Blog

In today’s politically charged environment, it isn’t uncommon for companies to want to stay out of politics. “We need to remain neutral,” is a common refrain – especially from smaller companies.  And why not? Political rhetoric, divisiveness and partisanship is now an epidemic in this country. And, for so many leaders it makes sense that they would want to avoid the topic entirely.   Read more

Four months after publishing its 2020 State of Tech Journalism Report, Muckrack dropped its 2021 State of Journalism Report this week. There are many similarities between reporters in general and tech beat reporters, but the story is in the differences – two in particular: how reporters view the quality and presentation of information we share;Read more

Welcome to the January 2021 edition of Top Conversations in Technology, where we break down which topics are leading, rising and falling each month to help technology marketers maximize relevance and adapt to changing market dynamics. In this month’s analysis, we focus on variations in news and blog citation volumes month-over-month (versus December 2020) and year-over-year (versus JanuaryRead more

Long after we close the books on 2020, the impact of COVID-19 will remain – not only for the lives lost to the pandemic but also for the truly seismic changes it forced in the way we work. And while every industry was forced to undergo sharp, sometimes painful transformations in the last 12 months,Read more

Technology is a fascinating, changing story but it’s not always easy to understand. That’s something to keep front-of-mind before sitting down with a reporter. The other thing to remember is that many – maybe most? – of the tech writers you’re going to meet aren’t tech experts. That doesn’t mean they can’t grasp the nuancesRead more

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