The Must List: The 5 Best Articles We Read This Week

Remember when we went on and on about how writing is the most important skill in PR and then we continued to proselytize how you can get better at it by reading, and reading A LOT?

Here are the 5 best articles we read this week:

The whole world’s talking about Caitlyn Jenner, and with good reason. There’s been so many articles about her – good, bad, annoying, provocative, thoughtful, and everything in between – so we decided to go with one that focuses on how she handled her announcement. Yes, we chose the PR angle. We’re shameless. Josef Adalian at the Vulture goes in-depth into her press strategy. h/t to Peter Himler for sharing the link.

 

 

Speaking of reading A LOT, do you have a couple of hours to spare to dig through Kleiner Perkins’ legendary Internet seer Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report? It’s worth every second you’ll spend soaking up Meeker’s considerable expertise. If Meeker told us to wear white after Labor Day, we’d listen!

 

 

If, like us, you want to see the agency search process completely overhauled, you’ll find former AdAge editor Rupal Parekh’s criticism of Lyft’s “wildcard” agency RFP stunt of interest. Parekh brings up that underdog startup Lyft is courting tried-and-true big name advertising agencies instead of scrappy shops that might better fit their own image. This is the startup that plastered giant fuzzy pink mustaches on people’s cars and insisted on “fist bumping” as a greeting, after all. Yet their agency search process appears to be as boringly rote as everyone else’s, while under the guise of throwing a bone to the little guys. No fist bump for you, Lyft.

 

 

Last week’s news that highly respected tech media outlet re/code (founded by the two most powerful tech reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher) was being acquired by Vox Media surprised many industry insiders. Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell convincingly lays out the reasons why re/code made their decision. In light of Gigaom’s shuttering, combined with the proliferation of good tech reporters leaving to become venture capitalists or start their own startup, what can tech media do to maintain eyeballs, quality reporting and their overhead?

 

 

Finally, this last link isn’t an article but very worth checking out. Apparent “Entourage” hater, Wendy Molyneaux Drake, came up with a very clever, funny way to raise money for nonprofit CureSearch. Drake didn’t dump ice cold water but instead leveraged her amusing (and some might say, completely rational) hatred for the HBO brofest to shed spotlight on a very worthy cause – children’s cancer research. She raised a whopping $30k for CureSearch – amazing. Congratulations/Sorry, Wendy! h/t/ to our pal Pamela Ribon for sharing the link.