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.
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.
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.”
In partnership with MuckRock — and to celebrate our 20th anniversary — SWMS has donated $20K to help fund the Sam Whitmore Media Survey Fellowship. MuckRock serves journalists, researchers and citizens by requesting, analyzing and sharing government documents as obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey. No business can survive without the loyalty of its customers. We call them subscribers, and we thank every one of them. In this piece we revist the various looks of the SWMS web site over the years.
When Axios launched in 2016, its founders described its goal as “smart brevity,” or more colorfully, as “Twitter meets The Economist.” Take a look, for example, at Sara Fischer’s most recent Media Trends newsletter and you can see that Axios has succeeded. Observe the form, not necessarily the substance.
Where are all the company profiles? They abounded when the IPO window was wide open. Not anymore. Back when he wrote for Forbes, Dan Lyons told us that PR people always wanted him to write “book reports” — here’s who we are, and we’ve done this and that. That sounds like a company profile, doesn’t it?
You send us lots of rejected contributed content, asking what went wrong. Sometimes we can spot a path forward, but it’s heartbreaking to hear that “the client wants it written this way” or “this has already been approved.” That’s why this week we studied nine sets of contributed content guidelines from top edit targets and packaged what we think is their most valuable advice.
You need to be logged in to view this content. Please Log In. Not a Member? Join Us
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Dr. Diane Hamilton has posted 37 articles on Forbes’s CHRO Network page since Dec. 1. She has an active LinkedIn profile, which advertises a book she wrote. But her X feed and her personal web page both seem to be down. The Dr. happens to be founder and CEO of Tonerra, a company that specializes in content creation, among other things. Strange, then, that Tonerra has no web site of its own. If you happen to see Dr. Hamilton, ask her to call her service.
Today’s Press-Gazette has a fascinating interview with Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, who left the FT to launch The CEO Signal, a weekly newsletter built for CEOs of companies with annual revenues of at least $500M. You can apply to receive it here.
Less than ten individuals were impacted, says a Jan. 15 report in Business Insider. Monitor Fridge Notes for the names as they become known.
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.
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.
