So you want your CEO profiled in Tier 1? Fortune this month served up a good reminder that the big publications have channels, and a “profile” may come across differently in each, with different PR outcomes.
Pitching The Atlantic has never been easy. PR pros always know what trade editors care about. Not so with a highly curated publication such as The Atlantic, still driven by the boundary-free judgment of human storytellers.
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Perhaps 2024 was a challenging year for you. It certainly was at SWMS. In any case, the promise of a new year awaits, and here
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SWMS tends not to cover the business initiatives of its subscribers, but the Marker Collective has embarked on something revealing. The parent org of Archetype,
SDxCentral is doing something brave: it’s overtly using AI to generate copy and dollars, and in a real sense is gambling its future. The 12-year-old B2B edit brand is past the experimenting-with-AI stage — it’s already in the refinement stage.
A veteran tech edit freelancer one told SWMS that freelancers are entrepreneurs like any other. Time is money. Profit beats all. Few PR pros pitch with this in mind — but they won’t be able to break through with John Edwards unless they do.
Semafor turned two this month. Do you care? Probably not. With the exception of OpenAI and other giants, Semafor doesn’t cover tech vendors or their products.
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FRIDGE NOTES
This is majorly tl;dr, but recent research from FT Strategies and Reuters empirically uncovers every trend there is, when it comes to the health of the media business. In short, “the media” is barely breakeven, here and around the world. AI search may prove devastating.
The WSJ this week launched CEO Brief, a newsletter designed to inform readers, and to attract new members to the WSJ Leadership Institute. This organization is already a Dow Jones profit center, and a great example of how Tier 1 can lessen dependence on advertising. Former Fortune CEO Alan Murray runs the institute and is the nominal editor of CEO Brief — and promises to read every bit of reader mail — though he has delegated the writing of the newsletter to subordinates in the early going.
Fast Company’s Lydia Dishman has joined (SWMS subscriber) Method Communications as VP of content strategy. Lydia joins an already strong content team, which includes former NY Times reporter Tim Race and B2B tech edit vet John Foley.
“I’m leaving to build something new,” Alex posted on X today. He spent 12 years at Forbes as a reporter and a builder of databases and lists. It’s time he gets to keep the money.
Axios reported on Jan. 24 that private equity firm Blackstone will sell IDG/Foundry, publishers of InfoWorld, Computerworld and Network World (and owners of IDC) to another private equity firm called Regent, which bought streaming video channel Cheddar in 2023. Remains to be seen how the ownership change will affect IDG’s venerable IT titles, but it’s unlikely their budgets will go up.
Unionized writers have secured new protections governing the use of generative AI in member newsrooms, reports the Hollywood Reporter. The union — Writers Guild of America, East — represents Fast Company, Wired and many other prominent titles. The union won agreement that publications “will not lay off current staff employees due to the use of generative AI,” and also that “advance notice [must be given] if the company plans to make the use of generative AI systems a requirement of [editors’] jobs.”
