Advertise
The Duvalist is read by people deciding where to spend an evening in Jacksonville. If your business wants to reach them, here is exactly how that works — and what it will never involve.
The one rule
We do not take money from anywhere we review. Not for a placement, not for a mention, not for a faster look at a new opening. If we have written about your restaurant or your bar, you cannot buy space here; if you buy space here, we will not review you afterwards.
This is not a promise we are asking you to take on trust. It is built into the software that runs the site: a sponsor can be linked to a venue in our directory, and once it is, the publishing tools refuse to put that venue into editorial coverage — and refuse the sponsorship in the first place if we have already written about it. The rule cannot be forgotten on a busy Friday, because nobody has to remember it.
Which means our sponsors are the businesses around the meal rather than the meal itself: the shops, services, makers, venues, festivals and professionals whose customers are the same people reading about where to eat.
What we sell
The front page. One marked slot between the lead story and the day’s run of pieces. One sponsor at a time, sold by the month.
The article footer. One marked slot at the end of every article, where a reader lands having just finished something. Sold by the month, usually alongside the front page.
The newsletter. One sponsor per issue, in a marked block above the first story. Sold by the send.
Partner content. A full piece, written to your brief, published under your name. It carries a paid-partnership notice above the headline, it never carries a rating, it is kept out of the review sections and out of the RSS feed, and it is labelled “Sponsored” everywhere it appears in a list. Those are not negotiable, and they are the reason it is worth anything: readers trust the label because we have never given them a reason not to.
How it is labelled
Every paid placement is marked Sponsored in plain English, above the thing it applies to rather than beneath it, in the same type we use for our own section rubrics — not in grey six-point at the bottom of the page. Outbound links from paid placements carry the markup search engines require of paid links. This follows the Federal Trade Commission’s standard: a material connection a reader would not otherwise expect, disclosed clearly and close to the content it affects.
What we will not do
Take a fee to review somewhere. Take a fee to remove or soften a review. Accept a meal, a reservation, a bottle or a plus-one in exchange for coverage. Let a sponsor read a piece before publication unless it is their own partner content. Or run anything at all that a reader could mistake for something we wrote because we wanted to.
Getting in touch
Tell us what you sell and who you are trying to reach, and we will tell you honestly whether this audience is worth your money.
If you would rather see how we write before you decide, start with the front page or our review policy.