Hi! I'm Darrell Etherington – I'm a Director here on the team on GrowthX, handling client relationships and delivery. But I'm also a longtime media student and observer, and a former journalist, having spent over a decade at TechCrunch, and many years at GigaOM before that (old heads will know). ,
One trend that I’ve seen recur in different incarnations over the years is that of businesses, technology companies and startups hiring people with media backgrounds to build them content properties with an editorial bent. Coincident with the current, enthusiastic AI investment and building cycle, we’re seeing another wave of that – including some splashy announcements like NVIDIA bringing on Shira Tibken from the Wall Street Journal to helm its technical blog.
I myself spun up and resuscitated some media properties for my last employer, OMERS Ventures, including a newsletter, and some investor-led cross-media initiatives. I also led the ‘onshoring’ of its editorial blog efforts back from Medium to its own domain – a project designed to make sure that the firm got the most bang for its buck when it came to thought leadership and demonstrated domain expertise.
Owning your own channel is not a new insight
A few years ago, during part of the time I was a journalist at TechCrunch, Andreessen Horowitz made a lot of noise about building up its own editorial chops and properties. Some inside baseball for those curious – at the same time, they also ramped down a lot of their access to third-party media organizations like TC. That specific effort didn’t quite live up to expectations, I’m pretty confident, but it was prescient in that it foresaw the need for brands to:
- Own their own narrative, and
- Do so at least in part with something that looked more like independent media, and less like blatant content marketing
I’ve been interested in this fusion of content that looks more like news or editorial, but that’s still funded by, and serves a brand, ever since. And the new wave of projects along these lines comes at a time when the nature of search, discovery and community/audience engagement is changing faster than ever thanks to the rise of generative AI, chatbots, and LLM-powered search.
To gain more insight on how and why some brands are looking to longtime journalists to build out existing or entirely new editorial properties and content initiatives, I spoke to my old TechCrunch friend and colleague Ron Miller. Ron wrote for TechCrunch for over a decade, covering enterprise software and B2B companies, and doing so at the top of the industry. Last year, however, he left TC and journalism entirely – instead joining Ed Sim and team at boldstart ventures, where he created a new blog and newsletter called FastForward.
Why build a publication with journalistic roots inside a VC?
FastForward features interviews with C-suite execs at all the leading enterprise tech companies, including Qualtrics, Klaviyo, Salesforce, Akamai, Snowflake and more. Ron also talks to a lot of big tech buyers, including leadership at Sam’s Club, JPMorgan Chase, The Boston Red Sox and others. I asked him about how he thinks about FastForward and its dual-mission of providing journalistic profiles, while also serving boldstart’s venture investment interests.
Here are the key quotes specifically about building an editorial publication to benefit a business:
"Even though this is a journalistic exercise, it's still, at the end of the day, kind of a content marketing piece, even though I'm not writing directly about boldstart or boldstart portfolio companies,” he said. “Eventually I'll be doing events, where we invite some of these people out of this network that I'm building up, and get them in a room with the portfolio founders. And then – hopefully – some magic happens and they start to do business together. My job is kind of to be the middle man in that."
There’s a balance to be struck when it comes to reaching the kind of high-influence, high-impact C-suite buyers that can really move the needle for enterprise-focused startups looking to scale up to tens or hundreds of millions in ARR. It’s a long game that relies on providing a real value exchange – something which you can’t accomplish by inviting these same individuals to collaborate with you on something that looks much more like traditional marketing.
“If I'm going to these people and saying ‘I want to introduce you directly to this person,’ and it's not an organic thing, that's very different from me saying ”You should meet this person – you should do business together,’ because we’ve built a relationship originally built on curiosity and trust," Ron explained.
Playing the long game
It’s an admittedly slow-burn strategy that takes time to develop and mature – though Ron’s been able to attract world-class executives as subjects for his FastForward profiles basically from day one, thanks to the reputation he’s already established over his long career on the journalistic side. It also helped immensely that the first interview subject featured on FastForward was Salesforce CIO Juan Perez.
“The hope was that once we did that, we would get sort of a FOMO effect, and I would have PR people going, “Wait a minute, I want to be in FastForward and Ron's blog. And that's what happened – within the first week, I had five big names.”
Great guests become a flywheel with an emerging media property like Ron’s, and that, in turn, attracts an audience. Audience is at the core of why companies and brands are increasingly looking to stand up their own original editorial initiatives – especially when traffic and conversions from traditional search are trending down in the face of AI-powered answer engines.
"Everybody seems to want to build and own an audience of their own,” Ron said. “I thikn the only way to stand out for your customer base, or even your potential customer base, is to give people a reason to consistently come back and engage with you directly."
AI is a force multiplier for thin editorial organizations
As for whether Ron uses AI in his own writing, the answer is that he does not when it comes to the writing itself – but he does rely on it more and more as an editor, reviewer and reader, especially now that he’s a solo operator rather than part of a newsroom. Still, he finds that the off-the-shelf consumer tools have a ways to go before they can be a true editorial partner.
“There are things that I find every day that it flags that a human editor would look at and know immediately that that was not a problem,” he said. “It can definitely help in some ways, and sometimes I'm amazed at what it comes up with if I kind of keep it narrowly focused."
Be sure to check out FastForward and subscribe to the newsletter for more insight from Ron, along with in-depth profiles of CIOs, CTOs and leaders guiding AI adoption at some of the biggest companies in the world.