How to Pitch InformationWeek

Circulation & Readership
InformationWeek’s audience consists of 1.6 million CIOs and business technology managers and staff found in more than 250,000 locations: 45.6% live in North America, 27.3% in Europe, 20.9% in Asia, 3.8% in Latin America, 2.4% in Africa and the Middle East.

440,000 IT professionals alone read the magazine each week. It’s first in reach to CIOs (107,000) and technology buyers with the biggest annual budgets ($250,000 to $1 million). 72.8% of the readers are IT executives and senior staff; 27.2% are in business management. Their average annual spend is $45.7 million.

Editorial Coverage
InformationWeek is much more than a weekly print magazine. It’s “at the center of our business technology news gathering and analysis,” says Preston. The style and tone are practical and detailed. It’s the publication to which industry professionals turn for subjects, such as vertical industries and IT.

Sections include:
o In Depth (their take on the latest business technology topic)
o News Filter (how top stories affect readers)
o News & Analysis (cover story)
o Tech Portal (security, software, wireless, mobile)
o High Five (business professional’s insights)
o IT Confidential (industry trends and events)
o Down to Business (urgent issues)
o Personal Tech Guide (useful tech tools)

Special issues: The magazine fields more than 20 research studies every year. Topics include: salary survey, information security survey, CIO agenda, mobile and wireless and business intelligence.

InformationWeek.com
The Web site gets 1.4 million unique monthly visitors and 300,000 weekly enewsletter subscribers.

The five newsletters and their circulation:
o InformationWeek Daily: 100,000
o This Week on InformationWeek: 55,000
o InformationWeek Between the Lines: 100,000
o InformationWeek’s Outsourcing Newsletter: 30,000
o TechCareers Report: 15,000

How to Pitch InformationWeek – 10 Tips
Tip #1. Familiarize yourself with the magazine
Acquire some knowledge of InformationWeek’s content and the focus of the reporters you contact. Indeed, lack of knowledge about the publication is one of Preston’s pet peeves. “Build relationships with reporters. Don’t just blanket them with the same messages you send everyone else.” And don’t think of your query as a pitch. “Ideally, you are not selling something to us; you are providing information that we want.”

Tip #2. Provide contacts
If you have a product you would like InformationWeek to review, provide a few consumer contacts so reporters can get feedback from them. Offer as much detail about the technology and its manufacturer as possible. Avoid industry-speak; describe concisely the characteristics of the product, its purpose, price and audience.

Tip #3. Keep it simple
Keep your information simple and straightforward, yet fascinating enough for a case study. They don’t accept embargoed material. They prefer to take “an end-user enterprise perspective.”

Tip #4. Send an email
Most editors favor email. If you must leave a voicemail, clearly state your name and phone number. Don’t ramble (i.e., don’t wait until the system cuts you off).

Tip #5. Craft subject line
Write succinct yet meaningful subject lines that don’t include the words “press release,” exclamation points or all caps. Then, customize your plain text pitches to the journalist’s coverage.

Tip# 6. Don’t send attachments
Don’t include email attachments, especially unsolicited ones. Do include the following bulleted points: what, when, who, where and how.

Tip #7. Limit number of slides
If you send a PowerPoint presentation, limit it to five slides.

Tip #8. Target your queries
Check InformationWeek’s editorial calendar to better time your queries.

http://www.informationweek.com/edcal/2007

Tip #9. Contact the right reporter
Send your story leads directly to the reporter who covers the beat or technology you’re involved in. You can find a list of reporters, beats and contact information here:

http://www.informationweek.com/contactus.jhtml

Tip #10. Identify time zones
Consider time differences when contacting them. Not everyone is based in New York.

Contribute to InformationWeek
Staff writers and freelancers produce most of the magazine’s content. If you want to freelance, send an email to the managing editor/features.

InformationWeek does not publish unsolicited articles; make sure a story is approved before you spend much time on it. The magazine does accept opinion columns, however. They like to hear your perspective on relevant issues.

Also, consider the Lightning Post — the site’s discussion forum. It connects readers to editors. They don’t promise to answer you, but they do promise to read your message. “Because of sheer volume, we may not respond to every query,” Preston says.

Press Kits
Editors prefer emails to press kits. Always include contact information and a product summary with whatever you send.

Meet Preston and Other Editors
Preston says you can meet the magazine’s editors in any of their offices. They are even available at “the principal’s site, if the principal and story is compelling enough.”

Editors attend various conferences and trade shows. The major one: InformationWeek500, a three-day show at which the 500 most innovative business technology users are named.

Source:Marketing Sherpa

5 Things Facebook Must Do To Be Really Useful

By Alexander Wolfe

1) Drag and drop onto your page. Currently, the process for accessing apps is confusing and cumbersome. Why not adopt a paradigm which allows users to freely configure their Facebook pages, and effectively turn them into their own personal Web sites?

2) RSS feeds and Twitter connections. OK, maybe these are already accessible somehow, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to, for example, post an RSS feed of this blog on my Facebook page. (I know, the world’s waiting for this.)

3) Make it completely — not almost — open to third-party apps. As Zuckerberg admitted at the Web 2.0 Summit, while Facebook is open to third-party apps, it retains the right to drop any app from its platform. When this policy is applied to malicious apps, it’s fine. But if you’re talking about an outside developer who’s poured his or her whole company into improving Facebook, it’s not so good. Hey, this even means aMicrosoft type company could be cut off. Either you’re open, or you’re not. Facebook should be open.

4) Tear down “The Wall.” Whatever the heck Facebook’s Wall is supposed to be, it ain’t. I don’t get it. Like I said in number 1, above, your whole Facebook page should effectively be your Wall.

5) Build out Facebook’s user networks. I hate to say it, but right now, Ning has got it going on much better than Facebook when it comes to connecting a group of people with common interests. Perhaps this is because Facebook started out as a college kids’ social net, where it was enough to tag yourself as going to Podunk U. to establish your group identity. Even now, when Facebook has been opened up to everyone, it’s hard to easily find the networks you want to hook into, and they’re pretty much defined along school or work lines. Facebook needs to make it easier for users to create their own groups, and there needs to be a completely separate sub-universe where these go according to one’s interests, a la Ning.

Source: