Fast Company seeks applicants for its upcoming Most Innovative Companies issue, due March 2022. FC this month held briefings to help prospective applicants shape their approach. Below is a summary of one session based on notes taken by an SWMS subscriber who attended.
Add Fast Company to the growing list of publishers launching readership communities. The Fast Company Executive Board now offers a waitlist in advance of its formal opening next week. FC is building its Executive Board in association with The Community Company, a virtual professional services firm that manages councils for Forbes, Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Bizjournals.
Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken sheds light on newsgathering at physical and virtual events, and changes in FC edit coverage brought on by Covid and other factors. Interview was conducted July 2020.
If it wasn’t before, Fast Company’s Work Life section became perfectly positioned when legions of readers began working where they lived and living where they worked. “I will say what our editor-in-chief, Stephanie Mehta, has said about Work Life, which is, it’s table stakes for us,” says deputy editor Kathleen (Kate) Davis.
Fast Company last week unveiled The Queer 50, a first-ever list of LGBTQ women and nonbinary innovators in business and tech. The idea germinated in Fall 2019, when Fast Company editors and members of Lesbians Who Tech decided informally that “it was about time a list like this existed,” recalls FC editor Julia Herbst.
So the CMO believes in stretch goals and wants you to land a cover story. You know the odds and not the path. Thanks to Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken, we at least can illuminate the path to this one, published in FC last fall. Read and learn.
The following is an excerpt from a Slack conversation held between Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken and deputy editor David Lidsky in June 2018 as the pair were deciding whether to publish the Steph Curry/Palm cover story, and if so, how and when. Published with permission.
Fast Company editors voted to unionize last week. So did the New Yorker’s. Should PR care? Not directly. Unionization does affect the editorial environment in which you pitch. Over time, if the economics of publishing don’t improve, the best journalists may well seek to work where editors are “protected.”
Where are all the company profiles? They abounded when the IPO window was wide open. Not anymore. Back when he wrote for Forbes, Dan Lyons told us that PR people always wanted him to write “book reports” — here’s who we are, and we’ve done this and that. That sounds like a company profile, doesn’t it?
You send us lots of rejected contributed content, asking what went wrong. Sometimes we can spot a path forward, but it’s heartbreaking to hear that “the client wants it written this way” or “this has already been approved.” That’s why this week we studied nine sets of contributed content guidelines from top edit targets and packaged what we think is their most valuable advice.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
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.
At this time last year, Eric Newcomer and his two podcast co-hosts — Max Child and James Wilsterman — each formed an “AI startup fantasy team” and picked five AI startups to seed their rosters. We’re now in year 2 and it’s time to draft again. The podcasters wonder… which startups do they dump? Which do they add? The player whose startups accumulate the most total value by Nov. 1, 2028 is the winner, so there’s plenty of time to make adjustments. Here’s a link to the AI fantasy team podcast — you may need a password. Not sure.
