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.
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’s newly named EIC, Jamie Heller, is exactly what BI needed: an experienced, no-nonsense newspaper pro disinclined to accept shortcuts.
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.
Until now at least, PR pros never had to pay much attention to tech analytics platforms such as CrunchBase, PitchBook and CB Insights. Sure, they might have had a blog. But PR was built to pitch publications. The worlds of tech data and tech edit really didn’t intersect.
It’s been true for years: Tier 1 loves to craft “can they do it?” stories. Some PR pros avoid pitching “can they do it” stories because “what if they can’t?” Why encourage a reporter to think that the company might come up short?
It’s one thing to know that Fortune reporter Jane Thier writes CEO profiles, and quite another to know the ingredients. We analyzed the 12 CEO/founder profiles Jane produced so far this year — and asked Anthropic’s Claude 3 to do the same.
Forbes this week began accepting applications for this year’s Cloud 100 List as well as the accompanying Cloud 100 Rising Stars list, which focuses on private cloud startups with less than $25 million in funding.
For most tech PR pros, the Financial Times isn’t top-of-mind. That may change. Last month the FT expanded its San Francisco-based bureau to “deepen its coverage of technology companies, venture capital and the intersection of money and technology.”
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.
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I am currently informing all subscribers personally that SWMS is back. Informing people through an email blast is of course bad form. So I’m going to defer the reintroduction of the SWMS emailers until next week… thank you for your patience.
Axios is hiring a senior tech reporter to cover AI. How long will it take for the “laid-off” to land on their feet? It is already happening.
From Crunchbase News:
Neuralink’s recent $650 million raise is by far the largest for a neural interface startup on record, but comes as funding to neuroscience startups overall is set to rise sharply this year. All told, funding to the broader category of neuroscience startups totaled $896 million last year and is on track to reach $1.4 billion in 2025.
From the excellent The Rundown AI newsletter: The future of video content creation is increasingly looking camera-less — with this latest round of upgrades taking avatars from more robotic talking heads to full-fledged actors with more granular control over motion and expressiveness.
Time to get a grip on Veo.
The BI culture over the years has been aloof to vendors and definitely PR. Now that many of those affected could use a friend or two, here’s hoping they get the lift they need. Here is the message from BI CEO Barbara Peng.
