We've ignored press releases on Jalopnik as a matter of policy for the last few years, largely because they take up a ton of space and are often inane or terrible. That changes today. Not only are we giving you access to relevant automotive press releases, we're giving you the chance to comment on them with the Releases blog.
Some of you have noticed that we've been letting you text-annotate certain press releases and image annotate certain press photos over the last few months.
You've enjoyed doing it, so we started a Kinja blog where we started posting the most interesting/wonderful/terrible press releases and all the wonderful/terrible press photos. So far it's just been a test to see if we could keep it up and so far it's worked, so we've moved it over to the Jalopnik domain.
Now you can see the press releases that automakers sometimes hide behind logins or get buried under articles on other sites. Even better, you can now comment directly on them (who knows, maybe the PR folks will notice).
The plan is to add full-site text and image annotation like you get on Jalopnik in the coming weeks.
You can now access the Releases page directly from the Jalopnik front page and we'll try to put a link to the press release somewhere in new product posts.
My goals for this?
- 1. Transparency — See where it is we're getting our information if it comes from a press release.
- 2. Access To Photos/Info — We don't just regurgitate everything in a press release and maybe there's a photo or info you care about.
- 3. No Editorialization — We'll try to post the releases as much like the original press release as we can, although there may be some formatting issues.
- 4. Chaos — I don't know what kind of disruptions this will cause, if any, but I welcome them.
Any questions? Suggestions? This is Editorial Fellow Andrew Collins' baby, so ask him questions below.
Photo Credit: Ryan Jorgensen - Jorgo/Shutterstock.com