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Fox News is a media publication with a very, shall we say, rocky foundation. Most people today recognize their conservative bias in reporting, and some decry them as propagandists and purveyors of fake news.
Whatever your perspective, there’s one thing you can’t deny, and that’s their presence in the world. Fox News, the website, has hundreds of millions of visitors every month. It’s a massive audience, and if it’s an audience you can capitalize on, it’s very much a site that would be worth posting on.
The Benefits of Posting to Fox News
There are a few benefits to posting on the Fox News site, the biggest of which is the sheer size of their viewer network. Sure, a lot of their demographic is older and conservative in viewpoint, but that’s not a bad thing, it’s just a shifted audience from what most startups are targeting.
Another benefit of Fox News is the credulous nature of their audience. People who loyally watch Fox News programming or read their website are ready and willing to believe anything posted to the site. Liberal groups certainly have their own areas of credulity as well, but conservatives have been studied time and again to believe outright lies when they’re more suitable to their viewpoint.
This means two things. First, you’re more likely to be able to get a slightly skewed version of the truth past their editors. Second, you can be quite exploitative without raising any eyebrows. If you’ve ever watched a Fox News TV channel, pay attention to the commercials. A lot of them are downright predatory money scams or shady products targeting older people who might not know any better.
I’m not making a value judgment here. If you operate in a space where your target audience needs a certain level of credulity to accept what you’re selling, Fox News could be a good place to start. If you have a strong enough sense of morality that you don’t want to exploit that credulity, you can still use Fox as a venue, you just might not fit in so easily.
Fox News also seems to be somewhat free and open with links in their content. They include links to sources quite frequently, and those links don’t seem to be nofollowed, though it’s possible they have some infrastructure in place that I’m not seeing on an extremely cursory inspection. My guess is they simply don’t care about the minutiae of SEO for a site with hundreds of millions of visitors.
The Drawbacks of Posting on Fox News
There are a few drawbacks to posting on Fox News. First and foremost, Fox has a fairly bad reputation amongst a large segment of the population, most notably younger people. If you’re creating content for Fox, chances are pretty good you’re going to carry some of that reputation with you elsewhere. Fox isn’t exactly an authoritative publication known for its factual accuracy, after all.
Another major drawback that I already mentioned is the audience demographics. Fox’s audience demographics skew almost entirely white and are mostly part of older generations. Young millennials and minorities tend to avoid the network, which stands to reason given how much of their rhetoric includes veiled or not-so-veiled hate towards them. Then again, you never can tell with some people.
This might or might not be a drawback depending on what you’re advertising and what niche your business covers. If your target audience tends to be white folks with low to middling incomes and ages ranging from 40 to 70, Fox might be an excellent target. On the other hand, if you’re aiming to reach younger people, minorities, or LGBT people, Fox is very much not a good platform.
Oh, and there’s one more major drawback:
How to Post on Fox News
There’s no publicly posted way to submit a guest post to Fox News, as far as I can tell. In fact, the phrase “guest post” has only been used on foxnews.com twice in the last year. One of them was a post referencing a guest post on another site, and one was the phrase “guest-post” in a link URL for Thanksgiving recipes.
As near as I can tell, Fox may have allowed guest posts several years ago, back in 2014 or 2015. Around 2016 – or rather, the lead-up to the 2016 elections – they dialed back on their contributions. This may have coincided with their then-CEO Roger Ailes being fired. A change in management leads to a change in operations, and scrapping a contributor system that didn’t provide them any value would be one way a site could consolidate.
These days, there’s no contributor system in place. You can’t email an editor and ask to submit a guest post, there’s no “write for us” page or form to submit, nothing. You’re out of luck trying to submit through traditional means.
There are, however, a few possible avenues you might consider, if you’re extremely dedicated to the idea of posting on Fox News.
Option 1: Submit a Tip
Your first option for publishing content on Fox News is to submit a tip for their editorial section.
Now, submitting a tip isn’t a great alternative to a guest post. For one thing, you’re probably not likely to be the one writing the content. Submitting a tip to Fox is mostly going to get your topic in front of an editor, but there’s no guarantee they feel it’s worth writing about.
If they do decide your topic is worth covering, the chances are pretty good they will assign the topic to one of their existing writers. Now, it’s entirely possible that this writer will seek you out to get your thoughts on the topic, not knowing you submitted the tip. However, it’s still someone else creating the content.
The “official” process is listed in the Fox News help center. You can send them a ticket through their help center ticketing system, which is no doubt bogged down by constant submissions about Obama being a Muslim terrorist and Hillary kidnapping children or whatever the conspiracy segment of their audience is latched onto today. You can also attempt to contact their accounts on Twitter and Facebook, both of which (I assume) are largely ignored. I can’t imagine being the person whose job it is to monitor the Twitter DMs for an organization like Fox News. That has to be absolutely soul crushing.
If you want an idea of how effective this method is, a more general “how do I contact Fox News” help center article with the exact same advice has had 415 out of 2,569 people find it helpful. When even dedicated Fox viewers don’t find their information helpful, you know it’s not worthwhile.
Option 2: Contact a Specific Show
Fox News has a wide variety of shows hosted by a wide variety of plain white-bread talking heads. You can see the full show index here.
We’re straying pretty far outside of guest posting territory, since this is about their TV shows and not their website, but it’s still a potential avenue if you want to get your content in front of the Fox-watching audience.
Basically, pick a show that’s most likely to cover or be interested in covering the topic you want to write about, and send the talking head for that show a message. You can reach out to them on Twitter, or you can stalk their email address with a little guesswork or some careful Googling. A lot of these folks keep their contact information public so they can cherry-pick messages for their shows.
Some shows might be more receptive to your kind of topic than others. In general, though, I don’t see most basic business content being picked up. This is an extreme long shot and is only likely to work if you have a unique (and conservative) perspective on some immediate political event.
You can also follow this same process and look for the editors that work directly for Fox News. Look for the names most commonly associated with posting content on the Fox site and see if you can track down their contact information to submit a pitch idea. Some of them might be open to under-the-table contributions, you never know.
Option 3: Write for a Syndicated Blog
A lot of the content published on Fox News is actually syndicated from other sources. For example:
- This post about a new cruise line is syndicated content from Travel Pulse
- This post about disaster relief funds for Puerto Rico is syndicated from the Associated Press
- This post about beer for the holidays is syndicated from The Daily Meal
- This post about aliens on Mars is syndicated from The Sun
These companies have deals with Fox News to have their content published on the Fox site, in exchange for who knows what benefits. I’m obviously not privy to the business dealings made by Fox behind closed doors.
The process for using this would be simple, if you were to attempt it. Decide on the topic you want to cover in your potential guest post, then search the foxnews.com site for it. I recommend a Google site search, as Fox doesn’t have a very good site search of their own.
Open up the most recent, oh, dozen or so posts about your topic on Fox News. Look under the title for the byline. You’ll see “By <name> | <Category>”. Except sometimes there won’t be a name, and sometimes the category will instead be the name of a site that originally published that content, with a link to the site.
Look for the cases where the site is a third party site, not just Fox News or a category list. Once you find a site – like Travel Pulse, The Daily Meal, or The Sun as I listed in the bullet list above – go to their site.
Your goal here is to look for a chance to write for the site that is syndicated on Fox News. For example, Travel Pulse has a “write for us” link all the way down at the bottom. This link gives you an email address to send general inquiries, a list of the editors that might be receptive to hearing about your pitch, and other contact information.
From there, follow a typical guest post submission process to pitch your topic to them. With luck, you’ll be accepted to write for that site, and with a lot of luck, you’ll see your content syndicated over to Fox News. There’s obviously no guarantee that this will work, but it might be your best shot.
Option 4: Contact an Affiliate Station
Another option for getting your content published on a Fox News site is to aim for one of their affiliate stations. There are a lot of different TV stations that are Fox affiliates throughout the country. For the most part, it means they show Fox programming most of the day with a few flex slots for their own local news and programming.
Obviously we don’t care much about their TV programming when we’re talking about guest posts. Fortunately, almost all of these affiliates have their own local news websites with Fox News branding on them. You can look up a list of Fox affiliates on Wikipedia here.
In this case, the process would simply be to look for affiliates that have a reasonable amount of traffic and see if you can post on those sites instead of the core Fox News site.
