The Intelligence sometimes receives loaner review units of new or upcoming products in order to assess them and be able to share an informed perspective about their quality and the experience they provide.

As is common practice in this industry, device manufacturers or other associated parties will typically offer to send such devices to us for this manner of assessment. This allows media organizations to gain intricate knowledge about a wide range of devices and be able to make educated recommendations as well as think through bigger-picture platform insight without having to incur the substantial cost of having to purchase every single product that comes out all year long.

Different device-makers have different policies on their end as far as this process is concerned. Many companies now require writers to sign an official agreement assuring that they’ll return the review unit after a certain number of weeks or months. Others don’t.

Regardless of what a company does or doesn’t request, it’s always been The Intelligence policy (and our own personal policies as well) not to keep any review units from organizations we cover or to accept anything of meaningful value. Even though we know that nothing we write would ever be influenced by any external factors like that, it certainly wouldn’t look good. And people might understandably have a tough time trusting that everything we write is legitimate, impartial, and based solely on my own thoughts and perceptions as opposed to being “bought” — even if indirectly and a more implicit level.

The indirect part seems especially relevant. There are absolutely writers who accept freebies and keep review units and don’t deliberately shift what they’re writing in any substantial way as a direct result. But if Company X is giving you free $1,000 devices a few times a year, it’s hard not to think it’d have some impact on your ability to cover that company impartially and not at the very least hold back a little or soften your thinking when something critical comes up.

If nothing else, everyone reading your work would always wonder. And we’d rather avoid those sorts of questions and conflicts (or even possible perceptions of conflicts) entirely.

Capisce? Capisce.

The Intelligence publications often include sponsored sections, but we will always maintain a firm and easily detectable line between the editorial content we create and the sponsored content other companies pay to have featured.

If material is not clearly marked in that way, you can rest assured it was created by The Intelligence with no outside input, influence, or oversight of any sort.

To take that a step further, we hope this is obvious, but it’s worth stating: Anything we write is based 100% on our own research, experiences, and perspectives. Outside companies are never given advance access, editing opportunities, or approval rights over any of our editorial material.

With sponsored segments, we work hard to find partners that align intelligently with what we’re doing and what our audience (that’s you!) is likely to be interested in seeing. Our hope is that more often than not, the sponsored material will actually be engaging, useful, and beneficial in some way. Plastering publications with random over-the-top ads isn’t in anyone’s best interest, and that certainly isn’t what we want to do here.

Of course, we recognize that as hard as we work to avoid any troubling conflicts of interest, the perception of such conflicts may still exist. Though we don’t do it frequently, we will on occasion include sponsored posts from the companies we cover — Google, Samsung, or any other such entities — but this will in no way influence our coverage of those companies. We’ve never been shy about calling such companies out when it’s warranted, and that will absolutely never change.

Additionally, we keep the editorial and sales efforts strictly separate, so writers will never be involved in creating our sponsored content or the related business relationships.

And with sponsored content that we do run, The Intelligence always has final approval of the copy and images that are published. We work hard to ensure no The Intelligence publication ever does anything that might be in any way misleading or deceitful, and that standard applies to sponsored material, too.

If you ever feel like The Intelligence isn’t meeting that goal, please reach out to us directly.

You can read more about our relationship with sponsors from a privacy perspective our complete Privacy Policy, meanwhile, but the short version there is that we never share, sell, or otherwise distribute your email address or other personal information to anyone. The only way a sponsor would have access to any of that is if you click on an ad and then opt to give the info to them directly on your own.

The Intelligence writes about artificial intelligence regularly — but when it comes to using generative AI tools in our own work, we have pretty strict guidelines around what is and isn’t kosher.

Specifically:

• We never use any form of AI for any of our writing in newsletters or on the web.
• We rely on AI services to generate some of the title graphics you see as thumbnails and at the top of articles throughout the site — but just the graphics and never our writing or any non-graphical mid-article imagery.

With our limited AI-aided images, we stick to obvious graphical illustrations that in no way suggest they’re real-world photos. There should never be a question as to if something is real or AI-generated, and we never want to use AI in any way that could be misleading or ethically ambiguous.

If we do ever use AI in any context where it isn’t an obvious graphical illustration — if, for instance, it’s being used for a deliberate context within the purpose of a specific AI-related article or newsletter — we’ll always disclose that and be sure it’s clear that AI was involved.

And, again, we will never use AI to write any of our copy.

Lots of publications feature a form of monetization known as affiliate links. These are special links that allow a retail site to track where incoming shoppers came from and then pay a set bounty or commission to the place that sent them.

This happens most commonly with Amazon, though plenty of other retailers have similar programs now, too. And just like with our sponsored material, we believe in full transparency with you so you’ll always know when this is happening.

What’s more, outside of sections that are clearly marked as sponsored, the presence or absence of an affiliate program will never have any impact on what we cover from an editorial perspective or what we recommend. If an affiliate link is ever present, it’s something added in by our marketing staff after the fact and with no bearing whatsoever on any of the editorial decisions.

Plain and simple:

Occasionally, companies The Intelligence covers will offer to pay for travel and accommodations in order to have someone attend — and cover — the company’s event.

This can create an awkward conflict. Once more, even if indirectly, it’s hard not to suspect one’s perception of a company would be at least somewhat skewed by the fact that the company just spent hundreds of dollars (or perhaps even thousands, in the case of international travel) flying you out somewhere, putting you up in a lovely hotel, and paying for lavish meals while you’re there.

If nothing else, you’re likely to give that company’s event more time and editorial attention than you might otherwise by virtue of the fact that you’re there on their dime and you’re consequently focused entirely on what they’re doing. And readers will rightfully question the impartiality of everything you say about that company during the event and after as a result.

We find all of this to be problematic and not worth the compromised integrity — or even possible perception of compromised integrity — it presents. So outside of small and insignificant courtesies, such as broadly provided shuttles to an event destination:

If anyone from The Intelligence is traveling anywhere, it’s on our own dime (or, at least in theory, potentially covered by a partner publication where our work also appears).

This one’s easy: No one who creates editorial content for The Intelligence is permitted to hold direct investments or other known financial interests in any of the companies we cover.

And if anyone by chance ever has any other type of relationship with a company we cover — including any form of previous employment or anything else that could conceivably bias that person’s perspective and ability to remain impartial — we require that to be plainly disclosed, both to us and to readers, in order to be fully transparent and to avoid any unanswered questions.