SiliconANGLE Media Launches 27 Awards
October 7, 2024
11:35 am
SiliconANGLE Media has launched the Tech Innovation CUBEd Awards, comprising 27 awards focused on companies, people and products.
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SWMS Deep-Dive: Innovation Edit
September 23, 2024
5:06 pm
This SWMS deep-dive on innovation edit started out as a cheat sheet — but sadly, there just aren’t that many targets. There are some. Innovation seems to be too abstract a concept for most publications to cover as a beat.
SWMS Q&A: Brendan Vaughan, Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company
September 19, 2024
1:23 pm
Fast Company EIC Brendan Vaughan had a busy week this week, chairing the publication’s tenth annual Innovation Festival. On Sept. 11 Brendan made time for the following SWMS Q&A, in which he discussed the role of AI in innovation…
Make A Two-Person Podcast Out Of Any Text File Or PDF
September 16, 2024
5:30 am
If you’ve ever listened to a podcast, you’ll want to spend six minutes listening to this. It’s an experimental audio file produced by a new Google tool called NotebookLM. It turns a text file or PDF into a podcast…
Business Insider Misses The Mark
September 11, 2024
7:07 am
Business Insider’s newly named EIC, Jamie Heller, is exactly what BI needed: an experienced, no-nonsense newspaper pro disinclined to accept shortcuts.
Cheat Sheet: Kubernetes Targets
August 27, 2024
5:23 am
Here’s a cheat sheet with 15 targets who cover Kubernetes. It’s a different take on the devops and open source names you already know. Several folks at the New Stack cover Kubernetes — Joab writes the most.
Deep Dive: Fortune’s Edit Churn in 2024
August 26, 2024
4:07 am
Fortune sure does churn through the journalists. In the ten months since we last studied its masthead, 19 editors have departed, while 16 arrived. That’s roughly a 25 percent turnover rate.
Cheat Sheet: Cloud Targets
August 22, 2024
3:47 pm
Lots of people cover cloud these days but who’s at the core of it? This SWMS cheat sheet offers 17 targets across Tier 1, trades and verticals. The challenge was not to omit obvious go-to’s, but still come up with targets you may not have considered.
Q&A: Timothy B. Lee, ‘Understanding AI’
August 6, 2024
10:53 am
You may be familiar with Timothy B. Lee’s work from The Washington Post, Vox or Ars Technica — he worked at all three. Today Tim is a Substack author well into his second year of “Understanding AI,” a fast-rising analytical newsletter on the hottest topic around.
Similarweb Audience Data: Axios, Fortune Just Keep Growing
July 25, 2024
5:02 am
Axios and Fortune continue to be star performers in the world of Tier 1 edit, according to the latest data from Similarweb.
From June 2023 through June 2024, Axios increased its readership by 47.5 percent, from 22.5M monthly visitors to 31.1M on a trailing 12-month basis. How does Axios do it? Smart management, smart verticals, smart brevity.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
The Media Business Underperforms Other Industries, Badly
February 6, 2025
This is majorly tl;dr, but recent research from FT Strategies and Reuters empirically uncovers every trend there is, when it comes to the health of the media business. In short, “the media” is barely breakeven, here and around the world. AI search may prove devastating.
WSJ Launches CEO Brief Newsletter
February 6, 2025
The WSJ this week launched CEO Brief, a newsletter designed to inform readers, and to attract new members to the WSJ Leadership Institute. This organization is already a Dow Jones profit center, and a great example of how Tier 1 can lessen dependence on advertising. Former Fortune CEO Alan Murray runs the institute and is the nominal editor of CEO Brief — and promises to read every bit of reader mail — though he has delegated the writing of the newsletter to subordinates in the early going.
Lydia Dishman Joins Method Communications
February 6, 2025
Fast Company’s Lydia Dishman has joined (SWMS subscriber) Method Communications as VP of content strategy. Lydia joins an already strong content team, which includes former NY Times reporter Tim Race and B2B tech edit vet John Foley.
Next Out the Door: Forbes’s Alex Konrad
January 31, 2025
“I’m leaving to build something new,” Alex posted on X today. He spent 12 years at Forbes as a reporter and a builder of databases and lists. It’s time he gets to keep the money.
IDG/Foundry: From One Private Equity Owner to Another
January 31, 2025
Axios reported on Jan. 24 that private equity firm Blackstone will sell IDG/Foundry, publishers of InfoWorld, Computerworld and Network World (and owners of IDC) to another private equity firm called Regent, which bought streaming video channel Cheddar in 2023. Remains to be seen how the ownership change will affect IDG’s venerable IT titles, but it’s unlikely their budgets will go up.
Key Editorial Union Stands Up To AI
January 31, 2025
Unionized writers have secured new protections governing the use of generative AI in member newsrooms, reports the Hollywood Reporter. The union — Writers Guild of America, East — represents Fast Company, Wired and many other prominent titles. The union won agreement that publications “will not lay off current staff employees due to the use of generative AI,” and also that “advance notice [must be given] if the company plans to make the use of generative AI systems a requirement of [editors’] jobs.”