Agencies and clients face a reckoning with contributed content. The latter still assumes that opportunities abound. More than 100 entries in the SWMS contributed content gatekeepers list proves them right. Then again, when it comes to Tier 1, it just might be best to pay whoever lifts the velvet rope.
What makes for a smart approach to contributed content? Answer: something that you know has worked. A Sept. 25 Enterprisers Project piece called “Beware the dark side of agile project management” drew more page views than anything else TEP published that month. Let’s deconstruct why.
Financial Times opinion and analysis editor Brooke Masters this month produced a short video — and companion article — explaining how to contribute content to the publication. Brooke offers five basic points that every executive author should consider before pitching — to the FT or for that matter anywhere else.
Is the Forbes Technology Council worth the money? We hear that a lot from PR pros looking to place contributed content. In our view the answer is ‘yes’, though there’s actually something bigger going on, which we’ll get to in a sec.
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.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Media analyst Brian Morrissey predicts that many smaller trade publishers and consumer publishers may one day just ditch readers altogether and simply publish to LLMs under contract and make their money that way. It’s a lot simpler than trying to sell ads to a dwindling reader base.
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.
