Coffee with a Journalist: Emilia David, VentureBeat

Written by OnePitch | Dec 10, 2024 8:00:00 AM

Emilia David is a senior AI reporter at VentureBeat.

In this episode, Emilia offers valuable insights on how to effectively pitch AI stories, emphasizing the importance of understanding her beat and the necessity of detailed, research-driven subject lines.

Follow Emilia on LinkedIn and X/Twitter.

Click below to listen to the full conversation and read below for highlights from the interview:

Insights on Relationship Building and Sources

[00:11:08] BB: What about relationships? You are here in New York City. Do you want to meet? I mean, we've seen you, Emilia, so we know, but do you want to meet. Publicist? Do you want to have any relationships with them whatsoever? And tell us, how do we do that?

[00:11:26] ED: I'm in a WeWork phone booth right now, and the reason I'm in a WeWork phone booth is Venture Beat is fully remote, but I go outside to the outside world because I'm often meeting people. And I met with the CEO today. Last night, I had dinner with a publicist. So I do go out and meet people. I. And then I end up. Because I have other calls, I end up having to go to a.

[00:11:56] ED: We work because I. I have trouble working from a coffee shop when I have to talk to someone because I have to record. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just. If it's. I. I like having coffee with publicists. I like chatting about which clients they have.

[00:12:19] ED: And of course, to also clarify what my beat is, what our coverage area is, they feel terrible that I sometimes can't write stories, but how it is. So I like clarifying that. So it also keeps my inbox. And I tend to meet with a lot of CEOs who might be rolling into town. If they have something interesting to say, I may be willing to go and meet with them in person.

[00:12:50] BB: Okay, maybe willing. Maybe willing is the key thing. Okay, we talked about relationship building. Sounds like you meet people in person, if it makes sense. What about sources for you? What type of sources are you, if any are you looking for? Like, oh, I'm the AI expert from, you know, NYU or what, whatever, you know, I'm an author of this book and so forth. So what are those sources looking like?

[00:13:15] ED: VentureBeat's audience are the technical decision makers. So if we could talk to the technical decision makers, whether it's the CEO or the CTO or the product lead or something, I'd love to talk to them. We are also always looking for engineers, senior engineers, or even just engineers who are working on very interesting projects. We think that the people who really are building these technologies or are maybe seeing the impact of a lot of these different models and applications are the engineers and the developers. And oftentimes they have clearance to say something. So we're also very much looking for a lot of those people who have more hands on experience using a lot of technology to give us their opinions, to give us like an idea of like if. Yeah, we definitely are using OpenAI01 because it's great for reasoning. Like, those are fantastic.

[00:14:24] ED: We'd love to hear though. So we do very much prefer people who are making the technical decisions who and who have experience and are really using and working with this technology with generative AI.

[00:14:42] BB: Okay, so the people in the trenches, the technical people with the pedigrees in terms of probably the titles.

[00:14:48] ED: Yeah.

[00:14:49] BB: That you. Okay. CTOs, probably your gems.

[00:14:53] ED: Yeah, I actually just met with the CEO this morning.

[00:14:57] BB:
Oh, well, we said CEO, but like CTOs as well.

[00:15:00] ED:
Yes, CEO, CTO, product lead. Yeah.

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Audience Ask: Emilia's Favorite AI Tools

[00:15:06] BB: Okay. Okay. Next question. We have an audience ask. I don't know who asked it in our community called our pitch posse, but the audience ask is. Well, I don't know if I want to. Well, let's, let's see what the answer is going to be. Emilia, the question is what recommendations do you have for reporters and PR professionals to effectively integrate AI techniques into their work? You have any questions that you like being the report? This is interesting because I haven't asked the reporter who convers AI what you use for AI.

[00:15:42] ED: Yeah, I can talk about like how and why I use it. Okay, so like all reporters, I Use Otter AI.

[00:15:50] BB: Okay, great.

[00:15:51] ED: All reporters. I said earlier, I record my conversations. I do. I record my interviews. Part of it is the training I've had in previous jobs. Part of it is I don't understand my notes very often. Yeah, yeah. I'm also the type of person that sometimes my brain floats away and comes back. It's like, oh, no, I missed that.

[00:16:14] BB: Yeah.

[00:16:14] ED: Which is why I record my conversations. So I use Otter AI. I've also been using a. I've been a beta tester for another transcription product. I don't know if I can say.

[00:16:27] BB: Okay, we don't need to say it, but a transcription product. Okay.

[00:16:31] ED: But I definitely... I've relied on transcription tools since maybe 2016. No, not 2016. Maybe 2017, 2018, when I. Because I hate transcribing.

[00:16:47] BB: Yeah, no, no.

[00:16:49] ED: So I. I definitely use that. I. Mostly through the necessity of my job, I do pay for the Premium subscriptions for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. And the reasons for that is sometimes there are product launches that they have that are specific only for subscriptions.

[00:17:18] BB: Oh, you use it as a scoop way.

[00:17:21] ED: Yeah. Well, not so much as a scoop. When they have the press release.

[00:17:27] BB: Yes.

[00:17:27] ED: I want to be able to see and verify. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I read a lot of research papers about these new models, these new techniques. I often don't really understand a lot of papers go. So I honestly, a lot of these papers in for ChatGPT or Notebook LM.

[00:17:56] BB: Oh, my God, this is so meta. You take the AI report and you put it through AI to tell you what it's. Oh, God, wow.

[00:18:03] ED: And then I ask it, like, what's the sum? I ask it to summarize things, and if there's a specific thing I want to do, I ask. It's like, what does this. What does this paper say about entropy, for example? How does it use entropy with large language models? And then it would, you know, give me the answer, and I find that it's faster this way. I still do read the paper because I need to be able to quote it, but it gives me a better idea of the technical information that's in the paper in a much faster way than if I spent three hours reading it, which is what normally happens. So I use that way. And then the other way I use AI is Adventure Beat. We use Midjourney and Dall E and anything else. A lot of these AI image generators generate the header photos for our stories.

[00:19:03] BB: Oh, good to know.

[00:19:05] ED: Basically. So we can make stock photos but it's always within a certain. It has to look like comic books. Like get sued.

[00:19:15] BB: Yes, exactly, exactly.

[00:19:17] ED: But we very much like credit that it's made. Made from. Made using an AI image generator. Yeah, but that's a lot of the usage that I do that I use AI apps for.

Rapid Fire Pitching Preferences

[00:23:28] BB: I have my quick little list of some rapid fire questions. So let's quick. Video or phone interview?

[00:23:36] ED: Honestly, both. It's the same for me.

[00:23:39] BB: Bullet points or paragraphs in pitches?

[00:23:43] ED: Oh, bullet points.

[00:23:46] BB: Okay. Shorter, long pitches. Long. Oh my gosh. I'm getting like more and more people saying long. Wow. Okay, we're on. We're on to something.

[00:23:56] ED: Well, not too long, just.

[00:23:57] BB: Okay.

[00:23:58] ED: Right amount of long.

[00:24:00] BB: Okay. The right amount, basically, so you don't have to follow up with more questions. There we go. Here we go. Okay. Images attached or a Dropbox zip file?

[00:24:10] ED: Dropbox.

[00:24:12] BB: Okay. Email or a DM on your social. Somewhere. LinkedIn. All the things. All the things. Email direct or creative subject lines?

[00:24:22] ED: Direct.

[00:24:23] BB: Hell yeah. Press release or media kit?

[00:24:27] ED: Ooh, press release in media kit.

[00:24:31] BB: Wait, press release and media kit.

[00:24:33] ED: Press release in the media kit.

[00:24:35] BB: Oh, in the media kit. Oh. Oh, okay. Haven't gotten that answer before. Good. You just mentioned too that you already do reading of your emails pretty much every 30 minutes. You gotta get that thing to 0. You gotta get that thing to zero.

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