On Feb. 28 we received an inquiry from a subscriber (vendor, not agency) asking whether journalists were bristling at being pitched in light of the crisis in Ukraine. The subscriber said “proactive pitching” had been paused. Here was our response…
“This week I’ve had a record number of people tell me they cannot talk to me because their PR department has blackballed me for no clear reason,” Chrissy Farr Tweeted on Apr. 6. “So glad you opened this door,” Tweeted CNBC editorial director Matt Rosoff the next day. “Every week I am stunned anew by how some PRs assume our business works, vs how it actually works.”
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
Former NYT reporter and Google Cloud EIC Quentin Hardy also interviewed Eric Savitz about his career and move to GM. Good reading.
The UK-based newsletter company called Trending Now uses AI to scrape what’s trending across 27 areas of B2B. Press Gazette has additional detail. The company employs ten, none of whom are journalists (by traditional definition).
The full union membership needs to ratify it on July 24, but it looks like no editors can be laid off or suffer a salary cut if the publication goes big in its use of generative AI. More detail here from Neiman.
Goldman Sachs took 32 pages to say pretty much that. The media business may turn out to be an outlier, an industry perfectly suited to synthetic, multilingual words, sounds and images at scale. As for everyone else, well, the global consultancies will learn the truth first because they have rushed to monetize Gen AI — they aren’t yet succeeding.
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