PSA: A Word on Submitting Events to Us

(Updated at 4:05 p.m.) Arlington County is a big place. As a result, we hear from a lot of people who are trying to promote events.

In fact, there are far more events than we could possibly cover with individual articles. That’s why we launched an event calendar and a weekly events post called the Arlington Agenda.

Some organizations email us with formal press releases about events. That’s fine, and for certain unique, newsworthy or large public events, we will use the press release to help us cover the event. For the vast majority of events, however, a press release is not necessary and we would instead recommend submitting the event directly to our calendar.

As long as your event is in Arlington and the information is submitted according to our guidelines, a submission to the event calendar will virtually guarantee that it gets seen by our readers. In fact, in an ARLnow reader survey earlier this year, nearly 50 percent of respondents told us that they had made a purchase decision based on seeing an event in our event calendar.

Four other things to note about the event calendar:

1. It’s for events in Arlington or just over the border. If your event is in D.C., it most likely will not be published.
2. Review your submission — and the guidelines — carefully. Because of the aforementioned volume of events we receive, we do not have the resources to update events after they’re submitted. If you made an error in your submission, it will be removed (although you may re-submit the correct information after notifying us of the error).
3. We will not type the information for you if you email it to us. This actually happens a lot, because organizations are used to sending their event information to print newspapers that publish event listings. You must submit the event using the online form.
4. We recommend submitting an image with your event information, but please keep the size of the image below 500kb. Large images, and images with apostrophes in the file name, often cause server errors. If you get an error, please rename and/or resize your image, or leave the image out of the submission altogether.