What a top tech blogger has to say about journalism

I recently had the pleasure of attending a journalism conference in Cambridge organized by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy,  Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship, and the Graduate School of Design.

One of the speakers was Kara Swisher, the founder of AllThingsD.com, an immensely popular tech, media and Internet news site (4 million readers) which she launched 5 years ago after she personally began to think that printed newspapers were becoming irrelevant.

Swisher doesn’t mince words. You would expect nothing less from a hardened journalist – one who turned down a gig covering the White House when she worked at the Washington Post because she was interested in a new phenomenon: the Internet, and AOL.

PR and Social InkLings for the Week of November 28

This past week in the wonderful world of social media was fitting for the bustling pre-holiday season: articles covered everything from Facebook’s IPO to Britney Spears on Google+, and we were left feeling a little like we do after an impromptu trip to the mall—overwhelmed, but somehow satisfied. Below, I share a few highlights:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Facebook IPO

There has been a flurry of news surrounding the Facebook IPO—with analysts and users speculating: will they, won’t they? Recently, Facebook officially announced that the company will go public between April and June of 2012. Most of us know that Zuckerberg and the gang aren’t exactly struggling in the revenue department (the company is valued at almost $100 billion) and might wonder why they’re moving forward with this plan. This Mashable article breaks down the pros and cons of going public.

Do Journalists Care About the Art of the Pitch?

12 Tips from the Mass Technology Leadership Council Innovation UnConference

Photo by Adam Zand

Today I was lucky to be part of a panel that was sparked in part by my blog post on the Art of Pitching the Media. We wanted to expand on this topic to better understand the perspective of both journalists and PR people when it comes to news value, pitching stories and building relationships.

We discussed this issue in-depth today at the Mass Technology Leadership Council Innovation UnConference at the Hynes Convention Center. It’s an amazing event that pulls the entrepreneurial eco-system in Massachusetts together in a unique setting that opens up conversations that could not take place anywhere else. The following is a snapshot of just one of those conversations where I joined Scott Kirsner, Innovation Economy columnist for The Boston Globe and Rodney Brown, news editors for Mass High Tech, along with PR pros Patrick Rafter and Adam Zand in a discussion that visited some important issues and offered even more important takeaways. Adam was ambitious enough to organize the panel and nimble enough to moderate it.

Letting Go

I have hard time letting go. I work hard to find the right balance between the dings of my email, Twitter alerts, and text messages on my iPhone and the time I spend with my family (see my post on The Good and Bad of NOW). But when I’m at work, I’m at work. I have a hard time letting the hard-working, smart people we’ve hired fly off on their own without my edits, perspective, input or help. In the words that G.I. Joe turned into conventional wisdom, I suppose that “knowing is half the battle.”