Thu, 2015-02-19 09:50
Sam Whitmore
SWMS Profile: Julie Bort, Business Insider
More than a few PR pros complain that Business Insider enterprise editor Julie Bort is tough to pitch. A veteran of LAN Times, VARBusiness and Network World, Julie has been around the track. Early in her career she also worked for PR Newswire -- so she knows all about your key messages.
Want to upgrade to full access to our SWMS Profiles archive? Send e-mail to Christy for details.
We profile Re/code culture reporter Nellie Bowles on a day when the woman who hired her, Kara Swisher, is to interview the President of the United States. That's something Nellie could pull off, too. She's just as erudite, charismatic and good on camera. Like Kara, Nellie can write books: she's writing one now, for Hachette, about Silicon Valley culture. And she writes as colorfully as anyone at Re/code or anywhere else. 
For PR, Ron Miller is a godsend -- an earnest, competent enterprise reporter for TechCrunch, a publication that every client covets. "TechCrunch gets pigeonholed in a way that's not necessarily accurate or fair," Ron told us this week. "In some ways it might be because they think of it as the TechCrunch of 2008, 2009 or 2010. It is still that, but it's more than that."
It's been years since Fortune senior writer Michal Lev-Ram was paid to walk trade show floors, head back to the hotel room and click the keys. She still writes and remains pitchable. But it's best to think of modern Michal as a businesswoman and a brand unto herself. She's fresh off co-chairing last month's Fortune Most Powerful Women, Next Gen conference; there will be another this year and she's recruiting speakers for it. 
Few publications are hotter these days than Quartz. According to AdAge, Quartz now attracts more unique monthly U.S. visitors than Fortune. It just lured finance reporter Shelly Banjo from the WSJ; openings remain for a data journalist and for video and op-ed chiefs. On board since July, Quartz tech editor Dan Frommer fits right in because he too is something of a data journalist.
This will be a big year for Wired. It's redesigning its web site. It's consolidating Wired Enterprise and Wired Business into a single comprehensive section. Its new boss? Same as the old boss -- senior editor Cade Metz. As Conde Nast reevaluates everything about Wired in advance of the redesign, Cade has been doing some reevaluating of his own. And what he says might surprise you.
Rachael King is the nicest tough reporter you'll ever meet. The San Francisco-based scribe for the WSJ's CIO Journal is tough only because she knows exactly what she wants from PR and will not compromise. "The bar is pretty high here," Rachael told us last week. "I'm looking to interview CIOs of Fortune 500 companies... even better if it's a Fortune 100 company. What are they doing with the product? What are they doing that they couldn't do before? When I get a pitch like that, I always stop to look."
Does Harvard Business Review's new web site, launched last month, presage equally new paths for contributed content? Sort of. The new HBR emphasizes charts, diagrams, videos and interactive graphics. Can you imagine your ideas conveyed this way? In researching their readership this year, editors rediscovered that readers like to save and store articles for a long time. Will the concept you're pitching be as valuable in a year as it is today?
Once again we shine the Tech Edit Spotlight on 
Few reporters understand PR and journalism equally well. Jon Fortt is one of them. That doesn't necessarily make him easier to pitch. But in this era of unprecedented PR-newsmaker hostility, it does make Jon something of an inspiration. Jon understands PR so well in part because the biggest part of his job is to interview some of the most well-trained, on-message CEOs in the world.
Looking to place IT-related contributed content, not just once or twice, but regularly? The fast-growing IDG Contributor Network "is a collection of blogs written by leading IT practitioners about technology trends, business opportunities and the challenges they face every day." The IDG Contributor Network is directed by Joyce Carpenter, who spent eight years building Computerworld's blog network.
Anyone who ever wrote for The Register comes equipped with a sharp tongue. Jack Clark certainly does. Bloomberg's cloud and distributed systems reporter can always be counted on for Tweets like... 
