
Analysis: Why Journalists Cover Surveys
“The best surveys are ones that reveal unexpected findings or examine issues that have not yet been widely covered,” says Chain Store Age senior editor Dan Berthaiume.

“The best surveys are ones that reveal unexpected findings or examine issues that have not yet been widely covered,” says Chain Store Age senior editor Dan Berthaiume.

If you’re younger than 43 years old, Steve Lohr was reporting for the New York Times before you were born. Imagine all the stories he has written… the interviews he has conducted… and all the pitches he has seen.
Tech vendors pour countless hours and dollars into surveys and ask the comms people to publicize the findings. How do you coax busy, skeptical reporters to cover these things? As we did in 2015, we asked reporters to give one reason they’d cover vendor surveys and one reason they wouldn’t. Here’s what they said this time.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
… and rarely reveals it. Roughly 45K opinion recent pieces from Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal, are 6.4 times more likely to contain AI-generated content than news articles from the same publications, with many AI-flagged op-eds authored by prominent public figures. Despite this prevalence, Cornell says, “we find that AI use is rarely disclosed: a manual audit of 100 AI-flagged articles found only five disclosures of AI use.”
From WebPro News: Romanian software marketplace Tekpon acquired The Next Web (TNW) from the Financial Times, rescuing the tech media brand from closure.
The day is coming that you will not be able to avoid framing the targets in terms of red or blue. So far you’ve been able to do that. Those days are coming to a close: large swaths of “the audience” are headed in this direction. If you don’t believe it, read this from Bloomberg. You will never see better reporting than this.
Superb reporting from Business Insider on what comes after Google Search. All the experts quizzed. The gist: these technologies and techniques are borderline mythical at this point.
In the latest installment of Sound Thinking...David Strom, a well-known IT reporter and security expert, discusses the threat of AI tricking security systems and luring them to catastrophe. What will that mean to editors? When will it happen? It’s not an if, it’s a when.
Good vision here from Jay Lauf. Interestingly, Jay suggests that B2B publishing will become a service business to B2B pros, providing value directly to individuals and organizations. Static content is dying very quickly. This is the point of the analysis from this great media organization.