FreePint Feedback - FreePint's Editorial Commissioning Process
Jinfo Blog

By Catherine Dhanjal

Abstract

FreePint's managing editor, Catherine Dhanjal, answers a recent customer query: "How does FreePint decide which vendors and subjects to cover in product reviews and articles?"

Item

We received a question from a customer: 

"How does FreePint decide which vendors and subjects to cover in product reviews and articles?"

We replied:

FreePint's editorial commissioning process and organisation of webinar and Community of Practice events is driven by a number of strands:

• Our research division
• Our customer sounding board
• Customer queries
• Our attendance at industry events
• Our editorial team.

Our research division, headed up by Robin Neidorf, carries out original research throughout the year, to coincide with our Topic Series and on other themes of interest to our Subscribers, who are largely information and knowledge managers across a range of sectors including banking and finance, biopharma, government, legal, manufacturing, professional services, and vendors. This provides a fount of knowledge which we feed into the editorial process through ideas for articles, interviews, product reviews, webinars and Community of Practice sessions.

We have a customer sounding board and we regularly consult with them to ask them about the key challenges or top-of-mind research requirements. We also take the opportunity to ask them about projects we are considering reviewing and research projects we have in mind. Their feedback is invaluable.

Our customers also send us queries or ask the account managers about specific areas they're interested in. We are always happy to answer these queries -- and they are not just answered and then forgotten about, they are actively taken into the editorial process for consideration for further research or to prompt us to review a particular vendor.

We regularly attend industry events such as SLA in Boston and Internet Librarian International in London, as well as special interest groups such as Pharma Documentation Ring. Connections we make and conversations we have are are also taken into account when gauging the shape and timing of our editorial. We also organise our own Communities of Practice sessions where we share insights from our research division.

Our editorial team, headed up by Catherine Dhanjal, works closely with the research division to ensure that we prioritise ideas from all the areas already-mentioned and that we take them forward in a planned way, for example grouping them into collections of related items, or identifying which of the ideas would form part of a Topic Series. Our editorial staff then commission writers who have particular expertise in those subjects or particular knowledge of an industry or tool, so that we constantly have new voices and new experts to inform the FreePint Audience.

Get Involved

If you would like to be part of our customer sounding board, to send us a query, to have a walk-through of the FreePint site or to find out more about the benefits of a FreePint Subscription, please contact us.

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