Tue, 2016-08-09 11:28
Sam Whitmore
SWMS Spotlight: Fast Company
Since its launch in 1995, Fast Company always got it right. Not once has it reinvented itself. Sweeping layoffs? Never. Revolving door at the top? Nope. The publication has had only four EICs. The incumbent, Bob Safian, has reigned nine years amid breathtaking changes in publishing and technology.
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New York Times deputy technology editor Quentin Hardy appears tomorrow night at a sold-out PRSA event in Silicon Valley. Billed as an "enterprise tech" journalist, Quentin does cover AI, and a bit of cloud. Truth is, Quentin hasn't sourced his own material all that much lately; instead he opines on other NYT reporters' material as part of the NYT's Daily Report.
Few edit shops frustrate PR pros more than HBR. With all of those big-name professors and book authors, how the heck do you place contributed content? According to Similarweb, HBR.org gets 9.6 million unique visits per month, lower than Computerworld (11.5M) but higher than CIO (4.5M).
Recode deputy managing editor Joe Brown is waiting for your contributed posts -- the ones actually conceived by the executives who get the bylines, written in first-person, confidently and generously. The section is called "Voices," after all.
Darren Murph is back in the tech edit saddle, as global editor-in-chief of TechRadar, a UK-based site with a monthly audience of 44 million. If you already know Darren's name, it's probably through Engadget, where he spent almost eight years during that site's glory days.
Phil Kenny oversees data journalism at The Economist. Phil joined the newspaper 15 years ago. Since then, empirically speaking, he has seen it all -- but he hasn't published much of it. Accepting vendor data is "a trap we never fell into," Phil says.
As promised last week, here is our conversation with freelance writer Stacey Higginbotham, now the author of a weekly e-newsletter on the Internet of Things. [Listen to our 20-minute audio conversation here.] The highlights: Stacey says she will continue to write for Fortune "once or twice a week... as long as they like my pitches."
If VentureBeat staff writer Jordan Novet says he'll get back to you, don't be surprised if on the odd chance he doesn't. Don't misunderstand: Jordan has integrity and means what he says. But look what happened in just two days this week: the IRS suffered computer failure; LinkedIn, Cisco and Microsoft acquired companies; and Box and Salesforce announced new products.
Mic now reaches 30 million readers each month. It just recruited Ruth Reader from VentureBeat to cover "innovative technology and the people behind it." That sounds promising. But Mic's relentless focus on big ideas -- sublime and ridiculous -- is likely to frustrate PR for a while yet.
This time last year, InfoWorld senior writer Fahmida Y. Rashid managed the RSA Conference blog. "If journalism is a 10,000-foot view, [at RSAC] I was getting a 20,000-foot view," Fahmida says. And she learned a valuable lesson: security is only part of the picture.
Healthcare-minded PR pros keep Christina Farr near the top of their pitch list, for good reason. Christina joined Fast Company last month as a senior writer covering "health and technology," one of the most fascinating beats you can have these days.
