Here’s the debut of something we hope you like: a quarterly review of all the content posted here on the SWMS site. (You’ll need your login and password.) “SWMS in Review” is ideal for your smartphone, thanks to Adobe Spark technology. Please let us know what you think of SWMS in Review and how we can make it better.
Which publications still accept one-off contributions? Of the 114 titles in our contributed content Google Doc, roughly 100 still accept standalone articles. Unfortunately, the most attractive venues — Forbes, TechCrunch and WSJ to name three — want ongoing commitments. Inc. and Entrepreneur already have hundreds of contributors and don’t hunger for more.
Financial Times opinion and analysis editor Brooke Masters this month produced a short video — and companion article — explaining how to contribute content to the publication. Brooke offers five basic points that every executive author should consider before pitching — to the FT or for that matter anywhere else.
Invest 15 minutes in last week’s LA Times profile of Huawei and you’ll appreciate the power of candor. The Chinese telecom giant had every reason to expect a grilling from legendary journalist Norman Pearlstine and his team. Instead, Huawei received fair treatment in context useful for both parties.
Data is scarce on how Apple News is doing, especially after last month’s launch of Apple News+. Specifically, what are readers responding to? In table form, here are the articles published on the Apple News Twitter feed as of April 10, along with the associated number of comments, shares and likes.
Who runs Apple News? Our readers increasingly ask because they want to pitch it. Well, like LinkedIn, Product Hunt and other platforms, it doesn’t really work that way. A small number of human editors curate the top content in Apple News, drawing from Apple’s rich set of licensed editorial properties. They don’t need PR pitches.
Former Forbes, Quartz and Recode editor Dan Frommer has launched The New Consumer, an edit brand “designed for anyone who’s curious about what’s new, what’s interesting and what’s important in the intersecting worlds of technology and consumer.” Access to Dan’s web site and twice-weekly newsletter costs $200 a year.
Healthcare IT trades — like all trades — are in the relationships business. They typically make their money through F2F events, awards programs and premium services. Surprisingly few require registration or paid subscriptions, but all of them can be counted on to behave respectfully toward healthcare business. You won’t see the next Theranos being taken down in the trades.
RSA Conference (RSAC) has come and gone, and hopefully the email flow has finally stopped. As usual, the conference and its associated 300 or so emails shows what the best and worst PR practices are. This time I asked Sam if I could share with you my analysis of these inquiries, in the hope that we (we being the trade press) can work better with you.
SWMS subscriber Amanda Orr writes:
Thank you for bringing this topic to the light in Media Survey, Sam, as it’s been on my professional mind for quite some time. Anecdotally, about three quarters of my clients over the past two to three years have had “social good” corporate missions.
YOUR ACCOUNT
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.
