Fri, 2015-09-18 10:33
Sam Whitmore
Profile: Kashmir Hill, Fusion
Getting to know Fusion senior editor Kashmir Hill is easy -- at least a younger version of her. Spend some time on her now-defunct personal blog. You'll learn that her goal as a journalist is to give people information they can rely on. She dislikes April Fool's Day and feels like it's smart to spend at least one week a year completely off the Internet.
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Recently we noticed that Ben Kepes moved his contributions from Forbes to IDG. When we emailed a Forbes friend to confirm this, he reminded us of all the enterprise tech contributors who remained. This week we explore the work of those contributors, many of whom carry big clout in the enterprise space. To PR's delight, some even profile vendor CEOs.
Taylor Hatmaker isn't just The Daily Dot's tech editor, or just another ReadWrite alumnus that landed somewhere else. She's emblematic of so many post-PR player-coaches we see today in the "millennial" publications (and before we know it, everywhere else). She can report, write and edit, with a refined sense of audience and keen differentiation from competitors.
The closest the industry has come to a Megan Rose Dickey, so far, is a Kara Swisher -- female, smart and focused on equality and inclusion. Though Kara is of course in a class by herself, Megan may have it on Kara in a couple of important ways. One, Megan is pretty much a full generation younger than Kara, in a business that reveres youth.
Nine years ago this month, WSJ personal technology columnist Joanna Stern was an account coordinator at Kaplow Communications in New York. Last week Joanna was in Hong Kong, working the crowd at Converge, a two-day Asian tech conference co-sponsored by WSJ and f.ounders. Not bad.
Ellen Cushing has what you might call a cool job. Only three months after becoming an articles editor at BuzzFeed, she spent five days on a bus touring the American Southwest with teenage Vine and YouTube stars. Her 7,873-word chronicle is exactly the kind of piece most readers would associate with The Atlantic or Rolling Stone but never with a perceived candy dispenser like BuzzFeed.
Paul Alcorn is an old-school product guy, the kind you may think doesn't exist anymore. A former Boeing modification mechanic who once helped turn 747 passenger planes into freighters, Paul now cranks news stories and product reviews as contributing enterprise storage editor for Tom's Hardware and Tom's IT Pro. 
CNBC senior editor Ari Levy is an experienced, well-connected reporter with countless sources of his own. His CNBC office in San Francisco is co-located within Re/code, perhaps the most connected news operation in the business. What can PR bring to a guy like him?
Re/code may now belong to Vox, but that hasn't stopped PR from coveting placements in Re/code's Voices section. One important piece of good news for PR: Re/code still accepts one-offs. Inc., IDG, Forbes Entrepreneur and other sites prefer contributors who can deliver multiple posts on a given topic. Still others, such as The Economist's Lean Back blog, prefer contributors whose posts consistently deliver strong traffic and shares.
We've encountered quite a few tech publishing models over the years but never one quite as enigmatic as the one at CloudTweaks. Call it hybrid pay-to-play. When you first pitch CloudTweaks, you'll be asked if you've been involved in any previous paid-sponsorship programs with them. If you have, writers will be motivated to consider covering your news for free.
It's hard to think of a reporter more experienced than Silicon Angle enterprise editor Paul Gillin. He's a former star reporter at the late, great PC Week, a former Computerworld EIC and the founding editor of TechTarget. He has managed many dozens of reporters over the years and there isn't an aspect of tech editorial he hasn't mastered.
The Economist's Alexandra Suich can write about pretty much anything she chooses. For PR that's both good and bad news. When pitching her, where does one start? "What we try to do is pull together what others might write as individual stories and put together bigger ones," Alexandra tells us. "We need to write about things earlier [than others], and we need to avoid repeating what other people are writing about."
