Tue, 2020-10-27 13:42
Sam
Lift This Writing Tip from Quartz
When you think Axios, you think “smart brevity.” When you picture Business Insider, you see those 30-word headlines and lengthy decks that finish the story before the reader even starts it. Quartz has its own comprehension hack, though only paid QZ subscribers get to see it.
Want to upgrade to a subscription that includes SWMS news, research and consulting? Send e-mail to Sam for details.
Few publications have innovated like Quartz. It launched in 2012 as "mobile-first" and raced to embrace native advertising. Its first news app was a chatbot. It created amazing visuals and posted the code on GitHub. It had obsessions, not beats. So why is Quartz in trouble?
Are tech events on the wane? Quartz last month pulled the plug on The Next Billion, its three-year-old conference series with $1,500 ticket prices. The Bloomberg Technology Conference, historically held each June in San Francisco, is as yet unscheduled for 2017.
With CES a month away, we asked veteran tech journalists, "if you could wave a magic wand and change the experience of covering CES, what exactly would you change?" We got more than our share of throwaway answers. We also got plenty of earnest answers that might help make a PR pro's Vegas experience more successful.
If there's one publication out there that never made a bad move, it's Quartz. According to Digiday, the three-year-old title now attracts 15 million uniques per month, about half from outside the US. More than 60 reporters and producers now publish between 50 and 60 pieces per day, Digiday says. That said, Quartz is at heart a software company.
Is the tech narrative endangered? Lately we've cased the web for the kinds of stories we used to see everywhere -- the 600-to-800 word news story about a tech company claiming to have built something better, cheaper or faster, or otherwise out to change the world. We found far fewer than we expected, even where they once were abundant.
A subscriber recently asked us, "What stories are better conceived as sponsored content than as earned media?" Great question. That's why we spent time this week studying sponsored content in some of the millennially-minded publications, looking to spot trends beyond the obvious. Perhaps you'll write and tell us whether we succeeded.
Trying to reach millennials? Join the club. This week we studied BuzzFeed, Fusion, Mic, Ozy, Quartz, Vice, Vocativ and Vox to map PR's path to tech coverage. Here's what we learned. Millennially-minded tech reporters build their beats around "culture" and "future." No pitch will work unless so tailored.