Are tech events on the wane? Quartz last month pulled the plug on The Next Billion, its three-year-old conference series with $1,500 ticket prices. The Bloomberg Technology Conference, historically held each June in San Francisco, is as yet unscheduled for 2017.
After year-end layoffs and buyouts, troubles continue to plague the WSJ. Beloved WSJ deputy EIC Rebecca Blumenstein quit this week to join the New York Times. EIC Gerard Baker will face tough questions at an all-hands WSJ meeting on Monday.
The WSJ’s SF bureau has realigned after departures of Don Clark and Scott Thurm. Bureau chief Jason Dean has divided things by enterprise hardware and enterprise software, by company. Not sure how startups and 2nd-tier players get covered in such a system.
It's hard to imagine the Wall Street Journal without deputy bureau chief Don Clark -- he worked there 23 years. But as of Dec. 15, Don is out the door, having accepted the buyout offered last month by WSJ parent company News Corp. Always quick to return an email, tech PR pros will miss him. Says Don: "That's what they've been telling me -- and it's gratifying."
Vauhini Vara is not your typical "target." You may remember her as among the first Wall Street Journal reporters to cover Facebook and Twitter. In 2008 she left WSJ for the University of Iowa and a Master's Degree in creative writing. In 2013 she launched the Currency blog at NewYorker.com and oversaw the site's business section.
Good writing isn't always "good." Using a writing-clarity app called Hemingway, SWMS this week analyzed 15 recent articles from authors in a dozen publications. The tool's chief bias: shorter sentences are better. Another: passive voice is used only by poor writers. Oh, and adverbs suck.
No publisher has more prestige than The Wall Street Journal. But like every publication, it must fight the forces of commoditization that make editorial excellence unprofitable. The WSJ strategy: combine news, data and events into a premium-priced vertical that differentiates from articles-only competitors.
Doug MacMillan will leave the WSJ this summer to become a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University in New York. "There's no plan to announce yet about who will be taking over my beat, but I know that I am leaving the bureau in very capable hands," Doug says.
Elizabeth Dwoskin this week departed the WSJ to become Silicon Valley correspondent for the Washington Post. She starts March 21. Good luck finding anyone who didn't admire her WSJ work covering big data, and most recently, algorithms.