An electronic magazine or ezine is one published online rather than in print and tends to focus on quite specific subject areas with a targeted readership.  EzineArticles.com describes itself as a matching service that brings ezine publishers together with expert authors and writers.  Submitted original articles are posted on the site and made available to publishers of email newsletters for inclusion in their offerings.

EZineArticles has just issued a list of five quality improvement changes for submitting authors to take on board with immediate effect.  This follows in the wake of Google’s recent offensive against content farms although any perceived causal linkage may be fallacious. Here is a summary of the changes:

• Quality Checks. The review time that EZineArticles editors spend on the format, grammar, spelling, and consistency elements of each article will be doubled.
• WP Plugin and API. Articles submitted through these tools will not now be accepted.
• Dead Link/Link Diagnostic Center. The arrangement whereby EZineArticles would unlink a dead link contained in an article within 35 days of initial notification and follow up with 5 reminders that a fix should be applied will be terminated.  Instead if the link has not been fixed after 2 weeks, it will be summarily unlinked.  There will still be the facility for authors to edit articles with link updates in the future.
• Basic Plus Membership Level. The progress of new member authors is to be more strictly monitored with the previous allocation of 25 articles granted after failure to achieve Platinum Membership level following the first 10 submissions now being reduced to 10.  If the standard is not achieved after this second round of 10 submissions no further allocation will be made and no future articles will be accepted.
• New Minimum 400 Word Count.  While maintaining an emphasis on quality rather than quantity, there will be an immediate increase in the minimum requirement for each article of 400 words.  To recognize those authors who consistently achieve the highest levels of quality in their submissions, another level of membership will be created and details of this will follow.

As indicated, all these changes will have immediate effect.  More information will be released in the coming days and weeks.