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April 14, 2009
Silicon Alley Insider
I just got off of the phone with Henry Blodget, the former Wall Street analyst who runs Siliconalleyinsider.com, covering digital media, technology and advertising. From a standing start 18 months ago, the site attracts more than one million plus unique visitors a month, so that it ranks second behind TechCrunch and ahead of GigaOM, VentureBeat, All Things D and other tech sites. The operation employs seven journalists in a newsroom in New York City; each is expected to file seven to ten articles a day. Blodget and Kevin Ryan (disclosure; a good friend), founder and former CEO of DoubleClick, created the site as part of Businessinsider.com, which gets 2 million unique visitors a month. Here are excerpts from our discussion:
1) We are broadcasters in print. We start work at 6 am and are constantly posting stories throughout the work day from 9 am to 5 pm. We work the opposite schedule to print reporters, whose content is up at midnight or on the door step at 6 am the next day. We do real time reporting. Our reporters are always thinking how they can post another nugget, how they can blend short and long form content.
2) This is a conversational medium, and our reporting standard on a story requires us to have a single credible source who says something interesting. If we can't verify it immediately, we often go with it and say clearly that it hasn't been verified. Most times, the story is correct; if it needs to be amended, we do so immediately. This is the way information travels by phone on Wall Street. It allows us to fill a niche between industry scuttlebutt and formal news reports.
3) Commentary is critical. There are many places that report the news; our readers appreciate our opinions whether or not they agree. Our breakthrough was the coverage of the Microsoft Yahoo proposed merger. We did 20 separate articles on the first day. We published spread sheets giving detailed analysis on the deal.
4) We focus on larger companies. Our competitive edge is business reporting plus strategic analysis. Our broad site, The Businessinsider.com competes with Forbes and Fortune. We will take an announcement of a new product, then discuss the competitive implications.
5) Our readers include Wall Street traders, technology companies, professional services firms that work for tech clients (headhunters, lawyers, consultants). They are a true community; they are often good sources of stories.
6) We do not feel that video content is central to our value proposition yet. Video in business media is still a weak link. We will be improving our game, capturing video snippets of CEO interviews, not the 45 minute discussions on CNBC, but material of value to viewers in hurry.
7) We respond to relationships with PR people. We are not going to burn you. Just treat us fairly and help us where you can. If we hear something about your client, we will likely call before we go with it. But we don’t react well to strong arm tactics and we will not seek your approval before writing a story.
8) Our staffers have general business background and domain expertise. They can do financial analysis as well.
9) Our future is to move into green tech, deep tech, bio-technology. There is much room to expand the concept. The goal at Businessinsider.com is to be to business press as the Huffington Post is to daily newspapers.
This kind of medium will require PR people to change their game:
• We will be feeding a news machine that is most similar to Washington DC, with a constant appetite for news. We will have to segment announcements, so that the news stays fresh. In this way, we will straddle mainstream media and the digital challengers, offering each the opportunity to opine on a given event.
• We will have to persuade our clients to be more public with more news. News is less an event and more a continuous flow of information informing the ongoing discussion; we must correct misstatement with alacrity.
• We should aggregate information from inside and outside the company to provide a definitive source of information about a product or issue from the client’s own web site.
• We can provide short-form fact-based video interviews, as long as we ensure transparency on the source of the information, because there’s no way eight reporters can be everywhere with cameras.
Let me know what you think.
Posted by Edelman at April 14, 2009 9:48 AM |
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Comments
Richard,
I liked this a lot.
Always interesting to get ..inside.. a business like the Insider.
Thanks for sharing the story with us.
Seb
Posted by: Seb Haigh at April 16, 2009 4:44 PM
The Internet has created an insatiable appetite for news and it is going to be up to the PR professional to feed the beast. This kind of medium sparks a lot of thought about how PR people need to adapt.I think PR professionals are faced with an ever-changing gamut of ways to communicate with target publics. How might we do this? Perhaps through direct business-to-consumer outlets including various facets of social media from Twitter, to blogs, to cloud communities. Who knows? I agree that companies are going to have to provide more content more often. The struggle will be making sure that companies don’t get boring. If each news bit is indeed new, how long can this cycle perpetuate?
Posted by: Marissa Yennie at April 20, 2009 6:38 PM
I definitely think PR people need to change their game. New technologies are coming up and they need to learn to adapt quickly. I also think it is great that business will share more information, but I feel that the constant flow of information will cause problems. If a company does not have exciting or interesting news, what news will come out that day? Stressing constant news could make the company put out useless or boring news.
Posted by: jennifer at May 4, 2009 12:03 PM