How We Choose Who Appears In Manhattan Standard
We sell paid feature coverage. Here is exactly what that does and does not buy, and how you can always tell which is which.
Most publications that sell coverage are vague about it. We would rather set it out plainly, because the alternative — leaving readers to guess which pieces were paid for — is worse for everyone, including the people who pay us.
Two kinds of article
Editorial coverage is commissioned by us, on subjects we choose, with no payment from anyone involved.
Paid features are commissioned by a subject. They pay for the reporting, the writing and the production of a piece about them or their business.
How you can tell them apart
Every paid feature carries a visible label at the top of the page, above the headline, before you read a word of the article. Every link from a paid feature to the subject's own website or profiles is marked so that search engines do not treat it as an editorial endorsement.
This is not decoration. Undisclosed paid links are against search engine policy and against advertising rules, and publications that hide them eventually lose the trust that made the coverage worth buying.
What paid placement buys
The commission, the reporting time, a permanent profile page, and the production. It buys our attention and our craft.
What it does not buy
It does not buy our conclusions. It does not buy the removal of accurate but unflattering facts. It does not buy a place on any of our lists or rankings, which are compiled separately and without reference to commercial relationships. And it does not buy the suppression of other coverage.
If a subject wants copy approval over our judgments, we are not the right publication for them.
Corrections apply equally
A factual error in a paid feature gets corrected exactly as it would in editorial coverage, and the correction is noted on the article.
Why we publish this
Because a reader who knows which pieces are paid for can trust the ones that are not — and because a client buying a feature should know precisely what they are getting before they commission it.