Todd Bishop
Todd Bishop and his colleagues at GeekWire have strategically blended business journalism with leading-edge media business practices to create a regional tech publication with worldwide readership.
Todd is convinced that content marketers and other content strategists could benefit from bringing a journalistic approach to their content. With a research-based, journalistic approach "you're not just telling people what you want them to hear because it aligns with your business interests, but you're finding things that are really valuable out there that people would not have known otherwise."
Even as GeekWire models modern media practices, Todd remains enthusiastic about old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism - filing FOIAs, digging through corporate IPO filings, and exposing business scams.
We talked about:
GeekWire's blend of editorial content and event production
how journalists are to content strategy as fish are to water, completely immersed in it
how GeekWire developed its position as an international source for tech news even as it stays regionally focused
his approach to balancing the editorial needs and expectations of his readers with GeekWire's business goals
GeekWire's own HQ2 experiment
how GeekWire turns fun and engaging internal team-development activities into engaging stories
the power of research - finding and sharing information that's in plain sight
Todd's Bio
Todd Bishop is co-founder and editor of GeekWire, a longtime technology journalist who covers subjects including cloud tech, e-commerce, virtual reality, devices, apps and tech giants such as Amazon.com, Apple, Microsoft and Google. A native of Orland, Calif., he has worked as a reporter for publications including The Philadelphia Inquirer, Puget Sound Business Journal and Seattle P-I.
Video
Here's the video version of our conversation (we spoke in-person and didn't record a Zoom video as I usually do, so this is just a YouTube version of the audio recording):
https://youtu.be/2-xdsAFXNH0
Show Notes/"Transcript"
[Not an actual transcript - just my quick notes on first listen-through]
0:20 - my intro
0:40 - Todd intro - longtime newspaper reporter and views content through that lens, with a modern twist - GeekWire is a national/international tech publication
1:40 - founding of GeekWire - origins in Seattle P-I - Jonathan Spasato sole invester and co-founder - bootstrapped from initial investment, and now profitable, has grown based on the business - big portion is events -10-14 a year - but also make money off of advertising and sponsored content - maintains news and advertising divide
3:#6 - content is the starting point for all - events, news, etc - people read GeekWire for all kinds of reasons - insights, tips, recruting, job hunting - reporters traditonally think of what they write as changing the world - not always Watergate or Pentatgon Papers - can be more local - would love to win a Pulitzer, but happy where they are now
5:00 - used Google satellite maps to find Amazon's secret drone testing site - also exposed a scam by Order Ahead, fake ordering service - try to do that kind of civic journalism - but also a lot of practical
5:45 - demise of enterprise journalism?
6:00 - everyone's a pulisher now, content marketing, establishing expertise - content marketers ofte struggle - as a journalist, my hypothesis is that you're so immersed in it (content strategy) that it is to you as water is to a fish
7:00 - did you take a strategic approach to, say, the beats that you choose to cover?
7:05 - yes, in some ways, more, though, about what they know is important - fascinating stuff happening here [in Seattle] - Amazon, MS resurgence, now, space - SpaceX and Blue Origin,
