Reporter and Research Queries
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Reporter and Research Queries
Berkeley Parents Network often publishes requests from
reporters and researchers who want to interview parents or children
about family and child-related topics.
Many of our parents are interested in participating in these.
However, because of the size of our membership and our reliance on
volunteers, we are limited in how we can help you with your article or research project.
What we can do for you
If your request is related to children or parenting and has interest
for our subscribers, you can post a query in one of two newsletters:
- The "Announcements" newsletter is emailed on Thursdays
to 31,652
local parents of babies and young
children, and parents-to-be.
- The "Parents of Teens" newsletter is emailed on Fridays
to 6,475
local parents of pre-teens, teens, and young adults.
You can post a message to either of these newsletters
yourself if you are a BPN subscriber --
posting deadlines are on
the posting forms below.
If you are not a BPN subscriber
You may subscribe to BPN if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area
and you are either a parent yourself, or you work with
children or children/parenting issues. It is free to subscribe -
Click here.
If you are not eligible to subscribe, you may write to us (click here)
to see if we can include your
request in an upcoming newsletter.
Give us 4-5 sentences in PLAIN TEXT
(no fonts, formatting, colors, bullets, images, or attachments) that
briefly describe your article or your research,
that we can copy-paste into the newsletter. Include your
name and an email address where interested parents can contact you.
You can include a link to a survey or to
your website or you can offer to mail details to interested people.
What your message should include
- Since BPN is a free not-for-profit network,
our subscribers are most interested in participating in academic
research studies, public service endeavors, and publicly available media
such as newspapers, radio and TV.
- Keep in mind
that your message will be read by thousands of people, so, to keep
responses manageable, you should be as specific
as you can about what you are looking for, such as
age ranges, type of family, etc.
What we can't do for you
- If you
have a deadline that's a few days away, BPN is probably not going to
work for you.
BPN newsletters are mailed on a regular weekly schedule and we cannot make
exceptions to this. See the "Post to" links above for details
about deadlines and mailing dates.
- We cannot post any announcements that are not related to
children or parenting.
-
The BPN is a very large
network of parents (31,652
subscribers as of today)
that is run by a very small number of volunteer moms and dads (10).
We do not have any staff, we
don't have an office or a street address or a telephone number,
and we do not have meetings.
We are an online, email-based network managed by volunteers, most of
whom have full-time jobs unrelated to the BPN.
Therefore, there is not anyone at BPN who can be interviewed
by reporters and researchers.
We won't be able to forward your query to parents we know, or answer questions
for you on the phone, or post your question on our website. The only
thing we can do is run your query in a weekly newsletter, as explained above.
- Many of the discussions from our newsletters are archived
to our website, and this may be how you found us.
It is OK with us if you quote some of the discussions on our website
as long as you credit the Berkeley Parents Network. See
this page for details about using BPN content.
Please be aware that we have no
way to contact people whose postings appear on the BPN website, because
when we archive them, we remove all identifying information for privacy
reasons. We do not keep any information about subscribers other than
their email addresses. Therefore, the only way to contact BPN subscribers is
to post to one of the email newsletters, as described above.
this page was last updated: Nov 24, 2012
The opinions and statements expressed on this website
are those of parents who subscribe to the
Berkeley Parents Network.
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