Add Fast Company to the growing list of publishers launching readership communities. The Fast Company Executive Board now offers a waitlist in advance of its formal opening next week. FC is building its Executive Board in association with The Community Company, a virtual professional services firm that manages councils for Forbes, Rolling Stone, Newsweek and Bizjournals.
Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken sheds light on newsgathering at physical and virtual events, and changes in FC edit coverage brought on by Covid and other factors. Interview was conducted July 2020.
If it wasn’t before, Fast Company’s Work Life section became perfectly positioned when legions of readers began working where they lived and living where they worked. “I will say what our editor-in-chief, Stephanie Mehta, has said about Work Life, which is, it’s table stakes for us,” says deputy editor Kathleen (Kate) Davis.
Fast Company last week unveiled The Queer 50, a first-ever list of LGBTQ women and nonbinary innovators in business and tech. The idea germinated in Fall 2019, when Fast Company editors and members of Lesbians Who Tech decided informally that “it was about time a list like this existed,” recalls FC editor Julia Herbst.
So the CMO believes in stretch goals and wants you to land a cover story. You know the odds and not the path. Thanks to Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken, we at least can illuminate the path to this one, published in FC last fall. Read and learn.
The following is an excerpt from a Slack conversation held between Fast Company technology editor Harry McCracken and deputy editor David Lidsky in June 2018 as the pair were deciding whether to publish the Steph Curry/Palm cover story, and if so, how and when. Published with permission.
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
TechCrunch redesigned this week. Still green, less clutter. Built for the phone. Events and newsletters rank higher in the home page scroll than startups, venture and AI. No enterprise section. Parent Yahoo invested this money to build engagement. More changes due in 2025, EIC Connie Loizos says.
Adweek’s Mark Stenberg reports that Wired is getting into the awards business. The Wired 101 Awards will debut in October. Be on the lookout for the announcement.
BI’s publishing software knows what you’ve clicked on before and where you came from. Through Google Analytics, BI also knows how all readers react to certain content. Once you visit, BI knows whether to ask you to subscribe, or to register, or just to let you see everything for just that one visit. Conversions rose 75 percent this year. Digiday got the scoop (subscription required).
TheCUBE has announced the 2025 Technology Innovation Awards — 28 awards in all — including many in the AI space. SWMS subscriber Bhava Communications represents TheCUBE and alerted us to these opportunities.
Fascinating piece from Lars Lofgren about how a Forbes subsidiary — under the Forbes name — has managed to dominate Google search results…
…and now it turns out that Forbes — both iterations — are set to be purchased by the venture arm of Koch Industries. Nice scoop, Sara.
Now that it has sold off its classifieds business, the owner of Politico and Business Insider will go shopping for more titles. Don’t be surprised if News Corp. sells the WSJ to Axel Springer, especially if Lachlan Murdoch loses his grip on the media empire built by his politically conservative father.
