[We asked Matthew Lynley, a former journalist with VentureBeat, TechCrunch and the WSJ, what makes for a great comms professional. Here’s what he had to say. — Ed.] Companies with massive budgets can hire a PR team the size of a small army. But hiring more people doesn’t make the company better at PR.
[We asked veteran tech reporter Mitch Wagner to deconstruct two of his recent news stories, explaining why he wrote them the way he did. Mitch has done so — you will enjoy his contribution. –Ed.]
A tech journalist today needs to get to the point right away. As a tech journalist, I have an ideal reader in mind every time I write an article. As I write, I’m always asking myself how I can best serve that reader with the news they need to know, fast.
[Enjoy this true story from SWMS contributor and PR pro Anton Molodetskiy -Ed.] You may think that journalists would rather talk to a telemarketer than answer your phone call, but the phone is still a key tool for both reporters and PR. I learned this hard way a few years ago while managing outreach for a B2B startup coming out of stealth.
Placing contributed content ideally comes without strings — “pitch it, place it, forget it” — but that’s not how it works at Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. Third Door is in the community business. Community editor Wendy Almeida wants to help but you must help her too.
Newsletters sure are tough to pitch. Many lack bespoke content. Many are assembled by managing editors or junior folks with scant domain expertise. Others are columnists impervious to suggestion. Every now and again you’ll find someone pitchable, such as…
If you’re looking for pitchable deep expertise in the IT infrastructure space, you can still find it in Packet Pushers, a team of podcasting publishers who celebrate their tenth anniversary this May. Freshly posted on their site is the 500th episode of the Heavy Networking podcast.
As someone who has been writing an almost-weekly Web Informant email newsletter since 1995, Sam asked me to comment on the current state of the art. It seems as if newsletters are having a new lease on life. Up until last summer, I wrote one of the Inside.com newsletters on IT security…
TechCrunch has announced yet another event series — TechCrunch Early Stage — designed to help seed and Series A startups grow quickly. The first event will take place Apr. 28 at the Hilton Union Square San Francisco. Events in Paris and New York will be announced later this year.
Editorially, what will Protocol aspire to? Editor-at-large David Pierce laid down some two-ton hints last month on his Twitter feed. Studying this list will help shape client expectations and help you build an approach to 2020’s “place to be.”
Protocol continues to recruit top edit talent as its Q1 launch nears. Focused on “people, power and politics” within the tech world, the San Francisco-based edit startup is poised to challenge traditional Tier 1 and put big pressure on Wired, TechCrunch, Quartz and The Information to retain their best reporters.
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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.
