hit them with a DMCA complaint with Google, then reverse-block all their IP addresses (as we had to do with the scumbags at EIN News). Stay tuned on this one. 🙂
Oct. 2019 – Issues with BING News
We have noticed some oddities with Bing News as of the first week of October where not pulling all the Send2Press stories dynamically, or from some other sites including some partner sites. Keeping an eye on it.
July/Aug. 2019 – Send2Press Moving!
Note we are relocating from Torrance, Calif. to Temecula, Calif. during July and August 2019. You may note this has delayed Chris’ effort to do a mid-year ‘tune up’ on the report dashboard; this will be done by last week of September. Pardon the mess while remodeling! 🙂
Move was completed Aug. 20, 2019. Once the ‘break-in’ period of the new phones, new internet, etc., gets sorted, we’ll be back to finishing the report tune-up!
July 22, 2019 – Send2Press full-text news now featured in Apple News
After more than 2 years in Apple News, our Send2Press “channel” was finally approved for full-text inclusion today, and back-ported news from last couple of months being fully indexed. Previously if you went to our “channel” and clicked a story, it would redirect to our website out of the news app, and also our news would not be shown in “related” suggested topics with all other Apple News. Took them forever to get to it after initial approval last November (!).
VISIT OUR NEW UPDATED CHANNEL: (requires iOS/MacOS) https://apple.news/TPlwep_MDRS-IV7Or1HW1vw
Note: For the above link, use SAFARI, not Chrome, as right now Google is doing an advertisement hack to try to load the link in Chrome mobile which breaks the link (bad Google!). OR: simply type ‘Send2Press’ in the News App, to find us simply.
July 9, 2019 – Google News ‘Mobile First’ Layout is Live
Sadly, the somewhat clunky mobile first layout for Google has now been activated even on desktop for Google News. This puts every item in a box, taking longer to scroll through items, and they now share the same look as ads. If you’ve tried to use Google search on an iPad recently you’ve noticed the mobile results are not easy to use, as ads, info boxes, video boxes, shopping, all look like search results and are designed to get you to click on paid content elements before organic elements. Boooo!
July 5, 2019 – BizWire Express ‘stalled’
One of the somewhat flaky content sites pulling our news apparently stalled or broke pulling our content. This may or may not resume, and is entirely outside our control, much like the folks at Newstag in Germany, etc. who seem to work for awhile, then not, then work again.
June 1, 2019 – Twitter Breaks Auto-post Systems
Apparently Twitter decided to “break” many of the long-standing automatic posting API connections, which effectively broke our Facebook posts pushing to our Twitter account; but, more annoying, it broke the Google API which was auto-posting news from California Newswire, Florida Newswire, New York Netwire, Citizen Wire, Mortgage & Finance News and the early morning ‘PRESS RELEASE’ version tweet from Send2Press.
We have been testing direct-API-connections with Twitter via our developer accounts, and these have been working with eNewsChannels and Massachusetts Newswire the past 2 months. This same direct-API-connect method will be rolled out to California Newswire and Florida Newswire by the end of June.
May, 2019 – Change to Facebook API
Apparently FB made a change to the auto-embed (OEMBED) coding for posts, as the preview of our client news posts on the Send2Press timeline no longer ’embed’ into the PRTrax report, which has worked for many years without any issues. Waiting to see if this is corrected, or if we need to “reprogram” this as we did the Twitter sharing buttons recently. UPDATE: fixed as of 5/22/19!
April 15, 2019 – Twitter Design Change Roll-out
This month Twitter began roll-out of their new mobile first layout/design for all users. Some folks have been able to switch back to a “legacy” view; some cannot. It turns out the new javascript layout system broke our share links from the main Send2Press.com/wire/ pages. Chris was able to fix this on April 30.
March, 2019 – PRN Loses BizJournals Sub-domain Posts
(PREMIUM PLAN CLIENTS)
Without any warning or heads-up to us Send2Press folk, it appears as of the week of March 4, Cision/PRN lost their long-standing relationship with BizJournals’ websites, where all of PRN’s full-text content would run on those sites, and the line-up would appear in the clip report for PRN (for our “Premium” plan clients only). Chris confirmed with PRN March 11, that BizJournals has made number of changes, so it appears those posts are now history.
March 6, 2019 – Yahoo! Finance Search API Change
As of March 6, the long-standing API to do custom searches for our news via the Yahoo! Finance system appears to have broken or been discontinued. So, for the moment the Yahoo! Finance search buttons in our reporting do not work, which is outside our control. The last Yahoo! button to search main Yahoo! search results does work. We are leaving the Finance search buttons in place pending an update or fix from their API.
Jan. 21, 2019 – Google Feedburner ‘Socialize’ API Broken
Google’s API to auto-post tweets for the Neotrope News Network is ‘broken’ as of Jan. 21, and using defective shortcodes in tweets that do not forward to our sites. ( UPDATE: Google finally fixed this issue. )
Jan. 1, 2019 – ‘Sunsetting’ Google+ (G+)
Google has announced they are retiring the G+ social network at the end of Q1/2019 for consumers/public (some version may continue for enterprise level teams). We have discontinued posting Send2Press news to Google+ as of Jan. 1, 2019. Our existing pages will remain until we see what Google plans to do for business users.
Dec. 1, 2018 – Retiring Inactive/Defunct Client Reports
Per our Terms of Service, we “retire” reports after 2-3 years for inactive or defunct clients to conserve system resources for this PR Traxâ„¢ platform. We have started removing reports from 2015 clients who no longer work with us, and early 2016 clients who may no longer be in business.
So, it’s always wise to back-up your reporting if it matters to you. Once deleted, it cannot be recreated or restored. Since we do not have any subscription fee or annual membership fee, we are not required or obligated to permanently make reports available for one-time clients from 2015, into 2019. This is simply not reasonable.
Again: please be sure to make copies of your reporting, as we make no guarantee your reports will be online permanently — but primarily, if you are no longer a client, at some point the reporting will be retired.
Nov. 10, 2018 – Updates to Google AMP and Apple News
Couple of things have been resolved as of Nov. 10. First, there was a duplicate image bug in the AMP (Accelerated Mobile Project) plugin, which would add additional custom syndication image to the /amp endpoint on mobile when a custom syndication image was created in Photoshop by Chris S. (e.g., two CEO headshots side-by-side). This is now fixed.
Example of the AMP version of a story:
https://www.send2press.com/wire/eight-exceptional-charities-selected-to-receive-2018-jl-simmons-non-profit-pr-grant-awards/amp
For Apple News app, we have migrated the RSS feeds from Send2Press to the News Publisher API this past week, and worked out couple of bugs with the Apple News support folk. Hopefully we will again have “full text” versions of news in the News App, as we did originally vs. the summary + photo that links to our site. The user experience of reading the full story in the News App is preferable to the jump out of app to Safari, then back to app again. This is likely only relevant to the three other people Chris knows actually using the Apple News app 😉 . Send2Press and California Newswire have both been in the News App since it was in BETA couple of years back.
Send2Press news channel in Apple News: https://apple.news/TPlwep_MDRS-IV7Or1HW1vw
Oct. 8, 2018 – Google to Sunset Google+ Social Network
Google has announced, as expected, they will be retiring the G+ network for consumers, but will redevelop the platform for use by business and enterprise. It is unclear if the Send2Press page will continue or not. However, it is likely that all “personal” pages will start to phase out through Aug. 2019. Send2Press will continue to share client news to our page through Dec. 31, 2018, pending further updates from Google.
Oct. 1, 2018 – Chris is Playing with ‘Scribd’ Website Again
For long time clients you may or may not recall we were early adopters of a couple of document archive sites, DocStoc and Scribd. The former died, while the latter is still around as a paid “read lots of stuff for monthly fee” kind of thing. Just for snorts, Chris started uploading our content to Scribd again for our larger clients to see what happens in SERPS since both Stumbleupon is gone and G+ going away. In case anybody noticed 🙂
Examples: Once on the page click the view more link to right above the thumbnails, since the landing page does not show “latest” items: https://www.scribd.com/user/12560058/Send2Press-Newswire
<em>Update Nov. 1: since these don’t seem to show up well (if at all)Â in search results, we are likely not going to go back to adding to Scribd; as I believe this is why we stopped doing so originally.</em>
Sept. 10, 2018 – Frankly Network System Changes
Frankly began making some changes to their platform as of Sept. 10 which was randomly breaking the API we use to pull links, where stories were showing with different /Global/story?=0000 format URLs. As of Sept. 12 in the evening this appears to have been resolved and should be fine moving forward, however as of noon on Sept. 13, still seeing some odd and broken links and indexes.
Sept. 6, 2018 – Frankly Network Loses Some Sites
It looks like a number of the FOX and CW news sites found the past 2 years in the Frankly Network are now coming up as “not found” for news content today. We will update the line-up as soon as we get updated API info from Frankly/WorldNow.
Sept. 3, 2018 – Financial Content Network Loses Some Sites
We noticed this week that some sites in the FC Network are no longer working, such as Travel Weekly, now redirecting to default FCN page. We will update our list in reporting once we have updated API from FCN.
Aug. 8, 2018 – 4-Traders ‘Rebranding’
It looks like our long time content partner ‘4-Traders’ is in the process of rebranding as ‘Market Screener by 4-Traders’ — and looks like this is part of their process to finally move to https. An example new post location:
https://www.marketscreener.com/news/Local-Foot-and-Ankle-Surgeon-Heals-His-Own-Foot-Pain-with-New-Brace–27077632/
July 31, 2018 – RIP StumbleUpon
As of July 31 (Aug. 1), ‘StumbleUpon’ is no more. It has been retired, rebranded, reinvented as ‘MIX’ which is quite a bit different and seems more like Pinterest than its former self. All our existing content appears gone and we were provided no option to migrate it. As of July 31, we have back-ported some stories and started building new category indexes (“collections”), and you can peruse those here: https://mix.com/send2press/collections
June 15, 2018 – MENAFN Out! Then Back!
Our friends at MENAFN (Middle East News) has had on/off/on technical issues since mid-June. We removed the search link from the “Neotrope” tab/section in report as it’s unclear from week to week if they are pulling in our news or not. Some yes, some no. (Update: Aug 1 — seems they are pulling our content again properly; however we have not added them back to the search tools as their system seems a bit hit/miss on doing searches. So you may randomly see their version of story in searches online and “maybe” in Google News, or “maybe not.”)
May 21, 2018 -PDF Button Disabled Main Site
Apparently there is a bug in the open source module used to create PDFs via PHP, widely used by many solution providers, where with PHP 7.5.2 (anything over 7.0) it generates errors, including memory issues.
Update Aug 1, 2018: we have brought back the ‘save as PDF’ option for all news items on the main site (Send2Press.com/wire/). [yay!]
May 12, 2018 – HTTP/2 Server System Enabled
As of May 12, all Send2Press and Neotrope News Network sites moved to the http/2 + ALPN protocol, which is the next generation method of serving secure web pages in modern browsers (over the old http 1 protocol). This makes the sites more secure and faster with mobile devices. During the week of May 14 we will be “fine tuning” the system. You may get a “502 Bad Gateway” error randomly during the tuning process.
Learn more about http/2 at: https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/http2/.
Changes to Google News – May/June 2018
Starting Spring/Summer 2018, Google is reinventing Google News and is changing the way news appears to be more personalized for each user, especially for mobile users. All Send2Press and Neotrope News Network content will remain part of Google News (as we have been since the original GN was in beta in 2005); however the custom search links in your dashboard may or may not behave as expected, and we will update those (as we always have), as Google continues to roll out and fine tune the new platform. Mobile users will be “encouraged” to use the new Google News App, much like YouTube has done. Our client news will continue to be very well represented in Google News on all platforms.
Changes for April 2018
It looks like Frankly has lost AZ FAMILY in their network (aka: KTVK-TV IND-3/CBS-5 – Phoenix, AZ). So those links will no longer work as of April 1.
Also, as of April 1, our friends at ScoopIT decided they want to “charge us” to post on their site, which is ridiculous, so we have chosen to no longer work with them as we don’t need their help to share content on Twitter (obviously). 4,800 of our news items as excerpts no longer appear on their site, either in our own topic or the main Business topic.
March 15. 2018 – New Content Partner: MENAFN
We are testing a new content partnership with the folks at MENAFN – “World and Middle East business and financial news, Stocks, Currencies, Market Data, Research, Weather and other data.” They appear in Google News, and have an international audience separate from many of our other content partners. Since our friends at Newstag in Germany went out of business, this should add some additional visibility outside the U.S. as part of our overall “no extra cost” international reach. (See notes about Newstag, below).
March 15. 2018 – Phase 2 Archive Pruning
Starting in March of this year, we began “pruning” some very old, defunct, dead-linked content in the Send2Press news archive – specifically the 2005-2018 system which now runs on a highly modified version of WordPress. In auditing some old news we kept finding defunct businesses, web apps, start-ups, dotcoms and whatnot, either no longer active, or in many cases with domain pointing at a foreign website with undesirable content. The first phase removed dead links from the page where applicable. Phase two started March 15, which is to remove selected content where the links are still active, but no relation to the original content, and perhaps in Asia, Russia, Arab countries or the like. Historically, we have said our “news lives forever … unless….” And, so, this now falls under the “unless” category. All our news is archived permanently in Archive.org (fun to look up our home page from 2000), but our goal will be to prune about 20% of the “old dead wood” in our system which is no longer relevant.
March. 2018 – Minor Report Updates
The Financial Content Network appears to have lost The Network Journal and so that item has been removed from the quick view lineup in report. Also, as of March 7, Chris has figured out how to use the new CDN-based (content delivery network) ‘Browsershot’ API (which replaced the prior API of 2005-2017) to put the screen shot back up top-right of headline in report, vs middle of page (which looked kind of dorky). However, screen cap is now again “hidden” on phones and small tablets while in portrait view. You can right-click-save the screen cap image if desired (it’s actually 600×450 pixels in size).
Jan. 2018 – Google Finance Deprecated
Google Finance began phasing out its main features Dec 2017 to roll elements into normal search (“SERPS”) and “knowledge graphs” – so the 2006-2017 finance portal with ticker news is now retired for 2018 and has very limited functionality specific to a single ticker. “Tickerized” press releases no longer shown as related content, even under the “News” tab. Google News also stopped using “news keywords” at the same time, and may no longer be using “ticker” information in the same way it has the past decade; although may highlight the news in main SERPS when looking for a ticker.
Jan. 19, 2018 — Font Change for Report
As of today we’re switching back to ‘native’ browser/mobile fonts vs the Google font, to speed up the report a little bit with all the dynamic elements being loaded. If you feel strongly about this and prefer the old font, please let us know!
Jan. 19, 2018 — Newstag.de Problems (*updated May 2018)
On Friday Jan. 19, our friends at the German news portal, Newstag, are having issues with their server and SSL/TLS certificate. Links were not working as of 12 p.m. PT. We are hoping this is resolved, but if not we will remove them from our reporting. As always, we have no control over sites that syndicate or clone our news outside of our main website (Send2Press.com/wire) and the Neotrope News Network sites. (*NOTE: a blog-format version of site appears to be back online May 1, however not quite the big German news magazine it was; we suspect it might be a rescue effort from one of the staff; but all our old content seems to still be there again even if in “cheap” looking form. In case you care 🙂 –CS).
UPDATE: It appears a funky blog-like version of Newstag has come back from the dead as of April 2018. It’s unclear if this is from the same company, or simply somebody cleverly buying up the old domain and scraping the archive. We have tentatively re-included the link to their system as of April, 2018. (If they implode again, or start posting terrorist junk, or whatever, we will try to block them; but for now, they are being “allowed” to scrape our news.)
Jan. 16, 2018 — BizWire Express DOA then back! (UPDATED Jan 19)
As of Jan. 16 it looks like bizwireexpress .com may be defunct as it is showing an “account suspended” notice on visiting the link to our former news index on that aggregation portal. Since it was one of many sites that cloned news from all the newswire services without contributing anything itself, the site was only included in reporting as a courtesy and not highly relevant. UPDATE: As of Jan. 19, it appears the site is “back” and working again for our link: http://www.bizwireexpress.com/Send2Press-Newswire.php
Jan. 2018 — Changes to Frankly/Worldnow Network
It looks like Frankly has lost/changed some of their site content partners for Q1/2018. Notably, these no longer work:
* KUSI-TV IND-9 (San Diego, CA)
* WAAY — Huntsville-Decatur (Flor) AL
(Additional items now DOA: will be updated on report system second week of Jan. to fix!)
Jan. 2018 — Issues with FC Network
*issues still not resolved Jan. 1, 2018.
We have reported several ongoing issues with FC Network syndication system/content. The following are examples (updated Jan. 2018 from Oct. 2017).
Site still returning broken IP error:
CEOWORLD: http://finance.ceoworld.biz/ceoworldbiz/news/read/35547035/
Site still returning no news content; redirecting to home page
BIOSPACE: http://investor.biospace.com/biospace/news/read/35547035/Tipp_City_Public_Library_expects_to_cut_utility_expenses_by_$5
Still broken, loading home page vs post page template
NETWORK JOURNAL: http://markets.tnj.com/tnj/news/read/35547035/
Broken branding/headers
ASK.COM http://markets.ask.com/ask/news/read?GUID=35547035
Multiple pop-ups; Amazon ad + video auto launch + AzCentral subscription banner
(renders unusable)
AZ CENTRAL: http://finance.azcentral.com/azcentral/news/read/35547035
Also, Send2Press became ‘https everywhere’ in 2014. 3 years later, FC Network still not moved to https for news content. #sad
August 21, 2017 — WorldNow Channel 12 NY
It looks like WorldNow has (temporarily?) pulled support for the line up of “Channel 12” sites in New York and NJ, and not showing news items. If you’d tried these links, you may have noted they throw up a ‘customer only’ notice after couple of visits, so that might be the issue. So, we are removing those links from the laundry list this week, since they don’t work.
August 1, 2017 — Updates to Report Sections
Starting August 1, we added a section with links to the custom News Room and RSS feed for each client, so you won’t have to go looking for them. Also, starting Aug. 7, we are testing the return of the QR Codes, which went away last year when Google deprecated their API. Since QR Codes are coming back into usage, thought it might be fun to bring them back, for those who might have a use for them.
July 10, 2017 — Retirement of Legacy .txt Release Copies
From 2000-2013 we created both .txt and .pdf copies of all news items, in addition to the static shtml/php version of press release on Send2Press.com. With the move to new dynamic platform in 2016, we began phase out of the old PDF files in favor of an on-demand PDF generator for those few who needed PDFs, versus always creating a file for every news release. As of July 10, we have also now retired all PDFs from 2000-2004, and all .txt files from 2000-2013. This old content is now not only woefully out of date, but now redundant with the dynamic news platform.
July 1, 2017 — WorldNow/Frankly Broadcast Network
As of July 1, all our plans include syndication online via the WorldNow network to 150+ broadcast websites nationwide. Previously this was only included with our Premium level plans (via PRN). For reports after June 20, you should see a new section in the report with direct-link clips.
May 15, 2017 — Changes to Financial Content Network (FCN)
It appears FCN has lost relationship with International Business Times (IBT) and links now going to default FCN dummy landing page. FCN seems to lose sites, but then adds them (e.g., lost Boston.com and others last year). Outside our control, obviously. FCN content should *not* be considered permanent, unfortunately.
Jan. 16, 2017 — Cancel Partnership with COMTEX
Due to lack of any follow up reporting, traction or measurable results we’re cancelling our partnership with Comtex. After spending $2,000 with them to enable wider placement of our news in financial systems, we found they cannot deliver on their promises. We have chosen to put our money into expanding the Neotrope News Network sites instead as we can provide measurable audience engagement, and better value for our clients (you!). 🙂
Dec. 27, 2016 — Working on Dashboard Revamp
Starting last week of December, we are working on a “revamp” of the PRTraxâ„¢ dashboard to move to top-down “accordions” vs. side-to-side “tabs” in order to make custom CSS for a print version where the accordions would all be “open” for saving to PDF, using appropriate “print to PDF” software or plugin. Pardon the mess during the revamp as we have to do this on the “live” panel due to dynamic nature of report data.
Nov. 1, 2016 – Old CMS and New CMS Merged
As of Nov. 1 we have completed the full “merge” of the old 2004 content management system (CMS), and merged with new 2017 CMS. All news since May 15 has only published in new system. Now, all archival news from Jan. 1, 2005 to May 15, 2016 has been merged and “301 redirected” to the new system. This includes all former file types of .shtml, .pdf, and .txt. So any and all files previously found at Send2Press.com/newswire/ are now found in the Send2Press.com/wire/ system and redirected to retain inbound links and “link equity.” All old javascript widgets have been retired; all RSS feeds have been redirected to the new versions. Ancient archival content from 1999-2004 remains in the legacy /PRnetwire/ folder and cannot be merged as it’s woefully old HTML code, and can never be made “mobile friendly.”
Oct. 10, 2016 – Neotrope News Network SSL Roll-out
Starting October 10 and continuing over the next 60 days, we’re migrating all of our news portals to full “https everywhere” like Send2Press.com has been since Nov. 2014. This means sites like MassachusettsNewswire.com and CaliforniaNewswire.com will soon only work via https with a visible security lock shown in web browser. One note is that our sites, other than Send2Press.com, will likely no longer work with older web browsers which only support the woefully insecure SSL2/SSL3 and TLS1.0/1.1 standard. The https/SSL setups for the Neotrope News Network will require a modern browser, optimized for modern security standards for both desktop and mobile users. Ancient insecure web browsers may not even be able to load the pages. As these are news portals, the emphasis is on ensuring a secure experience for current news, and not supporting ten+ year old web browsers any longer.
Oct. 2016 – Feedzilla RIP
It looks like our long time content partner “Feedzilla” finally got toasted. We have not been able to reach any of their site properties for some time, and their social sites (e.g., Facebook) have not been updated in a long time. We are considering them officially defunct as of October 1, 2016.
Q4/2016 – Service Expansion
Neotrope/Send2Press will be expanding the reach of our “Standard” level plans through a partnership with Comtex/Bloomberg and others in prep for streamlining our service offerings for 2017. UPDATE: beta roll-out started last week of Sept., and is ongoing during October. Stay tuned for more specifics!
August 5, 2016 – Major Web Server Crash
NOTICE: we had a catastrophic web server failure August 4, 2016 — ironically while in midst of migrating to our new 2017 web server. It appears that the server we had built Dec. 2013, had never been setup properly and was running three hard drives as RAID-0 (striped), vs RAID-5 (2+parity). We have fired our datacenter of 11 years, now owned by IBM, and have chosen a better provider whom we’ve worked with for 7 years separately.
This crash turned out to be systemic failure, which had started early July, and so we have some back-ups which are fully corrupted, which should have been “golden” backups. Most of the main Send2Press.com had a higher level of security, so everything up to August 1, was recovered fairly easily. Many of our other sites, and this report system, did not fare so well. As of Sat. Aug. 6 at 5 PM PDT, we are not sure at what point we lost reports; possibly everything after July 1 (!).
Please understand we are working as quickly as possible to recover, repair, and renew whatever is possible. And take this as general reminder you should be making copies of your reporting when you have them, as there is no guarantee the information will be perpetual. All PRN reports for Premium plans is in the PRN system, so we can easily provide links to that for those who need it “now.” For our own reporting, we will have to try to do a basic rescue and re-create a lot of data from July onward.
Our new platform has real-time mirroring again, as on prior systems, nightly backups, and automatic local backups every time we update anything on any of our sites. This gives us a triple-backup at all time, with validity checks to ensure information is viable.
Hope you’re having a better week!
— Christopher Simmons
CEO, Neotrope
May 15, 2016 – New Send2Press News CMS
Starting May 15 we began transition to our new publishing platform for Send2Press news, replacing the 2005-2015 system. All legacy content is still in its original location (your historical news); but all new stories we issue as of May 15 will be in the new system.
Classic news lives at: Send2Press.com/newswire/
All future news lives at: Send2Press.com/wire/
We will be merging the “classic” system with the “new” system by the end of August 2016, then redirecting all the old links to the new (will be same, just in new folder and without .shtml on the end).
We expect some hiccups with both syndication and SEO, since there are literally hundreds of thousands of links inbound to the old pages, indexes, and RSS feeds.
Also note with the new system we have much better rejection of “bot views,” so don’t be discouraged by lower “view counter” number at bottom of your main story page; this should now be more accurate as to number of “real people” reading the story vs 10,000 bot views in the first 10 days.
May 16, 2016 – Reuters.com
Important change to “Premium Plan” client news appearing on Reuters.com
Thomson Reuters has advised us that, effective May 16, they are no longer publishing any third-party content on their public website. This means that press releases from PR Newswire, as well as those from all of our competitors, will no longer be posted on the reuters.com site. On May 16th they started the process to remove the Press Release sections on stock profile news pages.
While this is process is happening, press releases for both public and non-public companies may be discoverable via search engines, but for all practical purposes, press releases should no longer be expected to post on the site. On May 19th the reuters.com database will stop receiving press releases. This will most likely happen in the evening (ET), after which time press releases will no longer be available on the site. It is possible that press releases on reuters.com may be visible to search engines during the transitions noted above. Here are some talking points you can share with your customers who may inquire about this change:
Reuters will continue to receive PR Newswire’s wire feed, and PR Newswire’s content will continue to be distributed to Reuters’ wide-ranging team of editors and journalists, as well as across the Thomson 1 and Eikon professional investor networks, accessed by hundreds of thousands of brokers, analysts, institutional investors, wealth managers and financial advisors who use Thomson Reuters’ product and systems.
This change impacts only full-text posting of press releases on reuters.com, and the change applies to all of Reuters’ 3rd-party content providers, which means that there are no competitive issues – press releases distributed by PR Newswire or any other wire service will no longer be posted on Reuters.com.
Jan 1. 2016 – New Web Technologies
Send2Press news can be found in the new iOS News App, under both the “Send2Press” channel, and the “California Newswire” channel. Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”) support began with the beta Nov. 2015. Almost all Neotrope News network sites, as well as the main Send2Press.com/newswire site content will be “AMP” compatible when this rolls out mid-Feb. 2016.
Dec. 15, 2015 – Topsy
NOTICE ABOUT TOPSY: As of end of day Dec. 15, 2015, Apple discontinued the TOPSY social media tracking system we had been including in our reports the past few years. We have removed that element from this tab as it no longer functions at all.
Sept. 2015 – Diigo / Delicious
As of Sept. 2015 we have discontinued support for Diigo (incorporating FURL) and Delicious social network/sharing/bookmark sites. We have supported these sites for nearly 10 years, however the majority of our clients don’t use these sites and most have never heard of them. Sadly, their relevance no longer benefits our client news projects moving forward.
June 2015 – SiteWatch now PRtrax
Note about report naming change: we officially retired the SiteWatch name after 15 years, as of June 1, 2015, as another company has registered a U.S. trademark for that name in the reporting field. Rather than contest this, we are simply going to use our brand PRtraxâ„¢ for both the simple dashboard here, as well as the PRO metrics graphing report which is coming soon (still being tested/optimized).