Policies

Our Gear/Resort Testing Policy:

All news organizations need to have equipment and services to review for their readers.  And, bluntly, none of us can afford to go out and buy everything we test.  At EasternSlopes.com, we receive goods and services in various ways.  Some products we buy at retail; some, at discounted prices; and some are provided to us free of charge.  Typically, products are provided on long-term loan to allow us a chance to fully test them and determine reliability; however, some of them aren’t worth returning, from the manufacturer’s perspective.  Food (obviously!), clothing, and items of the sort often are “free”; they’re less than worthless after a season of use and abuse.  A bicycle or a backpack, on the other hand, has a real value, and is typically returned when we’re done with it for the manufacturer to resell.  However, from our perspective, it doesn’t matter how we receive an item; it matters how it performs.  We put our lives on the line, literally, at times; if something is free but poor quality, why would we want it???  While we don’t put the source into each article, any reader can email us if they have a question as to how a particular product arrived on our doorstep, and we’ll be happy to provide that information.  Our reputation is all we have to “sell” to you, the reader; we will never compromise that to make a manufacturer happy.

Comments:

Comments are welcome and encouraged; we’re looking for your experiences, insights and ideas! All comments will be reviewed by the Executive Editor before being approved; those that are inappropriate, self-promotional, or spam will be deleted.

Advertising Policy:

In order to maintain our editorial independence and avoid even the appearance of possible conflicts of interest, we made the decision to not accept focused advertising from individual advertisers (e.g., an ad for a ski area with the article for the ski area). However, we DO have to make some money so that we can keep bringing you more and better content! So, after much thought, we decided to accept income from two sources.

The first source is Google Adsense; they choose the ads to put in boxes we created alongside the stories (never IN them). We have no control over them, so no conflict of interest. If you click on any of the ads you see in our site, you are directly helping us to continue bringing you the quality content that brought you to EasternSlopes.com in the first place.

Second, the Amazon Affiliates program. When you click on a product link, it will take you to Amazon; if you purchase that or some other product within 24 hours, we get a small percentage of the sale price. We chose that program for several reasons; first, we only link to products we have actually used and recommend from personal experience. Second, you generally have the choice of many vendors for a given item on Amazon, so there’s no question about us endorsing any particular one. Third, you also often have the choice of buying the product new or used. And finally, they often have product details that weren’t appropriate for our story but may be useful to you.

Please help us by doing your Amazon shopping by clicking through from a link from one of our stories (or just follow this link to one of our all-time favorite Silva compasses, and start your shopping from there); it won’t cost you anything, and it’ll help ensure we can keep giving you the same quality editorial content that you enjoy now!