Thu, 2015-03-26 11:50
Sam Whitmore
Pitching Security Stories: Mission Impossible?
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.
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Eight-year-old Farhad Manjoo left South Africa with his sister and parents in 1987, bound for a new life in southern California. He spent his college years among the gorges of New York's Finger Lakes, studying economics and editing Cornell's student newspaper. Upon graduation, Wired gave him his first tech edit job just as the (first) tech bubble burst. Farhad rode it out, eventually freelancing for top-tier titles and authoring a book about truth.
"Snarkless" may not be a word, but the term sums up New York Times enterprise tech reporter Steve Lohr. Steve has never framed a story unfairly, which may explain why so many of our subscribers ask how they can get on his good side. The quick-and-dirty answer: recruit an academic who can explain your client's value as well as you can.
We've never seen PR pros more pressured to deliver "Tier 1" business coverage than we did this year. Not to pander, but we know how difficult this can be: clients rarely give you what you need. Often, though -- and as we see in the skyrocketing number of SWMS valet requests -- PR pros often spend too much time finding targets for an idea that's weak in the first place.