Celebrating its sixth anniversary this Spring, The New Stack has built a successful tech edit franchise without relying upon web advertising or subscription revenue. Founder and publisher Alex Williams relies instead on sponsored posts, podcasts and ebooks dedicated to deep-tech education and professional development — augmented by news and analysis from staff editors and contributors.
What do you do when you’re pitching a tech story you don’t understand, to journalists who understand it well? You’ve got your hands on a juicy story about Kubernetes container management, or blockchain, or quantum computing, or any of the other advanced technologies pushing us ever forward into the future.
Telling stories with data comes down to the questions you have and where to start looking. When interviewing someone on a stage, you need to know the right questions to ask and how to guide the conversation. When interviewing a spreadsheet, you still need to know the right questions to ask and how to guide the conversation.
Finding out that a client lied to you can be demoralizing, but it can also become a larger business problem if you don’t identify the lie until it’s too late.
QuinStreet has sold all 35 of its B2B publications — eWeek, Datamation, IT Business Edge among them — to Technology Advice, a Nashville-based B2B data company that helps IT pros determine which products to buy. Edit operations at the publications will not change in the short term, according to eWeek EIC Chris Preimesberger.
A veteran of IDG and TechTarget and now on her own as consultant to CIOs, Maryfran Johnson discusses how best to pitch editors who serve C-title executives, in the first SWMS video teleconference of 2020. Visit MFJ Media to learn more about what Maryfran is up to these days.
Will Covid-19, better known as the coronavirus, change how tech and business reporters spend their time? Yes, and the changes have begun. We’re querying tech and business editors and will update this article throughout coming days. Here’s what we’ve learned from the front lines so far.
[Please welcome back SWMS contributing editor Lindsay Ciulla, a senior VP with (SWMS subscriber) Weber Shandwick Worldwide. –Ed.] Well friends, in what feels like the blink of an eye we’re somehow halfway through the first quarter of 2020 — in a decade that (at least when I was growing up) promised flying cars and travel via teleportation.
We recently conducted a video meeting with a subscriber who sought SWMS POV on the following media relations questions. With the subscriber’s permission, here are the questions and our responses. Hope you find them useful.
[We asked PR vet Alex Shapiro to contrast the worlds of agency and in-house PR. He knows both. Enjoy the read. -Ed.] For agency PR pros, the grass may seem particularly greener right now on the in-house side and there’s no shortage of hot companies hiring. We’re all told the job market’s hot, and that can often feel true for the revolving doors of PR.
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FRIDGE NOTES
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.
