This is the third installment of the SWMS-Semrush Top 15 Index. This month we list and analyze the top 15 most popular articles in Axios, TechCrunch, The Verge, VentureBeat and Wired during January 2023.
We don’t have the 2023 list, but we dug into who covered it last year and came up with 16 targets, all of whom still work at those same outlets. It’s an interesting mix of Tier 1 and verticals, locals and national.
We came up with 25 names of reporters and editors, from the deep trades to the top of Tier 1. Pretty much any CNBC show covers M&A when it breaks, so we omitted that property. We’re pretty sure everyone else is in there, with contact info.
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Where are the pitchable consumer tech podcasts? So many of them are produced by people who disregard pitches. So we used our best judgment building this cheat sheet — which ones might you have a ghost of a chance of influencing?
we have completely revamped the now-deleted creator cheat sheet published in Feb. 2022. There’s a lot of SEO going on these days with the term “creators” — just about every newly released consumer tech product is “ideal” for them. So we omitted faux targets like those.
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This cheat sheet is a revamp from our May 2022 research. We found nine additional CMO-related podcasts since then, and none that had lapsed. How unusual. Let us know if we have missed your favorite.
If you’ve ever tried it, you probably know that the HR segment is frustrating to research. Many of the titles hail from overseas. Contact names are hard to obtain (though we did). Paid and earned are blended and barely distinguished.
This is the second installment of the SWMS-Semrush Top 15 Index, designed to reveal the 15 most widely-read articles in a given publication over a given month.
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FRIDGE NOTES
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.
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.
