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2020 has been quite the year for news: COVID-19, mass unemployment, social justice protests in the streets, a wildly fluctuating stock market – and then we have the upcoming elections. All this has forced an increasingly stretched media to become even more selective about what it covers. In my last blog post, I spoke withRead more

Back during my newsroom days, I drove a very nice comms manager at a hot Silicon Valley startup absolutely crazy. Her CEO had come up with a killer idea how to make good use of some of the unused network infrastructure left over from the pre-dotcom crash era. It was clear to me – asRead more

In recent years, a financially strapped media industry has been tasked with the impossible job of doing more with less. This could not be any clearer than it is now. The joke among reporters is that even in the best of times, the media industry is usually in a depression. That may be a bit of exaggeration, but these are clearly not the best of times.Read more

It’s a classic PR conundrum. A disaster happens. A hurricane. A plane crash. 9/11. You have a relevant story to pitch to press – but do you? Or is doing so just plain tacky? Like never before, PR pros are asking those questions all day and every day. Plainly put, the COVID-19 outbreak is theRead more

There are times to pitch reporters during a crisis and then there are times to stay far, far away. As the world copes with the coronavirus outbreak and its social, business and policy impacts, there are very few “other” stories for the time being. Reporters don’t want to hear about whizzbang new widgets or version 3.X of your SaaSRead more

Over the past several weeks, our lives have been disrupted. Schools, shops, sports, conferences, concerts, businesses – even countries have closed, leaving us trying to figure out what this new normal will look like. For the time being, it is still to be determined. While for most of us the ‘new normal’ will most certainlyRead more

Man, these are crazy times. It seems like everything in the media is tied to coronavirus, either the threat or the misinformation, depending on what you are reading. It turns out that from a data perspective, yes, yes, it is. All. About. Coronavirus. Despite our ever-shrinking media environment, coronavirus has gotten the most press coverageRead more

I recently binge watched Amazon’s new take on Tom Clancy’s CIA-analyst-turned-field-operative, Jack Ryan (played by John Krasinksi, formerly John Halper in “The Office”). Early in episode one, when the higher-ups at the C.I.A. strongarm Ryan to strap on a SIG-Sauer P226 and hop on a plane to fight terrorists in Yemen, he delivers his takeRead more