Fri, 2015-08-07 03:28
Sam Whitmore
Profile: Joanna Stern, WSJ
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.
Want to upgrade to full access to our SWMS Profiles archive? Send e-mail to Sam for details.
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."
What is it like to be a reporter at Business Insider? "Everyone is kind of their own CEO," says west coast bureau chief Matt Rosoff. There's no daily copy quota, as there is at Pando Daily and was at Gigaom. Every reporter is free to chase a big story that takes weeks to report if the story is big enough. However, Matt adds, "there's an expectation that we're not going to be missing any news."
Fortune has transcended last year's chaos in which parent Time Inc. finally split from Time Warner and top editors Andrew Serwer and Stephanie Mehta suddenly left. Under first-year editor Alan Murray, Fortune is now, among other things, a high-velocity tech news shop. In March it published more than 500 tech stories; April's totals easily topped that.
If you're a PR pro under 30, know that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols was writing about technology before you were born. That doesn't make Steven unpitchable -- but it does make him impervious to clerk-y PR razzle-dazzle. We'll spare you the full measure of his PR laments, except that "it's kind of frightening" to him that "even the big PR firms... throw the "recent [college] graduates" into the deep end, pitching stories they don't fully understand.
