Aug 25, 2017 Kaley Carpenter
Continuing our series of conversations with journalists, I caught up with DZone’s Tom Smith to discuss what makes for a good story, tech predictions, and some advice for PR professionals.
Tom is a marketing strategist, research analyst, and writer at DZone who conducts one-on-one interviews to obtain insights for developers and engineers. He has covered everything from Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud, to DevOps, integration, Java, performance, monitoring, security and web.
Q: What do you think makes for a good story?
For the DZone community of developers, engineers, and architects, they like to know how a technology is going to make their lives simpler and easier. They like to know how the technology works, read use cases, see code blocks, and tutorials.
Q: How important are press releases to you in your story research and writing process?
Given that DZone has a full editorial calendar, press releases are of little value to me.
Q: What is your favorite story of 2017? (That you wrote.)
The biggest opportunities for the successful implementation of artificial intelligence.
Q: In your opinion, how has journalism and your role changed this year?
Versus the past two or three years, very little. It is still about telling stories that will be interesting to our audience.
Q: Do you have any tech predictions you'd like to share?
Companies that implement DevOps and make the digital transformation will surpass those that do not because they will inherently provide a better customer experience and I believe that is how companies will differentiate themselves moving forward. Listen, solve the customer’s problem, make their life simpler and easier, earn a customer for life.
Q: How many PR pitches do you receive? What makes for a good PR pitch - one that will stand out from all the others in your inbox?
10/day. Know who our target audience is and the type of information they find interesting.
Q: Do you have any PR pet peeves you’d like to share?
Know that we are not interested in management changes or funding and leave us off those pitches. Coach executives to tell a story versus selling their solution. When an executive gets on the phone and talks about the features and benefits of a product, he is wasting his time and mine.
