Soon: Live conference call with Anthony Ha on TED
At 2pm EST / 11am PST, we will have TechCrunch writer Anthony Ha talking live with Extra Crunch readers about all things TED conference, which was last week in Vancouver. Come armed with your questions, or send us an email if you want us to ask on your behalf. Arman is fielding them at arman.tabatabai@techcrunch.com. Call details will be sent to subscribers an hour before the call.
How to pitch to a (tech) journalist
I wrote a two-set piece yesterday about how to work with journalists. While written with founders and startups in mind, the lessons apply to pretty much anyone who works with the media or wants to.
The key — as with everything in life — is building relationships. You want to know the people who cover your company. You want them to know you too. That doesn’t mean you have to chat with them every day, but it does mean that making a quality human connection will take you far.
I also talk about newsworthiness and (quite extensively) the logistics of embargoes and exclusives.
Here is the hard, cold reality: There are a lot of damn startups out there. In any given week, there are now hundreds of fundings, thousands of people switching jobs, many, many partnerships announced and monstrous new products released. Popular journalists in this industry can get upwards of 500 emails per day clamoring for their attention. Yet, the bandwidth for writers and publications remains mostly static.
No one and no publication can cover it all. And so, to get your story out there, you have to focus on the quality of your news.
Newsworthiness is in the eye of the beholder. Every editor and writer has their own standards, their own taste of what they are looking for. Some writers focus on funding announcements and want to cover those in real time. Others focus on new product launches or features.
The master list of PR DON’Ts (or how not to piss off the writer covering your startup)
The flip side on how to pitch to a journalist is how to avoid pissing said journalist off when you finally have their attention. There are so many mistakes and annoyances that people do every day to vex the writers covering their companies, and so I polled the TechCrunch staff to find our common enemies. The total list ended up at 16, and each complaint was shared pretty much universally among TCers.
DON’T pitch multiple journalists at the same publication without telling them
Newsrooms, understandably, are reasonably decentralized places. Reporters are out in the field finding stories, not spending oodles of time coordinating their stories with their counterparts around the world. And so when founders pitch their story to five people simultaneously and separately without telling anyone, it creates an enormous amount of waste — and ultimately puts you on our blacklist.
Instead, reach out to the single writer who you think is most relevant at a publication. If you don’t hear back after a reasonable period of time (and no, an hour is not reasonable), then go ahead and pick one additional writer to reach out to, and mention, “Hey, I reached out to Danny Crichton with this news but didn’t hear back, so wanted to reach out to you instead to see if you were interested.”
Some PR firms think that is unwieldy, and will tell you privately that the only way to get your news article out there is to carpet bomb every writer at a media company with separate emails. Trust me: these firms have a reputation, and their stories are written up far less often than if they weren’t involved at all.
The new, new web
Our resident technology columnist and HappyFunCorp CTO Jon Evans takes a substantial look at the new ways in which content is now handled on the web. Headless CMSs, JAMStack, static site generators and more are revolutionizing the architecture of web delivery, and Evans has a highly readable introduction to these technologies and why they matter:
Traditional CMSes are a relatively tightly coupled part of the same system which ultimately rendered the pages to End Users. However, this tight coupling has become a little awkward. What happens when you want to render the same content in a desktop page, mobile page, phone app, tablet, and Apple Watch? Is one of those considered the “true” output, previewed and referred to during writing and editing, while the others are second-class citizens? That doesn’t seem right. Furthermore, if you’re building single-page apps, which pull their content as an API, why does your CMS have anything to do with that presentation layer at all?
The answer is: increasingly, it doesn’t. The last few years have seen the rise of the so-called “headless CMS,” into which Content is entered by creators/editors, and from which it is siphoned via APIs — but which are, critically, and by design, completely and entirely separate from how that almighty Content is packaged and sent to the End User.
Why it’s so hard to know who owns Huawei
I had a short piece on the growing challenge of understanding Huawei’s true ownership. The company says that it is employee-owned, but the challenge is that the very definition of ownership is different in the Chinese context than in the American one.
The “employee-owned” aspect comes from this trade union ownership. But as [the authors of this research paper] discuss, trade unions in China are treated very differently from their counterparts in the West. “In China, trade union officials are appointed by management or by the administratively superior trade union organization, not chosen by the members. Thus, under Chinese labor law, employees qua employees have no voice in how the union leadership decides to use its share ownership in Huawei Holding.”
Key takeaways from TechCrunch Robotics
Last week I was in wondrously sunny Berkeley, California for TechCrunch’s Robotics sessions event. We had our conference organizer and hardware editor Brian Heater and Lucas Matney talk about their major takeaways from the event on our conference call last week, and we have now published the transcript of their conversation.
Brian also goes into more details of the sort of logistics that comes out of compiling one of these events:
Brian Heater: I realized something when we were dipping our toes in the water and trying to figure out whether we wanted to do our first robotics event. We flew a couple of us out to Boston and did a dinner. It was probably five or six months out and we were trying to figure out if there was enough interest in the industry, if there were kind enough people, if the infrastructure, if all these things were right and we had this little private dinner, it was probably 30 people tops, and it was very funny because everybody in the room already knew each other. And because it was Boston, basically everybody there had worked for iRobot .
Thanks
To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.