This privacy policy governs the collection, storage, use of personal information collected by us, Roxhill Media Limited. It provides details about the personal information that we collect from you, how we use your personal information, your rights regarding the personal information that we hold about you. Please read this privacy policy carefully – by using our services, you confirm that you have read, understood, agree to this privacy policy in its entirety.

The contact details of the Data Protection Officer who is responsible for GDPR:

Nick Acworth, Data Protection Officer, Roxhill Media. nick.acworth@roxhillmedia.com

Who is Roxhill Media?

Roxhill Media Limited (whose registered address is Vaughan Chambers, Vaughan Road, Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England, AL5 4EE and registered company number 08756401) provides a journalist database subscribed to by professionals working in the Public Relations (‘PRs’) industry. Our database contains the contact details of journalists. Alex Northcott – founder of Gorkana – set up Roxhill Media in 2015.

Roxhill Media is a ‘data controller’ in respect of the personal information that it collects and stores from journalists.

What personal information do we collect about you?

We only collect basic personal data about journalists including name, email, phone number as well as career history.
We collect this personal information by a number of means including:

• Identifying bylines in papers, online sites and magazines
• By communicating with journalists when we hear of a move within the industry
• By following journalists updating their status on various platforms including LinkedIn, Twitter and other sites.
• Researching information about you via public databases and social media platforms.

We collect the personal information about our PR community when they receive access to the Roxhill Media platform. We also collect personal information about you when you contact or interact with us, this includes name, email, phone number and areas of interest. This can be via our website, the Roxhill Media platform, email communication or otherwise.

What is the purpose of collecting the personal data as well as the legal basis for the processing?

The Roxhill Media platform serves the interests of professionals working in Public Relations as it allows them to communicate with journalists.
We collect, store and handle the personal information of both journalists and PR professionals for our legitimate interest in compiling the Roxhill Media platform and to allow our PR clients to access it.

It also serves the interests of journalists who write about the companies that the professionals working in Public Relations represent. Journalists also will often need to communicate with PRs when researching articles. Likewise, PRs keep journalists informed of corporate news via telephone, emails and press releases / marketing updates. The relationship between PRs and journalists is established and respected.

The Roxhill Media platform provides PR professionals access to journalists’ contact details to allow them to carry out their working relationship with the journalists.
We only collect personal data from journalists or PR professionals in order to provide and oversee this service to the PR community. We believe in and carry out a policy of data minimisation. Roxhill Media holds no sensitive data on journalists (eg religious views, health history or criminal records).

We (or third party data processors acting on our behalf) collect, store and use your personal information for the following purposes:

• to make the platform available to the PR community and to provide them with content which is tailored to their individual tastes;
• to provide the PR community with services that they request;
• where either journalists or the PR community have given us their consent, to contact them (including by SMS and e-mail) with products and services which we think may interest them – for example our daily email newsletter titled ‘Tomorrow’s Business’.

We may also handle personal information to keep our website and the Roxhill Media platform secure and to ensure that our processes and procedures are as secure as possible.

We also collect, store and use the contact details of our clients within the PR community because this is needed for us to provide our clients with access to the Roxhill Media platform, pursuant to the platform’s contract and terms of use as signed by the PR client.

Who are our clients?

Roxhill Media serves the press teams within a large section of the PR and communications community. These include:

• FTSE 100 and listed companies where there is an in-house PR team
• Private companies where there is an in-house PR team
• The PRs that represent the brands and products of companies
• Agency PRs that conduct the PR strategies on behalf of companies and brands

What do we do with your data?

All the personal data that we handle is processed by our staff in the UK. However for the purposes of IT hosting and maintenance this information is located on servers within the European Union. We do not carry out any automated decision making which is likely to have a legal or similar effect on you. All our staff are aware, of our data protection policies.

Journalists’ personal information can only be accessed via a secure and password protected site. Their personal details are restricted to only those in the PR community who have signed up to use the Roxhill Media Platform and those within Roxhill Media. All the data held within Roxhill Media is stored securely on servers held in Ireland.

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to safeguard the personal information that you provide to us but no transit on over the internet can ever be guaranteed so we cannot guarantee the security of any information that you transfer over the internet to us.

What do the PR community do with journalists’ data?

The PR community keep journalists informed of corporate news via telephone, emails and press releases / marketing updates. The relationship between PRs and journalists is established and respected. PRs who subscribe to the Roxhill Media password controlled site are accountable for identifying the ‘right’ journalists to engage with and are data controllers in respect of any personal information that they access and use from the Roxhill Media platform. They will handle your personal information in line with the terms of their privacy policy.

PRs subscribe via a password protected site to identify the right journalist in order to:

• Call or return a call from a journalist following an enquiry
• Introduce their spokespeople to the journalist
• To send products to the journalists
• To send press releases / marketing updates
• To correct inaccurate stories written by journalists.

Roxhill Media also spends considerable time updating PRs on the moves of journalists to and from publications / outlets to make sure the data it holds is accurate.

Roxhill Media only wants to connect PR professionals to journalists who have a genuine interest in a topic. We try to achieve this aim by focusing on the following:

• We have more detailed journalist sectors
• We are more discriminate how we sector journalists
• You can build press lists by who is writing on a company or a topic
• You can see who is engaging on social media on specific topics

Roxhill Media also tries to foster good practise in our client’s behaviour by encouraging them to focus on those with a provable interest rather than hit and hope press release to thousands.

If you think PRs (who are clients of Roxhill Media) are not using the data we hold on journalists appropriately, then we can remove your personal data from their press lists assuming these are stored on our database.

How we share your personal information and who we share it with

In addition to sharing your personal information with our PR professional clients, we disclose information under the following circumstances:

• Third-party service providers: When we share information with third-party service companies to facilitate or to provide certain services on our behalf. This will include:
  • IT infrastructure companies that facilitate our provision of the Roxhill Media platform and the services to you; and
  • IT support service providers.
  • These companies are authorised to use your personal information only as necessary to provide these services to us.
• Compliance with laws and legal proceedings: When we respond to court orders, or legal process, or to establish or exercise our legal rights or defend against legal claims. When we believe in our sole discretion it is necessary to share information in order to investigate, prevent or take actions against illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of our terms of use, or as otherwise required by law.
• Merger or acquisition: When we need to transfer information about you if we are acquired by or merged with another company. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, you will be notified afterwards via e-mail and/or a prominent notice on our Site of any change in ownership or uses of your personal information, as well as any choices you may have regarding your personal information. 

How long do we keep your data?

Roxhill Media constantly checks to see if the journalists on the Roxhill Media platform database are still working at the outlets assigned to as well as still having a career in journalism. If a journalist leaves the world of journalism, we remove that journalist from our database and remove all personal data relating to that journalist from any PR lists that our PR clients keep on our database. We work on 4 month cycles to verify the data and make sure it is still relevant, if the journalist is still working in journalism, then we will retain the relevant personal information. For our PR clients we hold their data so long as they are in an agreed contract and subscription with Roxhill Media. If they decide to unsubscribe, we remove that PR from our database and remove all personal data relating to that PR.

What are your rights in relation to the personal information that we hold?

You have the following rights:

• to ask us to provide you with copies of personal information that we hold about you at any time, subject to a fee specified by law;
• to ask us to update or correct any out of date or incorrect personal information that we hold about you (in accordance with applicable data protection legislation);
• (where we are handling your personal information in order to perform a contract between us – therefore PR clients) to request that we send you (or another data controller) your personal information in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format (in accordance with applicable data protection laws); and
• the right to opt-out of any marketing communications that we (or any third party to whom we have disclosed your personal information with your consent) may send you.

If you want to exercise any of these rights, please write to us (either by post or e-mail) at the address specified below.

If you object to our processing of your personal information for certain purposes or you want us to stop using or to delete your personal information, you can contact us and tell us why. In certain circumstances we may not be able to stop using your personal information but, if that is the case, we’ll let you know and tell you why.

If you wish to raise a complaint on how we have handled your personal data, you can contact us to have the matter investigated. Please contact us at help@roxhillmedia.com.

If you are not satisfied with our response or believe we are not processing your personal information accordance with the law you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office https://ico.org.uk/ or seek a remedy through local courts if you believe your rights have been breached.

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Technologies such as cookies, beacons, tags and scripts are used by us and our partners, affiliates, or analytics or service providers. These technologies are used in analysing trends, administering our website, tracking users’ movements around the website and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by these companies on an individual as well as aggregated basis.

We use cookies, for example, to remember users’ settings (e.g. language preference) and for authentication. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. If you reject cookies, you may still use our website, but your ability to use some features or areas of our website may be limited.

Please read more about how we use cookies and what information is collected using cookies in our Cookie Policy.

This privacy policy was last reviewed on 12 February 2024. Please check back regularly to be kept informed of updates.