SD Times is the newspaper of record for the software development industry. As such, our newspaper should be the first place you tell your story.

As a newspaper, our primary focus is to inform our reader about the latest happenings within our industry, and what that news means for enterprise software development managers.

We report on such happenings as company mergers and acquisitions, product introductions and upgrades, and industry-wide initiatives and standardization efforts.

By contrast, SD Times does not generally cover vendor customer wins, marketing campaigns and promotions, reseller agreements, partnership programs, or analyst reports. Nor do we publish product reviews or “how-to” features, or reproduce externally written white papers or customer case studies..

As with all newspapers, coverage of specific news items will depend on its relevance to our audience, timeliness, other current news and available space in the newspaper.

With the exception of our op/ed Guest Views and letters, SD Times editorial content is entirely written by our staff reporters/editors, regular columnists and a small team of regular outside writers. SD Times does not publish freelance or contributed articles, and does not publish book excerpts.

Submitting news

News about your company, products and people should be sent to either news {at} bzmedia.com or directly to the appropriate reporter covering a specific beat. Your news does not need to be presented as a formal press release, and there is no standard format that we require for letting us know about news.

Due to the amount of news being generated by the software development industry, SD Times is not able to pursue every news item submitted by companies in our market, and cannot acknowledge receipt of your press release or news announcement.

SD Times prefers to be pre-briefed, whenever possible, about upcoming news, so our reporting can be as timely as possible. The ideal lead time for a prebriefing is two to three weeks prior to your release date.

In some cases, we are willing to be briefed under an embargo, but for your own protection, check with editors before revealing embargoed or not-for-publication news. We cannot be responsible for protecting confidential information sent to our reporters without our prior consent to the embargo.

The lead times for news varies from two to four weeks for hard news in SD Times; it's about four to eight weeks for features. The lead times for our newsletters ranges from one to four days prior to publication.

When submitting news to SD Times, please be prepared to provide high-quality graphics, including screen shots, product photography and pictures of those individuals available for briefing. The use of these graphical materials is up to the discretion of the editors.

Special Reports

Most issues of SD Times contain a Special Report, which is an in-depth feature written by a staff writer or by one of our regular contributors. A list of upcoming Special Report topics can be found on our editorial calendar.

It is common practice for marketing and public relations staff to request detailed information about the topics and writers of upcoming Special Reports, and to offer interviews with their executives. We appreciate your interest, but may not be able to accommodate your request, due to the large number of these requests that we receive. Also, not all topics lend themselves to vendor coverage or commentary.

We do not provide detailed information about the Special Report direction for competitive reasons, and also because the angle of a Special Report is fluid until the research and reporting is complete.

While we acknowledge that marketing/PR staff would prefer to pitch our writers directly about including their client in our Special Reports, this is not an efficient practice for SD Times due to the large number of queries we receive. Therefore, we do not release the names or contact information for writers working on specific Special Reports.

Instead, we have evolved a standard procedure for accommodating Special Report queries: Send us a message and we will relay it to the writer of that Special Report. If the writer wishes to follow up on your query or interview request, he or she will respond to you directly. Due to the large number of queries we get for every topic, it is not assured that you will have a response from the writer. Repeated queries and follow-ups may be counterproductive.

You can send Special Report queries to David Rubinstein, Editor-in-Chief, at drubinstein {at} bzmedia.com. We advise sending such queries two to three months in advance of the cover date of that Special Report's issue.

SD Times 100

Each spring, SD Times recognizes the companies, organizations and individuals that demonstrated the greatest innovation and leadership during the previous year. Learn more here.

Editorial beats

The software development industry is tremendously interconnected, and therefore, editorial beats on SD Times are somewhat loosely defined. Also, because news isn't always spread evenly across beats, the editors and reporters of SD Times often work across other beats.

Here's a rough guide to coverage areas. If you are not certain who to contact, start with David Rubinstein.

P.J. Connolly, pjconnolly {at} bzmedia.com
Databases, embedded/mobile/wireless, microprocessors, programming languages

Jennifer deJong, jdejong {at} bzmedia.com
Special assignments, investigative reporting

Robert Mullins, rmullins {at} bzmedia.com
IDEs, Java, Eclipse, NetBeans, Linux, Unix, open source, standards

David Worthington, dworthington {at} bzmedia.com
SOA, Microsoft/.NET, Web services, business, business process management, test/QA, performance management

Alan Zeichick, alan {at} bzmedia.com
General editorial queries, letters, special reports, business development, mergers and acquisitions, software value management

Phone & in-person briefings

Many companies wish to have briefings, either in person or by telephone, with SD Times editors, and we do our best to take those meetings when driven by a news announcement.

Unfortunately, due to the size of the industry and the fast-paced nature of our jobs, we may not always be able to accommodate your request for an introductory, background or overview meeting. This is particularly true at conferences and trade shows, where schedules are extremely packed, but also applies to phone or in-person meetings at our offices.

Feel free to request a meeting, but please don't be offended, or take it as a sign of lack of interest in your company or products, if we must respectfully decline.

Corrections & clarifications

It is the policy of SD Times to correct factual errors in a timely fashion. If you believe that SD Times has published a factual error, please contact Alan Zeichick, alan {at} bzmedia.com.

Editorial graphics

SD Times often publishes graphics to accompany its news and analysis stories. We typically request screen shots and "head shots" of people who we interview. Graphics should be sent directly to the reporter or writer who requested them.

Many images copied into Microsoft PowerPoint presentations or Word documents are not suitable for use in SD Times. Please send us the original artwork, such as screen shots or Adobe Illustrator graphics, if possible.

Screen shots should be sent to us as native unaltered bits, in BMP or TIFF formats. Please do not save them as GIF or JPEG files - those formats compress files by throwing away bits, and therefore produce distorted images with blurry text and muddy colors. Because BMP and TIFF files can be very large, compress them using ZIP or StuffIt before e-mailing them to SD Times.

Head shots or other non-screen-shot artwork should be sent as megapixel resolution TIFF or JPEG files. For pictures of people, professional photographs of the subject are preferred, but are not required.

If you are taking the photograph with a digital camera, place the subject in a well-lit area. Backlighting (i.e., standing in front of a window), the use of on-camera flash and a busy background all detract from the quality of the photograph.

Please do not edit or alter the photographs or screen shots using Photoshop or another image editing product. Instead, send us the unaltered, uncropped digital image.

Questions?