Attention is Cheap. Credibility Isn't.
Tech founders are often frustrated with journalists and legacy outlets. They still, begrudgingly, need their help.
Tech’s race to insert itself into culture has repeatedly proven its power to reshape other industries. Journalism is one of them, and one that can feel more like a power struggle than a symbiotic relationship.
Tech founders have no real need for a third party to get the word out about their companies. It’s faster, easier, and cheaper to self-produce and promote on social media. And, you get to control your own narrative.
That doesn’t make legacy publications obsolete. I’ve found it actually makes their appeal stronger.
We were all reminded of this last week with a viral post by Vice President of 1X Dar Sleeper. Their humanoid home task robots scored a feature on Wired, where the journalist discussed the bizarre and suggestive marketing tactics the company was using to promote the launch; the article has since been updated to tell readers 1X had taken down aspects the author originally referenced. Sleeper and other executives were unhappy.
He was disappointed and regretful, but not surprised, since he’s found “dishonesty and malice” rampant in journalism. His call to action to let “the technological revolution… inspire a journalism renaissance” instead of letting it “fall into further decay” made me wonder, as outbursts with this motif always do, if there’s nuance to his preferred solution to the industry beyond us writing whatever our subjects want (which is neither ethical nor realistic).
I read the Wired article and noted that 1X had, in its aftermath, scrubbed its marketing before airing its grievances to Wired privately and publicly. Sleeper then posited the article as journalism in microcosm, and spoke to journalists in a tone that was condescending about letting the need for clicks and inflammatory stories get in the way of human brilliance being shared.
Clicks driving profit in digital journalism is a problem, one I promise journalists are also frustrated by and wary of. It is, ironically, a symptom of how tech has changed our industry to be less human, and gets in the way of the celebration of brilliance tech executives say they want. I understand the frustration that coverage of a critical moment wasn’t what they were expecting, and the Wired article was admittedly a little strange — but so were the relevant aspects of 1X’s marketing. It wasn’t the perfect profile piece on their product, but condemning journalism as clickbait felt unearned to me. The most inflammatory part of that saga, and the post that garnered two and a half million views, was the company’s executive making it publicly known he didn’t get what he wanted.
That brings me to a workshop in San Francisco this weekend for early-stage founders to learn how to get similar press coverage without putting thousands of dollars a month into PR. Press Club, the hosts, showed off their AI agent that scans thousands of tech articles, catalogs reporters who write them, and gives a personalized ranking of the top hundred journalists who may write the story they want about their company. It generates “human-sounding” cold emails, inserting personalized praise and references to the journalist’s recent work before pitching the user’s company as their next story. Even without using their AI, they walked attendees through the process of cold emailing tech journalists.
It was fascinating to watch the presentation of an algorithm designed to win my own attention, and even in the wake of the 1X debacle, it was fascinating to see what journalism still signifies. With journalism’s reputation in a volatile place these days, what still incentivizes founders’ hopes of winning a feature slot on Wired, Forbes, or TechCrunch? If there is at least some consensus of distrust for journalists in this space, why not just rely on social media for distribution and reach?
One of the co-founders of Press Club answered this plainly: credibility. The opportunity for self-promotion that social platforms made possible quickly oversaturated them. Reputable publications, in the words of Kathy Wang, “create hype and FOMO a LinkedIn post can’t.”
That explanation makes the 1X outburst make more sense. They felt attacked by an outlet with credibility. Their response was to attack that credibility. If we’re putting journalism’s relationship with the public in microcosm, that reaction is a great place to start.
One thing the event emphasized about looking for press coverage: sell yourself and your company as a dual product. The mentality — the Founder’s Mindset, as I keep hearing — has to be “I’m crazy, and that’s why I’m uniquely capable of building this company.” Wang then laughed and added, “It needs to actually be true, guys. Journalists will fact-check you. You can’t lie.”
Credibility aside, I wonder more than ever what role journalism now plays. The life cycle laid out in front of me is mostly artificial. A possible future of journalism production looks like an AI agent reading the articles, creating and quantifying profiles of journalists, and writing personalized emails that play to egos, with the end goal of a brief one-on-one that becomes an article the AI that incited the interaction can algorithmically predict the outcome of. It makes me wonder who, or what, is actually reading our pieces that are seen as prizes of social capital.
How journalism shifts and maintains footing on the moving fault lines of the digital space has always interested me. Social media and the democratization of access to an audience has morphed journalists and outlets from arbiters of information distribution into… something else. Hostile and opportunistic intermediaries, or independent watchdogs over private and public power. I’ve found it depends who you ask and depends on the day.
The humanity in journalism that is clearly here to stay is the power dynamic it disrupts by observing. The scarcity of social credibility in an internet where anyone can promote themselves is what makes founders still hope to land in Wired, however the story ends up.
This is why we keep receipts. 😏