How to report a photo on any Offbeat Empire site that shouldn’t be there

My editors work hard to ensure that we only use photos on the site that we have full permission and licensing to use. We’ve had solid attribution policies in place since 2011, and tend towards the obsessive when it comes to crediting photographs. Sometimes, however, despite our best efforts and intentions, things go wrong.

Reader complaints that taught me things

As y’all know, with a readership as large as the Offbeat Empire’s, we get a fair number of reader complaints.
Last week, we got a couple different reader complaints that were super valid, and I wanted to take a minute to share what I learned.

Of shoes and Facebook: Are you smarter than an algorithm?

Offbeat Bride’s Facebook page posts as many as 10 times a day (including these ridiculous SHOES AT 2 shoe posts I’ve started doing), but you only see all those posts if Facebook understands that you WANT to see all those posts. If you consistently ignore them? You see maybe only 1 post a day, or none. In other words: Facebook’s algorithms are smarter than we could ever be.

…And they’re getting smarter.

How to slowly kill a website you love

Last week on Offbeat Home & Life, we published a sponsored post about gender-neutral baby clothes, angled toward the gifts market. Within a couple hours, several readers commented on Facebook and the post itself that the products featured were out of their budgets — which I totally understand and respect. I’m less understanding toward readers feeling the need to post insulting comments when they can’t afford a product.