Karen Walker is a consummate management consultant who contributes to Forbes and Fast Company. She thinks differently than journalists do, as you’ll see in this revealing Q & A, conducted Oct. 25.
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There’s a back door to landing a C-title profile in the Wall Street Journal. There’s also a catch: the executive must maintain a “personal board
In our companion analysis we looked at headlines and ledes of successful profiles. In this analysis we spot key ingredients in body copy. Find a way to get these elements in front of your client before pitching. Bake this stuff into your narrative.
Rarely do clients and agencies imagine the ideal headline on a compelling CEO profile. Editors always do. Thanks largely to analytics, they know what works in headlines, and what seems to work lately is “Meet the Woman Who…” and “Meet the Man Who…”
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Steve is a longtime friend of SWMS and worked at subscriber LaunchSquad before moving on to IBM, Salesforce and now Anthropic. Steve knows exactly how to harness Claude’s power for comms purposes. Follow him and learn.
Press Gazette has a great story about Google reintroducing AI summaries into search results — less so in queries about breaking news, but definitely when someone searches for trend or how-to info. Convenient for users, maybe… but publishers stand to lose a ton of long-tail traffic because of this. No wonder the vast majority of publisher “innovation” is about commerce or consulting and no longer builds upon journalism.
CNBC Make It had a popular video franchise called My Biggest Lessons, in which CEOs shared something valuable that they learned along the way. No new segments have appeared since May 31. We’ll monitor this for you.
Great reporting from Mark Stenberg at Adweek. Two departures on the sales side seem to have hurt. The story also suggests that former Fortune CEO Alan Murray — who said he was retiring — may turn up at WSJ. Fortune is said to have released Murray from his noncompete, taking his word that he was ending his career.
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Ten months ago SWMS spotlighted five up-and-coming Fortune reporters, suggesting that PR get to know these rookies. Where are they now? Jane Thier continues to excel in the Success section. Ruth Umoh now edits Next To Lead. Kylie Robison split for The Verge. Rachyl Jones is a fellow at Semafor. Alexandra Sternlicht this summer won a Knight-Bagehot fellowship at Columbia. Competition for this is brutal — congrats Alexandra!
