Andreessen Horowitz is looking to hire an editor to manage guest posts. The VC firm’s 936-word want ad reveals much about good contributed content. PR pros can go to school on this one, using these universal insights when pitching any outlet.
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.
— Updated Mar. 2, 2021 — Here is our latest and best list of titles and authors known to produce CEO profiles. The possibilities on one hand have shrunk considerably. On the other, literally dozens of publications will consider CEO pitches — but the context has to be there.
Nothing brings PR anxiety like crickets, especially when you pitch contributed content and include the submission. Was the pitch bad? Was the piece bad, or both? Or neither! Or maybe “they just didn’t see it, so I’ll ‘float it to the top of their in-box’ in a day or two.”
With few exceptions, contributed content gatekeepers are operating the way they always did before Covid-19 — serving the readers who buy products, manage teams and have projects to deliver. Here’s what nine of them said this week.
Placing contributed content ideally comes without strings — “pitch it, place it, forget it” — but that’s not how it works at Third Door Media, publishers of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. Third Door is in the community business. Community editor Wendy Almeida wants to help but you must help her too.
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.
G2’s contributed content guidelines are refreshingly explicit and perhaps a bit demanding — you really need to know your SEO. Still, it’s worth it: submitting to G2 may land you a surprisingly effective hit while revealing how trade editors see their jobs these days.
The Enterprisers Project, described by owner Red Hat as “a community of CIOs discussing the future of business and IT,” may represent a contributed content opportunity for you. Content director Laurie McLaughlin (yes, formerly of IDG and UBM) explains why.
Which publications still accept one-off contributions? Of the 114 titles in our contributed content Google Doc, roughly 100 still accept standalone articles. Unfortunately, the most attractive venues — Forbes, TechCrunch and WSJ to name three — want ongoing commitments. Inc. and Entrepreneur already have hundreds of contributors and don’t hunger for more.
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FRIDGE NOTES
The Atlantic’s Karen Hao, in conjunction with the Pulitzer Center, is designing a course in AI for journalists. Classes begin next month. Details here. Might be something to alert your friendlies about. Karen hopes to help train 1,000 journalists in AI over the next two years.
Joshua Topolsky‘s edit project for Robinhood is optimized for mobile but you can peruse it here. The design seems crazy. Context from Axios’s Sara Fischer here.
‘The Prompt” is not out yet, but you can sign up for it here.
That’s the strategy as expressed to NYT’s Katie Robertson by Axios CEO Jim VandeHei. First up: Eleanor Hawkins, Sara Fischer and Dan Primack.
Forbes’s reputation is taking a hit because of the ad scandal unearthed this month by the WSJ. Some advertisers have stopped spending with Forbes, at least temporarily. Here’s the latest from Digiday [subscription required].
What a terrific scoop from the WSJ’s Patience Haggin: Forbes for years operated a shadow, tiny-traffic web site — at www3.forbes.com — that housed advertising bought to run on the big-traffic Forbes.com site. Advertisers paid for the real site but were placed on the spammy shadow site. After WSJ broke the story, Forbes took the shadow site offline. One quote from the story: “Imagine if a car dealership slapped a Lexus sticker on an economy Toyota and sold it to you as a Lexus.”
