SWMS tends not to cover the business initiatives of its subscribers, but the Marker Collective has embarked on something revealing. The parent org of Archetype,
A veteran tech edit freelancer one told SWMS that freelancers are entrepreneurs like any other. Time is money. Profit beats all. Few PR pros pitch with this in mind — but they won’t be able to break through with John Edwards unless they do.
Ever use AI to test pitches before sending them to reporters? Try it sometime. It’s a fun way to improve them. For the proper horsepower, you’ll need a paid subscription to a Gen AI service such as GPT-4 or Claude 3.
Just for fun, try creating the story pitch after the story is written. We did that this week, using generative AI. We pasted an already-published story into each of three GenAI tools and asked it to write a compelling PR pitch based on that article.
It’s 2026. You’ve got a new job, earning $250K a year as “VP, Pitch Analytics.” You’ve got a modest budget to retain freelance tech reporters. You manage an intern.
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that when you’re pitching Tier 1 reporters, you are pitching their bosses at the same time. That’s why it’s helpful to understand the entire editorial process in the publications you’re pitching — not just the persuasion part.
Search platform TechNews last month introduced features that let users spot trends deep within tech editorial. Launched as IT Database in 2007, TechNews is widely used within tech PR to learn who is writing what.
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A recent edition of the new Axios Communicators newsletter offered pitch advice from five Axios reporters and a co-founder. Newsletter author Eleanor Hawkins polled her colleagues on what PR folks need to be told.
SWMS contributor Bob Scheier writes: A company’s Wikipedia entry is often one of the first to come up in response to a Web search, and might get more exposure than its Twitter, Facebook or other social media account.
YOUR ACCOUNT
FRIDGE NOTES
I am currently informing all subscribers personally that SWMS is back. Informing people through an email blast is of course bad form. So I’m going to defer the reintroduction of the SWMS emailers until next week… thank you for your patience.
Axios is hiring a senior tech reporter to cover AI. How long will it take for the “laid-off” to land on their feet? It is already happening.
From Crunchbase News:
Neuralink’s recent $650 million raise is by far the largest for a neural interface startup on record, but comes as funding to neuroscience startups overall is set to rise sharply this year. All told, funding to the broader category of neuroscience startups totaled $896 million last year and is on track to reach $1.4 billion in 2025.
From the excellent The Rundown AI newsletter: The future of video content creation is increasingly looking camera-less — with this latest round of upgrades taking avatars from more robotic talking heads to full-fledged actors with more granular control over motion and expressiveness.
Time to get a grip on Veo.
The BI culture over the years has been aloof to vendors and definitely PR. Now that many of those affected could use a friend or two, here’s hoping they get the lift they need. Here is the message from BI CEO Barbara Peng.
