Highwire SAE Ben Wolfson writes: “I recently attended a media panel with three of the top enterprise tech reporters in the Bay Area. Business Insider’s Becky Peterson, Bloomberg’s Nico Grant and CNBC’s Ari Levy shared what moves the needle for them.”
TechCrunch still covers funding rounds the old-fashioned way — with lots of full-fledged articles each day, each with their own style. No digests like Fortune’s and CNBC’s. Nothing half-hearted. Coverage ranges from seed round through Series E and F.
CNBC doesn’t profile many startups using 2,000 words and two team photos. But that’s what it did on Oct. 4 when Kate Rooney, a markets reporter, went deep on a startup called Plaid. It didn’t hurt Plaid’s cause that CNBC named it to the CNBC Disruptor 50 list. Still, it was singled out. Why?
Placing funding news used to be easier. Get the targets under embargo, schedule the interviews, hope no one misbehaves and watch the coverage roll in. You still have to do all that. But now there’s the issue of, “The round is only $50 million?” And/or, “I want an exclusive on this.” And/or, “I want a two-hour jump or I’m not covering it.”
Is the Forbes Technology Council worth the money? We hear that a lot from PR pros looking to place contributed content. In our view the answer is ‘yes’, though there’s actually something bigger going on, which we’ll get to in a sec.
There’s CES — monstrous, unconquerable CES — and then there are the events within the event. Pepcom and Showstoppers and CES Unveiled. The floor tours during the show. They’re all designed to bring CES into focus for exhibitors and journalists.
Bloomberg last month fielded a survey designed to help it decide what to do with Businessweek, a brand it bought from McGraw-Hill in 2009. Coincidentally, the questions asked in the survey can reveal much about business journalism in general, and about how PR pros can build more effective Tier 1 pitches.
It’s time to address the big bad B word: Budget. Oh, and that O word, too: Overservice. Budgets are one of the most important aspects of any client/agency relationship: they help set the basis for the scope, and without the dollars, an agency can’t operate.
Fast Company editors voted to unionize last week. So did the New Yorker’s. Should PR care? Not directly. Unionization does affect the editorial environment in which you pitch. Over time, if the economics of publishing don’t improve, the best journalists may well seek to work where editors are “protected.”
MIT Technology Review laid off two of its four associate editors yesterday, Emily Mullin and Jackie Snow. Tech PR pros Tweeted encouragement to both. Some readers and editors offered freelance work or shared links to open jobs. The community takes care of its own.
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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.
