Clearing the news road ahead
Strong staff growth and a little loosening of budgets may, with luck, herald a clearer future for news organizations. Everybody ready?
 A big uptick in consumer confidence and some huge holiday buying presage a much less depressed new-product season in early 2011 than we've seen in any recent past years. As always, some of what we see is junk, some of it plays customers for suckers and some of it will never get funded.
The good news is there's a lot more of the really cool new products that help bring some fresh air to our workdays.
We're still aggressive hunters of products that can help improve personal productivity in any workspace, office or home. As always, we're chasing down what's hot and what's cool - what's brilliant and what's foolish - and covering it in our weekly Newstips Bulletin.
Since all of our readers are other journalists, we try to be their advance scouts and give them the earliest possible look - not at prototypes - but at things that are going to be real.
Vendors are welcome to suggest their own products for consideration and even more welcome to invite a chat about becoming a sponsoring client here.
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NEW: Picks for Bricks lets reviewed products win shelf space
We added an enticing contest element to our usual weekly product reviews. Any consumer tech product that isn't already being sold by brick & mortar retailers could win its way onto store shelves. Many are already en route there now.
There's no cost to enter. We'll review every product that comes in (though we may not publish every review). Those that we believe are good candidates for brick & mortar retail shelf space will get a fast, assured path to being there.
That helps deserving products get placed where more people can buy them. It helps stores find the hottest/coolest new products faster. And it helps us attract even more interesting content for our reviews.
To submit a product, drop us a note with a description and a photo; we'll let you know pronto if it's in our cross-hairs and how to get it here.
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For press people
We're adding to the kinds of help we can give you. And it's all still free.
We have details for print, radio and TV people on the main page in our For Press section.
These are all responsive services, meaning you don't hear from us until we hear from you. Because the last thing any of us needs is more junk we don't ask for being thrown at us.
Our focus is on shortcuts we can offer you because of what we know or who we know.
That includes our own background briefings on the tech or the market, plugging you into authorities when you need a quote, helping you find contacts at companies, helping get info or photos or products into your hands, etc.
Pop into our For Press section for details.
If you don't already get the weekly Newstips Bulletin by e-mail, info galore is here.
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About the weekly
Newstips Bulletin
We've been journalists
reaching journalists
for almost 30 years
Our unique combination of unsponsored independent enterprise journalism with sponsored items about important or soon-to-be important products has kept us a significant presence both for our readers (all in the press) and for the product vendor community.
There's a more complete description here of the Newstips Bulletin, info here for press people who want to subscribe, info here for product people interested in becoming sponsoring clients, and back issues here for anybody who wants to see what it looks like.
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For product people
We can also help vendors. And some of that help is free.
Few product people truly understand the extent to which the product coverage environment has changed.
In our experience, even fewer of their PR agency people understand it.
(Our Press Tectonics briefing tries to address that; click here to see it).
It wouldn't do you much good to just wring our hands over how bad things have become. We have answers.
Some of them are free, starting with some of the info on the main page in our For Vendors section.
You can also help yourself (for free) by taking us up on the offer we make there to share your up-to-date contact and product info with us.
We also have ways for some products to open up the road to retail, to gain major coverage outside the press channels and more.
How can we help you?
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