Tue, 2018-05-08 13:18
Sam
Profile: Michael Morisy, MuckRock
A one-time TechTarget cub reporter has gone on to help build one of the strongest journalism tools America has. Perhaps you’ve heard of it — MuckRock. Not Muck Rack — most PR pros know about that. No, this is MuckRock -- the FOIA specialist -- based in Cambridge, Mass.
Where were you in 1981? Perhaps you were just a twinkle back then. Pat Thibodeau was a newspaper reporter in New Britain, Conn. Fifteen years later he moved to Computerworld, where he worked for more than 20 years. Now he reports for TechTarget’s HR and ERP verticals, and he believes he’s in the right place.
Industry analyst Rob Enderle starts his workday in the inbox. “I get a wave of pitches every day… a wave that breaks on me every morning,” Rob told us in a 23-minute audio interview. Can a 33-year veteran of the tech business get value from cold pitches?
Does Dion Hinchcliffe still write for ZDNet? Well sure… just not as much as he used to. Being a Dad to three-year-old twins has slowed him just a bit. “As they get older I can find more time to write,” the proud Papa told us last week. One can find Dion’s core work at Constellation Research, where he serves as VP and principal analyst.
Perhaps you’ve seen How to Lead, the new weekly business leadership column from the Financial Times. It’s a showcase for executives with something compelling to say. Work & Careers editor Helen Barrett, who oversees the franchise, welcomes PR input but there are guidelines and we’ll get to them in a moment.
Said tech reporter Douglas MacMillan: “I’ve been following a lot of ideas in social media, and looking at how social media is shaping business and shaping society as well.” The year was 2009. Doug was a 25-year-old up-and-comer at McGraw-Hill’s BusinessWeek, covering tech primarily for the BW web site.
Wouldn’t it be great if all tech journalists were like Sean Captain? He writes about AI, big data and telecom, yet is open to even broader territory — “people and their ideas.” Though a freelancer, he writes principally for Fast Company, squarely in Tier 1.
The company’s stock has risen 75 percent this year. Jim Cramer interviewed its CEO last month. Things are going quite well at New Relic. It must be the content marketing, don’t you think? Let’s put it this way: it should surprise no one that a successful cloud-based software company invests vigorously in content and hires tech edit pros who have been there.
Stacey Higginbotham — the Stacey of IoT — is enjoying entrepreneurship. “It’s not as stressful as any of my previous media gigs and it’s really satisfying,” says the former Gigaom and Fortune reporter. 
Here's another profile of an unpitchable editor. Stop the madness! Right? Well, we learned quite a bit in our conversation with BuzzFeed senior technology reporter Alex Kantrowitz. He’s an inspirational 30-year-old who more than holds his own in one of tech media’s most powerful investigative shops.
The New York Times has been around since 1851. According to SimilarWeb, the NYT gets 400 million unique visits each month from more than 250 countries. Naturally, PR pros want to plug into this prestige and power — which is why many NYT editors often suspect your motives when you approach them.
If you’re focused on pitching Thomson Reuters tech reporters, don’t forget about their boss, global technology editor Jonathan Weber. Yes, his bylines these days are for editing, not for writing. Jon’s weeknight party-going days are long over, so you won’t see him around. So why get to know the guy?