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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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.
America can’t read anymore. The good news: advertisers can advertise against different kinds of emotion in the copy. So even if the numbers of readers drop, there are more ways to attract ads. So perhaps the bad news will get cancelled out by the good. Sam Whitmore and David Strom discuss.
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.
