Some manufacturers have very well resourced PR departments and they tend to bombard the media with press releases, especially about new products.
But what is "new"? We'll get a preview item when the product is about to debut at a trade show, then more details when it actually goes on show and then there will be even more material when it goes on sale. Then, there's a series of 'local' releases as the new product is introduced in various markets - and we'll sometimes get more press releases for each of those.
If a machine is lucky enough to get nominated for an award, they'll fire off a press release about that, followed by another if it is named as a finalist. Of course, if it wins, well, you know the rest ...
This is all great - and we wouldn't want to stop them sending in all this information, but we would ask them to understand that we can't possibly subject our news readers to a barrage of what is, effectively, the same story.
The flip side is the small manufacturers who produce great equipment, but don't have the well-oiled publicity machine to back it up. We urge those companies to keep us in the loop. They don't have to prepare flashy media packs - just shoot us an email telling us what's new and we'll follow up and do the rest.
We also have marketing packages for the publication of any article in the 'Announcements' column.