On Dec. 2 we hosted a Zoom session with TechCrunch senior editor Alex Wilhelm and Madrona Venture Group strategic comms director Erika Shaffer. The mission: to spot the best ways to land startup coverage in 2021. Here’s the video playback. So many tips and nuggets! Huge thanks to Alex and Erika for their insights and generosity.
CES is virtual this year, just like the accompanying and independent product showcases — Pepcom, ShowStoppers, CES Unveiled and Techfluence. This shift to cyberspace creates fresh opportunity to lead this category. Last week we spoke with the least known of the four brands — Techfluence — which hopes to reinvent the show-within-a-show CES experience.
No single 2020 predictions list amounted to much, thanks to a pandemic and the murder of George Floyd. Next year begins a bit more clearly, with a conventional American president and a surging stock market. Oh, trouble lurks, of course. With the proviso that anything can go poof, let’s gaze into the crystal ball…
CES 2021 is six weeks away. We’ve been asking whether editors care. Most can’t yet conceive of a virtual CES and are waiting to see what the Consumer Tech Association comes up with. The show organizer has announced keynote speakers and Microsoft’s role as virtual platform provider and little more.
Media brands are hustling to build “community” and that trend will continue in 2021. Since executives can’t belong to them all, which one is best and by what measure? Based on attending and covering the 2nd annual summit late last month, we might suggest giving the CNBC Technology Executive Council a close look.
Rolling Stone magazine this week will launch the Rolling Stone Culture Council, an invitation-only community that will let members publish contributed posts on the RS web site. The new RS community is being built in partnership with The Community Company, a virtual professional services firm that manages councils for Forbes and Bizjournals.
With the election now only days away, publications have settled into their methods and strategies: how will they cover the election’s final days, and its tumultuous aftermath? We ask editors and they weigh in. We’ll be adding to this piece in the coming days.
After 19 years at Fortune, Adam Lashinsky left this month to become EIC of the most powerful business community few ever heard of. For that alone, perhaps it’s time to learn about World 50 and its newly merged partner organization, G100.
Ebony Magazine was founded in 1945, the year World War II ended. Essence Magazine was founded in 1968, the year Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Today, Medium publishes a pair of Black-focused titles for this generation.
Medium has a pair of new publications, probably just as difficult to pitch as other Medium pubs, yet still worth evaluating. Both are spinouts from OneZero. Future Human was built for “readers who want to understand more about the science carrying us into tomorrow.” Debugger is for “readers who are hungry for thoughtful stories about gadgets.”
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Registration is now open for the ‘Bloomberg Tech’ F2F event, being held Jun. 4-5 in San Francisco. With the current early-bird discount, a ticket runs $1,500. There is no better way to build relationships with Bloomberg’s notoriously elusive tech reporters.
Well, for now it’s Jim Jordan… but such news illustrates the kind of world we seem to be headed for. Adweek has the details, subscription required.
No “predictions” post will appear on this site. That said, quite a number of subscribers have asked for a Zoom/MS Teams presentation on what 2025 will bring. A conversation is precisely the right tool for the job. After the election — and with AI transforming publishing and life — “2025” is best discussed among peers, not predicted. So if you’d like to have a confidential group exchange on what stands to unfold, and why, and how comms pros can come out on top in spite of it all, drop a line and we shall schedule something.
According to Adweek, Omnicom CEO John Wren and IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky were in merger talks for eleven and a half months before the transaction was announced this week. Amazing that it didn’t leak.
Should PR pros stop visiting X, with all its lies and hate? It’s only going to get worse. Or are tidbits from targets too important to walk away from? Click here to watch tech edit vet David Strom and I disagree (at high speed) about this, as one compelling visual after another pops up on your screen. In 2025, SWMS will officially launch “SWMS Sound Thinking,” designed to be “argumentative insight in six minutes or less.” Each segment will explore a timely and controversial topic of interest to tech comms pros. This prototype runs 5:25. Hope you enjoy it — feedback vital and welcome! –Sam
New EIC Jamie Heller has asked her reporters to start going on camera — for the BI TikTok channel — to explain the big, deep-divey story they just published. Other publications do this — especially archival Fortune. BI is now on that too. Game on.
