Press EntryO-1 & EB-1 media evidence

Published examples

811 articles, and what each one is missing.

Every link here is a real published article, fetched from the live page rather than copied from a rate card. Read one before you buy one. The chips on each row are the three things that decide whether a piece can work as evidence, and most rows are missing at least one.

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Why we show you the byline and not just the logo

The O-1 and EB-1 published-material criterion does not only ask which publication ran the piece. It asks what the piece contains:

“Published material about the person in professional or major trade publications or other major media relating to the person’s work in the field for which classification is sought. Such evidence must include the title, date, and author of the material, and any necessary translation.”
8 CFR 204.5(h)(3)(iii) and 8 CFR 214.2(o)(3)(iii)(B)(3), as set out in the USCIS Policy Manual, Volume 6, Part F, Chapter 2 (current as at 18 December 2025).

The title and the date come free. The author does not. A great many paid placements publish with no byline at all, and an exhibit with no author is missing one of the three things the criterion names, on its face — whatever the masthead at the top of the page. That is why it is a chip on every row here and a warning in the builder, rather than a footnote.

811
live articles we hold
260 (32%)
carry a person's name as the author
164 (20%)
credit a paid-content label instead
387 (48%)
carry no author at all

So 68% of this portfolio cannot satisfy the author element, before anyone argues about readership. A fifth of it credits the piece to something like “Marketplace Contributor Content”, “Content Partner” or the website’s own name, which is worse in a petition than a missing byline: it tells the officer who paid.

And when there is a name, it is usually the same handful of names

We counted the bylines across all 811 articles. The author a paid placement gets you is very often a house writer who covers the whole network — not a journalist at that newspaper. 124 of the 260 bylined articles here are credited to one of 14 names that each appear across five or more unrelated publications.

Jon Stojan
21 different publications
Matthew Kayser
13 different publications
William Jones
11 different publications
Connie Etemadi
11 different publications
Nia Bowers
10 different publications
Tom White
8 different publications

Why this is the thing to worry about. The criterion makes you supply the author, so the author becomes part of the exhibit. An officer who types that name into Google finds somebody who has written about hundreds of unconnected businesses across dozens of newspapers in the same month. That does not just weaken the one exhibit — it is the kind of detail that makes a reader doubt the exhibits that were fine.

What to do about it, practically. Ask us who your writer will be, and ask in writing, before you pay. On some outlets we can place you under a journalist who writes for that title and little else; on others we cannot, and we would rather tell you that than let you find out from the published page.

What this leaves, and it is a small number

Apply all three tests at once — a real person’s byline, not a house byline, and no paid label on the page — and 103 of 811 articles (13%) survive. That is the honest size of the opportunity, and it is the default filter on the list below. 32 of these articles sit on publications we actually sell for a visa file; the rest are the wider supplier network, shown because hiding it would be the dishonest version.

None of this makes a paid placement into Criterion 3 evidence. It cannot be, at any price: the USCIS Policy Manual says marketing material is not published material about the person, and names “seemingly objective content about the person in major print publications that the person or the person’s employer paid for”. These tests tell you which placements are worth buying for your search record and your background picture — and which are not worth buying at all.

What the labels mean

Labelled contributor content

The publisher puts “contributor content” in the URL and on the page. An officer reading the exhibit has been told by the publication that its newsroom did not write it.

Labelled branded or partner content

Labelled branded or partner content. This is the case USCIS names directly: marketing material is not published material about the person.

Press-release wire item

A press release on a syndication feed. One text on fifty sites is one source, and it is the applicant's own words.

No paid label in the URL

Nothing in the URL marks it as paid. That does not make it editorial — check the page itself for a label and a byline.

Browse every example

Defaulted to the strongest filter — a real person’s byline, not one of the house names, and no paid label on the page. Widen it to see how much of the market fails one of those, and bear in mind the chips describe other people’s articles: they show what an outlet runs and how it credits it, not what yours would say.

103 of 811 live articles

Three honest limits on this page

Now go and look at the list with prices

A free account opens every publication with its price, its examples and the reason it counts — or the reason it does not.

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