CIO’s very own Ryan Giggs lookalike editor Martin Veitch has kindly aided tech PR flacks’ planning all over the country with a month-by-month guide to the big tech media stories in 2010.
Helpful addendums from Chameleon include:
February
A slew of stories about mobile payments, mobile apps and mobile handsets following a week long journo drinking binge in Cannes Barcelona at GSM 3GSM MWC. A large telco firm fires its PR company because Microsoft/Google got the front page of the FT MWC supplement.
March
UK tech media stop answering phones because they are at CeBIT although, strangely, it’s largely a consumer show, is in Hannover, and many of them are still seen frequenting Soho drinking holes.
The Times runs a supplement on a technology issue that was hot nine months ago, with almost every article written by the same freelancer and every single story containing quotes from each of the three sponsors of the supplement.
April
Lots of UK tech companies issue new product news releases hoping to get their new financial year off to a flying start.
Also, probably a news cycle on something about phishing and identity theft, using an extremely ignorant person from socioeconomic group D as a case study.
The BBC unwittingly gives a major US corporation a huge front page advert on its main news page based on its launch of a new phone/browser/operating system.
May
Some amazement at a large corporate IT company as a trade tech journalist fails to appreciate the cost of hospitality at the FA Cup final, turns up late, and fails to file a profile piece on the UK marketing director during half time.
June
Plethora of pre-canned stories about how many billions of lost productivity the UK has lost as a result of people ‘throwing sickies’ to watch the World Cup. Outrage in national media that state-owned banks have purchased some hospitality suites and flown bonus-grabbing fat-cats to South Africa at the taxpayers’ expense. Another example of rip-off Britain, and wasn’t this the very type of wastage of taxpayers’ money that Cameron said he’d clamp down on… much huffing in Tunbridge Wells.
July
The Times runs a supplement on a technology issue that was hot nine months ago, with almost every article written by the same freelancer and every single story containing quotes from each of the three sponsors of the supplement.
The BBC unwittingly gives a major US corporation a huge front page advert on its main news page based on its launch of a new phone/browser/operating system.
August
Utterly lame story about an old person using a computer gets run and re-run in every written media in the land. Use of the phrase ‘silver surfer’ goes through the roof and some PR person with too much time on their hands produces a graph from Google Insights that tells us in just 17 paragraphs that people are using the phrase ‘silver surfer’ more than they did the month before.
September
Every US headquartered technology firm that has operations in the UK issues between three and seven news releases, each focused on a different product upgrade with a view to getting Q3 off to a flying start (well, July and August don’t count do they?).
The BBC unwittingly gives a major US corporation a huge front page advert on its main news page based on its launch of a new phone/browser/operating system.
October
The Times runs a supplement on biometrics to coincide with the Biometrics Show, and various biometrics stories appear sporadically throughout the month as a story on The Register about biometrics slowly gets forwarded around various national media freelancers who fancy writing about biometrics. Ben Goldacre does a piece exposing that the commonly quoted stat for the number of CCTV cameras in the UK was in fact just a guess from a bloke-down-the-pub’s friend whose ex-misses knows a copper.
December
Desperate story about an ERP suite being a perfect stocking filler fails to get coverage anywhere except on sarcastic blogs and Twitter missives.
2 Comments
Martin Veitch
6 January 2010
08:32pm
Ha! They’re all in the diary. What about that other old chestnut about ‘danger’ of lost bandwidth as staff tune in to World Cup.
Tony Henderson
7 January 2010
10:45am
Had a quick look in my crystal ball and it’s a bit cloudy but I can see between now and May a slew of stories involving that disastrous mix of politicians and IT.
These stories are:
IT PR companies and IT journos claim the next election will be decided by bloggers and Twitter making the coverage of traditional political reporting redundant
Political journos devote part of each report to rubbishing ideas that the next election will be decided by blogs and Twitter claiming it is no substitute for traditional political reporting – for some reason I keep seeing the name Nick Robinson in my crystal ball!
Lemming like rush of candidates to get “cool” web sites, “groovy” blogs and Tweet like there is no tomorrow. Those without teenage children or interns head towards mass nervous breakdown.
Party web site hacked and IT marketing people go into meltdown pressing PR companies to push there old and tired security stuff and then shout at PR people as a more savvy rival gets interviewed by Nick Robinson.
Political parties realise they could pay off the national debt and have enough cash left over for all MPs expenses if they had taxed the use of the phrase “cloud computing” as PR people make increasingly wild claims about how the next govt need to use it for everything.
2Comments
Technology PR story tracker for 2010
Posted by Steve Loynes January 6 2010 03:53pm