Union for Mashable, PC Mag and Lifehacker Wins Protection Against Gen AI
July 18, 2024
5:25 am
The full union membership needs to ratify it on July 24, but it looks like no editors can be laid off or suffer a salary
>> Notes
Gen AI: The Big Fizzle?
July 10, 2024
4:23 pm
Goldman Sachs took 32 pages to say pretty much that. The media business may turn out to be an outlier, an industry perfectly suited to
Want A Free 1-Month Sub to Big Technology from Alex Kantrowitz?
July 8, 2024
10:24 am
Three free one-month subs are available from SWMS, no catches or gimmicks. Get in touch for details. BT is among the best tech newsletters out
Bloomberg Businessweek Goes Monthly
May 23, 2024
4:26 pm
Now a misnomer, the Businessweek name will stick around for a while longer. Bloomberg is investing big in paper stock and photography. It’ll be a
Semafor Goes AI Crazy
May 23, 2024
3:33 pm
Fourteen of 19 tech stories in the Semafor technology section are about AI. Two of the five outliers were about TikTok’s potential sale. Semafor sells
OpenAI To Pay News Corp. $250M Over Five Years
May 23, 2024
8:57 am
This deal leaves the NYT in the courtroom pretty much all by itself. The coming climbdown will fascinate comms pros, who will go to school
Microsoft Copilot Inserts Ad In Results
May 21, 2024
1:45 pm
That didn’t take long. This is how AI is going to be monetized — ad results blended with the other results. “Church-state” has no precedent
Refinery29 Buys An Event Company
May 8, 2024
8:41 am
Another scoop from Sara Fischer at Axios: Refinery29 is “taking over” B2C event brand Beautycon, among the most successful F2F events in the beauty space.
Nic Carlson Resigns as Business Insider EIC
May 8, 2024
8:16 am
It’s dangerous to publish content that antagonizes the powerful. Nic will stay on as editor-at-large. That BI announced no successor implies that this situation has
News Corp. Is Negotiating With AI Companies
May 8, 2024
7:58 am
Quoted by the UK-based Press Gazette, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said, “Courtship is preferable to courtrooms – we are wooing not suing. But let’s
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Congress to Investigate the Omnicom-IPG Deal
December 20, 2024
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.
SWMS Predictions for 2025
December 10, 2024
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.
Talk About Confidentiality…
December 10, 2024
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.
Introducing ‘SWMS Sound Thinking’
November 22, 2024
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
Business Insider Reporters Starting to Go on Camera
November 19, 2024
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.
The ‘AI Fantasy Draft’ From Eric Newcomer
November 13, 2024
At this time last year, Eric Newcomer and his two podcast co-hosts — Max Child and James Wilsterman — each formed an “AI startup fantasy team” and picked five AI startups to seed their rosters. We’re now in year 2 and it’s time to draft again. The podcasters wonder… which startups do they dump? Which do they add? The player whose startups accumulate the most total value by Nov. 1, 2028 is the winner, so there’s plenty of time to make adjustments. Here’s a link to the AI fantasy team podcast — you may need a password. Not sure.