The Wall Street Journal is about to ramp up The Experts, the contributed content operation affiliated with Journal Report. WSJ is open to vetting new “panelists” (contributors) in each of six areas: energy, health, leadership, retirement, small business and wealth management.
What makes for a smart approach to contributed content? Answer: something that you know has worked. A Sept. 25 Enterprisers Project piece called “Beware the dark side of agile project management” drew more page views than anything else TEP published that month. Let’s deconstruct why.
Financial Times opinion and analysis editor Brooke Masters this month produced a short video — and companion article — explaining how to contribute content to the publication. Brooke offers five basic points that every executive author should consider before pitching — to the FT or for that matter anywhere else.
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.
When Axios launched in 2016, its founders described its goal as “smart brevity,” or more colorfully, as “Twitter meets The Economist.” Take a look, for example, at Sara Fischer’s most recent Media Trends newsletter and you can see that Axios has succeeded. Observe the form, not necessarily the substance.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Indy media business experts Brian Morrissey and Jacob Cohen Donnelly have built two very successful businesses with both newsletters and face-to-face events. Axios has noticed this and has decided to get into the event space focusing on the economics of publishing, which of course is a topic close to home. Announced this week: an Axios event coming up in September. Hosts: Sara Fischer and Kerry Flynn.
ServiceNow has launched a special report on Fortune to jumpstart strategic spending on AI, illustrating workarounds for implementation problems, and otherwise illuminating the path to integrating AI into software operations. This is a branding exercise, of course, and perhaps is a sign that earned media is just not going get a strategic job done.
AIQ shows a big idea and how to leverage the prestige of Fortune without having to pitch stories to accomplish that same objective: you can just buy shelf space. In the case of AIQ, Fortune hired freelancer Sage Lazzaro — who used to work on staff there to create high-level content. So let’s keep an eye on this project, monitoring how well-respected it is… and whether its content gets surfaced in search engines.
Here are the details — Choose from 5 categories and 30+ subcategories. The awards are being promoted by Bhava Communications, an SWMS subscriber.
The guy also is the full-time “chairman” of Bally and Sassoon. On top of that, he’s also chairman of Foundry and 13 other companies. Well, 14, if you count his own private equity firm. How much time will he put into TC, understanding the subtleties of tech edit?
Julie opens up to host Dave Reddy.. it’s a good listen. BVM is a SWMS subscriber.
