How do you land coverage in WSJ Journal Reports? Pitch the beat reporters. “It’s hard to target these reports,” says senior editor Larry Rout. He explains that the best stories come from those with the domain expertise, be it in healthcare, energy or wealth management.
Where were you in 1981? Perhaps you were just a twinkle back then. Pat Thibodeau was a newspaper reporter in New Britain, Conn. Fifteen years later he moved to Computerworld, where he worked for more than 20 years. Now he reports for TechTarget’s HR and ERP verticals, and he believes he’s in the right place.
Industry analyst Rob Enderle starts his workday in the inbox. “I get a wave of pitches every day… a wave that breaks on me every morning,” Rob told us in a 23-minute audio interview. Can a 33-year veteran of the tech business get value from cold pitches?
Does Dion Hinchcliffe still write for ZDNet? Well sure… just not as much as he used to. Being a Dad to three-year-old twins has slowed him just a bit. “As they get older I can find more time to write,” the proud Papa told us last week. One can find Dion’s core work at Constellation Research, where he serves as VP and principal analyst.
Stacey Higginbotham — the Stacey of IoT — is enjoying entrepreneurship. “It’s not as stressful as any of my previous media gigs and it’s really satisfying,” says the former Gigaom and Fortune reporter.
The New York Times has been around since 1851. According to SimilarWeb, the NYT gets 400 million unique visits each month from more than 250 countries. Naturally, PR pros want to plug into this prestige and power — which is why many NYT editors often suspect your motives when you approach them.
Will there ever be another Walt Mossberg? The now retired consumer tech product reviewer was one of a kind. But someone, someday, is bound to emerge as the voice above all others. Don’t be surprised if it’s Bloomberg technology reporter Mark Gurman.
Adrienne LaFrance, staff writer for The Atlantic covering tech, never worked in the trades. She never cranked out three stories a day. Adrienne once worked as an investigative reporter in Hawaii and reported for Boston University’s WBUR. She knows “story” crafted from the ground up.
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FRIDGE NOTES
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.
No “predictions” post will appear on this site. That said, quite a number of subscribers have asked for a Zoom/MS Teams presentation on what 2025 will bring. A conversation is precisely the right tool for the job. After the election — and with AI transforming publishing and life — “2025” is best discussed among peers, not predicted. So if you’d like to have a confidential group exchange on what stands to unfold, and why, and how comms pros can come out on top in spite of it all, drop a line and we shall schedule something.
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.
Should PR pros stop visiting X, with all its lies and hate? It’s only going to get worse. Or are tidbits from targets too important to walk away from? Click here to watch tech edit vet David Strom and I disagree (at high speed) about this, as one compelling visual after another pops up on your screen. In 2025, SWMS will officially launch “SWMS Sound Thinking,” designed to be “argumentative insight in six minutes or less.” Each segment will explore a timely and controversial topic of interest to tech comms pros. This prototype runs 5:25. Hope you enjoy it — feedback vital and welcome! –Sam
New EIC Jamie Heller has asked her reporters to start going on camera — for the BI TikTok channel — to explain the big, deep-divey story they just published. Other publications do this — especially archival Fortune. BI is now on that too. Game on.
