The Sedona Red Rock News has been the voice of Sedona and the Verde Valley since 1963. We’re the largest and most well-read news outlet in the Verde Valley, both in print and online, with our sister newspapers, The Camp Verde Journal and the Cottonwood Journal Extra. Organizations, nonprofits, businesses and government bodies are eager to be in our newspapers to reach the most number of residents, who pick our newspapers throughout the week and read about the goings-on in the community and see ads from local merchants, nonprofits and individuals in the adjacent space.
If you read through our newspapers, you’ll see the big items are news stories written by reporters. We also have our regular columns written by members of the community that appear weekly, biweekly or monthly. The Opinion page is for voicing political or personal views on local topics. Our guidelines for those letters are on our website, redrocknews.com, but know we need your full name, street address and phone number and letters must be under 300 words. We do not publish anonymous letters, which means that, unlike social media, you know that the author is a real person, not a pseudonym or a bot.
The rest of our space is content provided by readers like you who send in press releases for possible publication. Getting into our newspapers is easy. Press releases are published as a free service for our community.
“News,” according to the journalistic definition, is “That which is of the greatest interest to the greatest number.” When your group hosts a free event; when the statewide head of your organization speaks locally; when your church holds it annual picnic; when your group sponsors a public forum; or when a sports championship involves athletes in our community, we want to know because our readers want to know. These are events that shape our lives here.
We charge nothing for this free space, however, that means not every press release will get in due to volume we receive, so if you’re resolute that the community must know about your event, contact our Advertising Department and buy an ad, which is guaranteed to be published regardless of how or when a press release is published.
We make an honest effort to publish all the press releases we get. Sometimes that means we edit or cut text to fit the information onto a page or reword parts to be more efficient, but that’s done to squeeze releases onto a page and fit the space available.
We offer the following suggestions to get news into the newspaper:
- Send press releases by email. We have to retype hardcopies and image PDFs.
- If a time element is involved, send the information well in advance of the event’s date. Our deadlines are listed on our website under “Submit a press release” at the bottom of the page. Items are published on first-come, first-served basis, dependent on space, so don’t wait for the last minute.
- In addition to news about events, we’re happy to publish announcements of graduations, scholarships, new hires, employee awards, promotions, retirements, births, engagements, weddings and anniversaries for members of our community. The recent photo of the first baby born in 2026 at Verde Valley Medical Center had nearly 100,000 views on our Facebook page so we know readers love seeing such news.
- If you send a photo, make sure it is at least 1 megabyte or larger. Low-resolution photos, like those taken from a website, are of too poor quality to publish. Make sure the photo is yours or that you have written permission from the photographer or owner of the copyright before submitting it to us. Don’t send stock art or AI-generated images, don’t steal images from the internet if you don’t own the copyright. Don’t send flyers, don’t add text to the image and don’t photoshop the image.
- Include a phone number so we can contact you to turn a press release into a story.
- Include all the necessary information. Does your press release include the date, time and place of the event you are announcing? Are the names correctly spelled in full? Are titles listed, e.g., chairwoman, vice president, executive director? Even if you feel you can’t write well, just submitting the information to us in a story form will help tremendously. Be brief and to the point; it saves time for readers but gets the details out.
- Finally, list your name and telephone number. The reporter or copy editor must know the source and whom to contact for clarification, if necessary, and readers need to know who to email or call if they have questions. Never assume we at the newspaper or readers already know what you know.
Some of the best local news stories are missed because we never got a news tip. If you are aware of something newsworthy happening, call us at (928) 282-7795 or email me at editor@larsonnewspapers.com.
