Q&A With Tech Reporter Salvador Rodriguez of Reuters

I recently sat down with Salvador Rodriguez, as part of our ongoing series of interviews with journalists, to discuss his new beat at Reuters, interests and what we can do as PR professional to work better together.

Q: What types of stories are you most interested in covering in your new role?

My new beat at Reuters includes enterprise software and cloud computing. To me, the cloud computing side is the most interesting part of my beat and I’m really excited to cover AWS. Another topic that is top of mind for me is artificial intelligence and how companies are incorporating this technology in different ways.

Q: How will this role be different than your previous reporting roles?

In previous roles, I was published 2-3 times a week. Now I have a longer turnaround time, which gives me more time to work on a piece and really go a bit deeper on the topic at hand.

Q: Where do you read or find news that is most interesting to you?

I’m constantly looking at Twitter to get news that’s relevant to my beat. Biz Carson is one of my favorite people to follow; I think she’s incredibly smart and she writes really compelling stories. I also think Techmeme, Reddit and subreddits are key, I find a ton of great stuff in there.

Q: What’s your biggest PR pet peeve?

I read every single email that comes to my inbox and there is nothing worse than when a PR person doesn’t know what I cover so they send irrelevant material. It’s also frustrating when it’s clearly not a personalized email and just copied and pasted from one reporter to the next - that’s a good way to not get noticed; however, I would be able to overlook the fact that an email isn’t personalized if the pitch is relevant to my beat.

Q: What is one thing that PR people can do to make your job easier?

Follow me on Twitter; if you follow my tweets, it’s really easy to see what I’m interested in. In general, it’s always good to check in to see what a reporter is working on, and maybe there is a way for the reporter and your client to meet in the middle. Starting that dialogue with myself or another reporter is really important in building the relationship between us and your client.