SWMS tends not to cover the business initiatives of its subscribers, but the Marker Collective has embarked on something revealing. The parent org of Archetype,
A veteran tech edit freelancer one told SWMS that freelancers are entrepreneurs like any other. Time is money. Profit beats all. Few PR pros pitch with this in mind — but they won’t be able to break through with John Edwards unless they do.
Ever use AI to test pitches before sending them to reporters? Try it sometime. It’s a fun way to improve them. For the proper horsepower, you’ll need a paid subscription to a Gen AI service such as GPT-4 or Claude 3.
Just for fun, try creating the story pitch after the story is written. We did that this week, using generative AI. We pasted an already-published story into each of three GenAI tools and asked it to write a compelling PR pitch based on that article.
It’s 2026. You’ve got a new job, earning $250K a year as “VP, Pitch Analytics.” You’ve got a modest budget to retain freelance tech reporters. You manage an intern.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that when you’re pitching Tier 1 reporters, you are pitching their bosses at the same time. That’s why it’s helpful to understand the entire editorial process in the publications you’re pitching — not just the persuasion part.
Search platform TechNews last month introduced features that let users spot trends deep within tech editorial. Launched as IT Database in 2007, TechNews is widely used within tech PR to learn who is writing what.
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A recent edition of the new Axios Communicators newsletter offered pitch advice from five Axios reporters and a co-founder. Newsletter author Eleanor Hawkins polled her colleagues on what PR folks need to be told.
SWMS contributor Bob Scheier writes: A company’s Wikipedia entry is often one of the first to come up in response to a Web search, and might get more exposure than its Twitter, Facebook or other social media account.
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.
