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.”
In partnership with MuckRock — and to celebrate our 20th anniversary — SWMS has donated $20K to help fund the Sam Whitmore Media Survey Fellowship. MuckRock serves journalists, researchers and citizens by requesting, analyzing and sharing government documents as obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey. No business can survive without the loyalty of its customers. We call them subscribers, and we thank every one of them. In this piece we revist the various looks of the SWMS web site over the years.
When Axios launched in 2016, its founders described its goal as “smart brevity,” or more colorfully, as “Twitter meets The Economist.” Take a look, for example, at Sara Fischer’s most recent Media Trends newsletter and you can see that Axios has succeeded. Observe the form, not necessarily the substance.
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.
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Can you imagine not needing to be a human being to be a superstar? You may remember Max Headroom. There’s plenty of examples of technology personas, but AI is a different world altogether. Is there a tech media angle to this item? Not really, but here she is — Xania.
This is a must-read article about both Business Insider and Wired being tricked by a phony freelance reporter writing phony stories. If BI and Wired can be fooled, everybody can be fooled.
Veteran tech journalist David Strom is working with a couple of AI developers to understand exactly the nature of his writing as it has unfolded over the years. In this edition of Sound Thinking, David shares his learnings and where everything might go.
It’s been tough to keep track of SDxCentral this year, with the sale… management moves… Here’s a podcast and an article that will help you catch up.. thank you, Ben, for the assistance.
Newly merged TechTarget and Informa this month laid off 10 percent of their employees. Check out the euphemism in the 8-K: “[the] net reduction [will be] up to approximately 10% of the Company’s current global colleague base.” That just beats all, doesn’t it?
