Fast Company’s Lydia Dishman has joined (SWMS subscriber) Method Communications as VP of content strategy. Lydia joins an already strong content team, which includes former
You may know John Kell as the author of Fortune’s weekly newsletter, CIO Intelligence. You’d be right, but John’s work also shows up in Fast Company and Business Insider. Few other freelancers have such impact.
Fast Company EIC Brendan Vaughan had a busy week this week, chairing the publication’s tenth annual Innovation Festival. On Sept. 11 Brendan made time for the following SWMS Q&A, in which he discussed the role of AI in innovation…
Here are the latest paid content rates from Fast Company. The submission below is provided by FC account director Justine DeGaetano. Fast Company will write the post for you, at a premium.
Fast Company’s longest-running franchise, Most Innovative Companies (MIC), has made FC a lot of money since 2008. Candidates pay to apply, with no guarantee they will make the grade.
On the job a bit more than a month, Fast Company EIC Brendan Vaughan has inherited a respected, if not beloved, 27-year-old publication. His mission is to improve it.
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.”
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
This is majorly tl;dr, but recent research from FT Strategies and Reuters empirically uncovers every trend there is, when it comes to the health of the media business. In short, “the media” is barely breakeven, here and around the world. AI search may prove devastating.
The WSJ this week launched CEO Brief, a newsletter designed to inform readers, and to attract new members to the WSJ Leadership Institute. This organization is already a Dow Jones profit center, and a great example of how Tier 1 can lessen dependence on advertising. Former Fortune CEO Alan Murray runs the institute and is the nominal editor of CEO Brief — and promises to read every bit of reader mail — though he has delegated the writing of the newsletter to subordinates in the early going.
Fast Company’s Lydia Dishman has joined (SWMS subscriber) Method Communications as VP of content strategy. Lydia joins an already strong content team, which includes former NY Times reporter Tim Race and B2B tech edit vet John Foley.
“I’m leaving to build something new,” Alex posted on X today. He spent 12 years at Forbes as a reporter and a builder of databases and lists. It’s time he gets to keep the money.
Axios reported on Jan. 24 that private equity firm Blackstone will sell IDG/Foundry, publishers of InfoWorld, Computerworld and Network World (and owners of IDC) to another private equity firm called Regent, which bought streaming video channel Cheddar in 2023. Remains to be seen how the ownership change will affect IDG’s venerable IT titles, but it’s unlikely their budgets will go up.
Unionized writers have secured new protections governing the use of generative AI in member newsrooms, reports the Hollywood Reporter. The union — Writers Guild of America, East — represents Fast Company, Wired and many other prominent titles. The union won agreement that publications “will not lay off current staff employees due to the use of generative AI,” and also that “advance notice [must be given] if the company plans to make the use of generative AI systems a requirement of [editors’] jobs.”
