eWeek

eWeek (formerly PC Week) is well into its 36th year and never has it been more different. Under the leadership of EIC Chris Preimesberger and QuinStreet top management, eWeek this month pulled back from news and analysis and refocused on helping buyers decide what to buy. PR folks won’t like that.

eWeek last week redesigned its web site and launched new personalization features that allow readers to easily follow topics and authors. Coming soon: a content-sharing arrangement with Silicon Angle’s video brand, theCube, as well as a new approach to case studies broadly named “IT Science.”

A builder of IT software and IT community, Spiceworks is now in the IT media business, too. Former eWeek and ZDNet editor Matthew Rothenberg joined the Austin, Tex.-based company this week as executive editor.

In the wake of recent layoffs at eWeek and InformationWeek, it’s time to keep a closer eye on the pitch opps that remain across the IT media landscape. To that end, here’s the first of a two-part SWMS IT media spot check. Pitch opps, nuggets and more...

Currently a freelancer for eWeek and other tech sites, David Needle has reported on tech for more than 30 years. Over that period, he saw quite a few email pitches and became something of an expert on the topic. In a recent email exchange with us, that topic was very much on his mind. Things got started when we sent him this Sept. 29 post in The Atlantic from senior editor James Hamblin.

[We're back at SWMS HQ this week but head to New York and Boston before March is through. Today we examine some of the topics that emerged from recent face-to-face meetings with you.]

What are coverage trends these days surrounding funding rounds, especially Series B?

"India’s Flipkart in talks to raise up to $1B, likely in a down round," wrote TechCrunch last week.

San Francisco will uncoil when Dreamforce ends today. Las Vegas can handle 160,000 people. South of Market can't. Salesforce did what it could, renting a cruise ship to house attendees. For our part we learned a lot by studying Dreamforce coverage -- including the nine-step process by which CEO Marc Benioff prepared his keynote speech. Every client should consider using this process as well.

Yet another venue has arrived for IT contributed content. It's called RTInsights and was founded by Les Yeamans, the software executive who founded eBizQ in 1998 and sold it 12 years later to TechTarget. His new project, RTInsights, rounds up the usual suspects -- analytics, big data, cloud -- but focuses on real-time technologies surrounding IoT, event processing, decision management and related fields. 

Never before have we seen PR pros struggle so mightily to land security coverage in business publications. Considering that businesses will spend $76 billion on cybersecurity in 2015 and $155 billion by 2019 (say Cybersecurity Ventures and Gartner), you'd think business editors might care to address where that money might be spent. Yet they don't. "I think there are lots of reasons why, not the least of which is that security journalists have become crime reporters," says a veteran security PR pro, who asked to remain anonymous.