What is an Article?

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Modified on: Mon, 21 Nov, 2022 at 9:00 PM

In short, an article is a piece of published content that contains a headline, content, and a publish date. Cision standards for an article or blog post are maintained to set guidelines for what kind of content can be considered earned media or a valid article. This is to rule out advertisements, bot content, low-value search engine bait, static web pages, and common online spam content. For online content to be considered an article by Cision standards and for it to be indexed into the platform, it must conform to a short set of guidelines.  

It is often easiest to clarify what is meant by an earned media article by looking at a list of published content types that we would not consider to be an article. 

What is NOT an article? 

Content that does not meet the standard to be considered an article include but are not limited to:

• Event Pages
• Aggregators with a short excerpt of an article that links to the full article
• Forums, discussion pages, or message boards
• Websites with user-generated content
• Coupons/sweepstakes
• Dissertations/thesis
• Video-, audio- or image-only content
• PDFs
• Sale listings
• Business pages
• Product descriptions
• Index pages with lists of articles
• Documents that are fully blocked by a paywall
• About Page or Author Bios

More details on valid earned media articles: 

An article can be found in any online news publication, including magazines, online newspapers, TV news site, blog or meaningful posts.

To be considered an article, it must comply with the following guidelines:

• Articles have organized text content and include more than 250 characters
• Contain a publish date
• Contain a valid title

A few notes:

• Partial content, even if shortened by a paywall, are considered valid articles
• Product descriptions are considered valid articles only if they contains review-type information
• Active news or blog sections of business websites can contain article

Publish Date: The date the article was published must have the month, day, and year. If a date is not verified by the publisher, we cannot add it to our database.

Article Title: Also referred to as the article headline, this field must contain the title of the article and nothing else.