What Tech Journalists Actually Want from PR with Jasper Hamill (Machine)

• Cover the community, not just the news — try tapping into what a community is angry or annoyed about.
• Real events beat abstract warnings. Actual events that happen are, in his words, “real gold dust to journalists.”
• A press release with a quote helps a small, busy publication.
• Pitch “it’s going to get worse, and here’s why”, rather than how amazing the product is.
• Small publications and independent journalists notice when PRs and their clients like and reshare their work on LinkedIn.

In my three years behind the mic on the BuzzStream podcast, I haven’t interviewed anyone specifically about tech news.

That all changes today.

In this episode, I’m joined by Jasper Hamill, a tech journalist with nearly 20 years of reporting.

You might have seen his work in The Sun, the Daily Mirror, and Metro. Today he’s a freelance journalist and consultant, and he also runs his own tech news publication, Machine.

We cover how Jasper thinks about PR, how he actually uses press releases, and what brands in tech (and beyond) can do to get into the news today.

He also has a simple ask for PR pros at the end that I really love.

Here’s a slightly-edited transcript:

What is Machine, and why did you start it?

Jasper Hamill: Many, many moons ago — I know I look very young, but in fact I’m getting quite old. Maybe I don’t look young, maybe that’s flattering — I worked on the launch of a magazine in Scotland, which is the northernmost part of the UK, called, rather embarrassingly, The Skinny.

When I started that, I assumed the rest of my career would be in media entrepreneurship. But I got offered a job as a hard news reporter in Glasgow, a tough city. It was such good fun that I thought, I’ll do this for a little bit and then go back to media entrepreneurship. Then I just kept getting jobs, and I couldn’t say no, and suddenly decades passed.

It was in the back of my mind that I wanted to pursue the semi-suicidal goal of trying to run my own publication, which is not easy. It’s probably harder than it’s ever been. That led to Machine.

My original idea was to run it as a kind of tabloid.

I was a tabloid tech journalist, and I wrote all sorts of really quite grubby stories that reached massive, massive audiences.

But I’d also had what we call working on the dark side. I had one foot in the dark side, which is working in the commercial world as a copywriter, fractional head of content, this kind of thing. So selling my soul a little bit, in the most glorious ways. And I realized I’d changed.

I couldn’t go back to writing about people having their news leaked, or some weird press release about dinosaurs being tender lovers, or whatever it was that we used to write about at the tabloids. I’d gone too far into the B2B tech space.

So now I’m trying to pursue a more intellectual angle to tech journalism, which I’m calling systems journalism. What is a systems journalist? I think I made up the phrase not long ago. My idea is that we want to cover the systems that power modern life.

The slogan for Machine is now “Breaking changes in critical systems,” which is actually a very tabloid pun.

Breaking changes means things that happen when you install software and things go wrong, but it also means breaking a story.

So it’s that pun. And it’s all about the systems that power civilization, from AI systems to critical infrastructure systems to all sorts of other technology systems that we depend on.

My thesis is that things are getting pretty complicated; we’re losing control of the systems that power our civilization, and it’s about to get a lot worse due to AI. And being a bit of a tabloid hack at heart, I want to be there to cover the doomsday when it comes.

Have you noticed new techniques or types of writing that work in news these days?

Jasper Hamill: Absolutely.

Something that’s worth noting is that human beings tend to become immune to engagement tactics.

The early internet stuff — “XXX happened, and you’ll never believe what happened next” — was effective once upon a time, and obviously isn’t now.

So engagement tactics constantly change.

I started in print, actually, and there was this new thing called the internet that everyone was a bit sniffy about.

I worked on the launch of Scotland’s first digital rolling news service for the Herald, which is one of the oldest English language newspapers in the world. I think it’s the eighth or the ninth, which actually isn’t that great in the English rankings, because many older ones, you know, Leeds, I think Newcastle, had one before us. Anyway, I quickly began to learn about the internet.

I guess the difference is not that pronounced.

You need to shout very, very loud to be heard.

I certainly realized this at the tabloids, where we were under a lot of pressure to write for the instant.

I wrote primarily for the internet. You needed to scream your head off and write really loud, garish headlines to cut through the noise, which is actually a slightly dangerous thing to do.

I look back at some of them and cringe terribly. I’m not even going to say them.

Not everything, though. Some of it was great stories and all the rest of it.

I did start off with Machine doing that tabloid stuff.

Last year I wrote about people hacking or jailbreaking AI models to make them do naughty things, NSFW things, and that got loads and loads and loads of clicks.

I realized it’s because most coverage of AI is quite business-like.

It’s about the money being made, or it’s features, or it’s inside gossip.

That was a different take on it, and it actually reflects my old adage: to really get the traffic on the internet, you should cover the community and not the news.

So if a product is launched, you won’t necessarily get the big traffic from covering the launch, because everybody will cover the launch.

But if you manage to tap into the community — say they’re angry about something — that’s different. If they’re happy about something, it won’t click as well. They need to be annoyed. You tap into that. So it’s still the same, actually.

I’ve actually moved away from that with Machine, I have to say.

As I say, I had this kind of epiphany that I’m not quite the tabloid hack I once was.

I still want to cover the apocalypse.

My favorite stories are about the apocalypse. I love the end of the world.

But I think there’s a more erudite and intellectual way to cover the end of the world, which is this looming complexity crisis as we pass off control of stuff to AI and lose control of it, which seems almost inevitable. It’s quite fun to write about, if slightly scary.

I think the deliberate techniques for selling stories will always change, and you notice this move through the ages.

Last year, for instance, there were all these headlines that said, “I’m a dentist. People tell me their teeth are hurting because they’ve been chewing on their vapes,” or whatever.

I’m making up that headline.

That was a tactic that worked, and things will always evolve.

But the minute you notice an engagement tactic is the minute it’s not going to work anymore.

In terms of tech, I’m finding the appetite for AI stories is huge.

When I was at the tabloids, it was Elon Musk. You could literally put Elon Musk in the headline of anything.

This was before he became a controversial figure, when everyone loved him.

Some of the stories I wrote about Elon Musk from his Twitter feed were half an hour’s work, and I’d get gazillions of hits.

But the topic of the moment is definitely AI, and I’ve found that a slightly edgier, more people-focused take seems to do well.

In fact, I feel like that’s been my stock in trade, really. And in cybersecurity, it’s always a people-focused take that seems to work the best, because tech journalism is quite formula-bound.

I’m not saying formulaic — it could be, but it’s not formulaic. It’s formula-bound.

For instance, in cybersecurity you’ll cover what are called CVEs, which are details of vulnerabilities in software. Regular as clockwork, someone will say, “It’s a 9.8 CVE, and that’s really terrifying,” and everyone will click on it.

But you can go a slightly different angle. An example would be the North Korean crime gangs that have been taking over organizations. This was a brilliant story because it’s a human story. North Korean agents are posing as skilled tech workers, taking jobs at several different companies, and then basically pilfering all the information and data or locking down their systems with ransomware.

It’s a brilliant story, and it’s a more human take on tech. I think that’s a really fertile area for tech writers: the human side, more like cops and robbers.

How many of your stories came from pitches versus your own research and interests?

Jasper Hamill: I actually have an anecdote that would probably alarm PR people a little bit.

When I was at Metro, I didn’t check my emails for about two months.

They stopped working, and I didn’t check for two months, and I did perfectly fine.

I still got the gazillions of hits needed to keep the editors at bay and all the rest of it.

So at the nationals, not that much, is the truth of it.

This was also the era of churnalism, which I think is hopefully now coming to an end.

There was a lot of ripping off other people’s stories, and that was something I hated about that era.

You’d go into work and the picture editor would say, “Hey, could you rip off this story from this other publication?”

And the SEO editor would be in touch: could you rip off this?

Then the audience editor would be in touch.

Just this army of people saying do this, do that.

I hated that, because it seems to me spectacularly pointless.

You could clearly judge your success as a reporter because it was based on page views and all the rest of it, so you could tell your own success and steer your own way.

But nowadays, I’ve got a small publication and I’m trying to earn a living at the same time.

I couldn’t sustain myself on Machine alone, so I sell services as well.

Writing mostly, head of content services, that sort of thing.

I work much more closely with PRs, actually, and depend on them a lot for contributed op-eds.

Particularly in cybersecurity, there are a lot of really good press releases.

Covering AI, not so much. I don’t see that there’s really great… PR departments working for OpenAI or Anthropic. They have a different attitude, and these giants dominate the AI stories.

It is rare for a small company to be that newsworthy.

How can you be as newsworthy? They’re broadcasting the end of humanity: you’re all going to lose your job. By the way, our cybersecurity agents are completely out of control. They’re going to hack your organization, they’re going to leak your [unclear in recording: “sense of pictures”], they’re going to ruin your day.

How can you beat that with a little tech startup saying, “We’re using AI to optimize database management”? It’s hard to beat that. So they are getting a bit drowned out.

Having said that, I do use a lot of PR op-eds and a lot of PR pitches, and there are some great, great PRs out there, I have to say.

Shout-out particularly in Britain.

Obviously there are in America too, but my focus is largely American these days.

I’m actually thinking about dropping the S’s from my spelling and going to full Z’s.

That’s a bit of a controversial decision. I’m not sure if I’ll be strung up the next time I’m seen down on Fleet Street for doing that.

But that’s fine.

America’s where it’s at, I’m afraid. Sorry, Britain.

So yeah, I do depend on PRs nowadays, but in a small publication, and they’ve been really supportive of me.

I have to say thank you, because it is a bit of a gamble.

I can’t imagine, and I’ve been running it for what, a year, that someone goes to their client and says, “I’ve got your placement on Machine,” and the client’s like, “Wow, you’ve really done your job. Here’s your 20 grand a month retainer.”

They want to be on the Wall Street Journal.

But I think that’s a missed opportunity for brands, because small publications often have a role to play, and getting in the Wall Street Journal strikes me as semi-impossible these days.

I’ve done a bit of PR consultancy in my time, and as I told one client, “Yeah, you want to be on the front of the New York Times.

The only chance you’re getting there is if you kill all your colleagues.” And hopefully that’s not going to happen.

Why do you find press releases so useful?

Jasper Hamill: I was saying it from the perspective of a small, very busy publication.

It’s useful for me.

I love reading the reports from AI firms, cybersecurity firms, data firms, infrastructure firms, whoever they are. But it’s very time consuming, and I haven’t always got the time.

A press release sums it up and gives you someone to quote, which you can also tag on LinkedIn. I have to be a little bit mercenary in making that point: it’s hard to get traffic on LinkedIn.

I don’t use Twitter anymore.

It was actually very, very difficult to punch through these days, to be honest.

I used to use Twitter — X, sorry. I don’t have any beef with anyone, and I stay neutral on such matters. But I use LinkedIn, and it’s very useful to be able to use that story very, very quickly.

What we would probably call that in the British press is a NIB, which is a news in brief.

There are all sorts of these great acronyms.

WOB is my favorite acronym, actually. White on black. That’s a headline with white text on a black background. But a NIB could be very useful for us.

Vince Nero: A lot of good PR acronyms, I feel like.

Jasper Hamill: There are some brilliant PR acronyms.

I remember once, one of my first commercial clients wrote to me and said something like “EOY,” and I thought it was one of those formulas you had to type into a scientific calculator. I was like, what is this person telling me? EOY? Why are they saying… end of year, obviously, but I didn’t know that.

So yeah, loads of them.

Press releases can be so, so handy for those quick stories.

One of the disadvantages of running a small publication is that you need to keep the wolf from the door.

You need to keep publishing, which does make it more difficult to do investigative journalism and stuff like that.

This is a work in progress for sure, and to be honest, I think it’s going to take me years to get the balance right.

But press releases can really help with that, particularly if they’re quick and easy to go.

I do use a bit of AI.

It’s not really good enough to write headlines, intros, and conclusions. But it can be useful for turning around body copy, the stuff in the middle.

So I have this dream of being able to very quickly turn around diary news, basic research, that sort of thing, and press releases really help with that.

Even though it would be much better to read the reports and do it all myself, I think realistically that’s a bit of a tough one for a dashing young media entrepreneur such as myself.

Do you prefer being pitched a story, or being given the data and finding your own angle?

Jasper Hamill: Definitely for staffers at traditional publications, tech publications, they’re going to want to read the report themselves and really delve into it.

That approach works.

I do hate those kind of pseudo-publications that just publish the press release as is, and I say that with some caution.

That is pretty vile.

I know a publication that’s on Medium, and it just publishes interviews with leaders, all the world’s greatest CEOs. It just gets PRs to write them.

It publishes 30 of these things a day, and they’re all the same questions. It starts with the same intro: “It’s lovely to have you, I’m really interested. Could you tell us a little bit about your childhood?” or whatever. Then it goes through two and a half thousand words of absolute bilge and ends.

They publish 30 of these things a day, and it’s painful. It’s purgatorial. I’m anxious just thinking about it.

I really can’t stand that level of churn.

It’s too much, and the use of AI egregiously is also too much.

So I always prefer to try and find my own angle.

It’s hard to find your own angle on things, and it’s a kind of skill you pick up: how am I going to grab attention?

Obviously, it’s much harder to grab attention when you’re a small publication than if you’re at The Sun, where you’ve got a massive platform and you’re getting millions of clicks every month. It’s much easier there. You can get away with a bit more, because if you’re a little publication, you don’t want to push it because people think you’re awful.

So in terms of press releases, I do like to find my own angle, but I find a good, in-depth press release, particularly with a quote, really useful. And that’s primarily for LinkedIn, actually.

I’ve often heard PR say it’s the data that’s the most important.

I’m not even sure that’s true.

People don’t click on headlines with numbers in them.

Well, obviously they do, but they click on headlines with numbers less. Numbers are less engaging than a story.

It’s an old bit of knowledge in journalism.

And the quote is really useful.

It gives you something to tag on LinkedIn, which is super handy as well.

If I have survey data, is it more helpful to also give you quotes and an expert?

Jasper Hamill: Absolutely, that is helpful.

The best thing is to deliver some sort of event that’s happened, a news story.

So rather than saying AI is very scary and so on, I wrote something that did quite well.

I actually just took this off a web forum, I’m ashamed to say.

It was something about Cursor, the platform. Some bloke had claimed he turned on YOLO mode and Cursor deleted itself and everything else on the computer.

There was a kicker: it felt like Ultron took over. Cursor deletes itself in YOLO mode.

Cursor goes rogue in YOLO mode, deletes itself and everything else, which is a brilliant little rhythm, I have to say.

That did really, really well.

That went on Hacker News, which is a distribution platform, an aggregator, I guess you’d call it.

It’s stuff that’s happened, an actual story.

And some of the stuff around AI is brilliant.

What was that story today?

Someone’s AI agent had hacked his gym.

It went in through the API of the gym and booted other people off the bookings list for gym sessions and put him right at the top.

And he just instructed it, “Can you get me an appointment?”

That’s the claim, anyway.

Vince Nero: Amazing, I didn’t see this.

Jasper Hamill: It decided to do its job so effectively that it had hacked the system for bookings, going in through the API.

Which is a brilliant story. It’s stuff like that that’s real gold dust to journalists: actual events that happen.

How does a brand get into the news these days?

Jasper Hamill: I think it’s exceptionally difficult to get in the news these days, to be honest.

Obviously, I don’t ever really pitch the media or anything like that, but I do consulting, and it is exceptionally difficult.

So I guess you need to be delivering some kind of insight that isn’t available anywhere else.

You need to be doing it with the right job title.

You also need to have the right timing, and be adding value.

You’re adding in at the bottom of a story.

Obviously there are op-eds, there’s expert insight.

But I think businesses often do know something they haven’t let on, particularly in the tech world, in AI and in cybersecurity.

They really do know something that maybe is newsworthy.

I think they need to query what that might be.

And to be honest, I’m really quite excited about owned media as well as earned media.

I think owning your own media is a brilliant opportunity to share your message without requiring an interlocutor, a medium to get it out there.

You can just do it yourself, and you can measure your own success quite accurately.

It’s hard to see who’s clicked on something when you put a story into the press.

And with web traffic, it follows the Pareto principle: about 10% of the stories on a publication will do 90% of the traffic.

So you might get this prestigious placement in the trade title you’ve been aiming for, or even tier one titles, but will it actually get that many clicks? It’s not clear.

Whereas if you own the media, you can shape that message and refine it, and you can see what’s worked for your audience.

So I’m quite excited about the possibilities of brands doing it themselves, because it is getting harder to get in the media.

That’s particularly true in tech, where there’s been a big tech-pocalypse of tech journalists all being laid off.

All these brilliant journalists have gone forever. We saw major publications shutting down or cutting some of their staff.

It’s harder than ever, and getting in the press is getting difficult.

I think op-eds, insights, and comments are the way in.

Or just getting a really, really good story and shaping what that might be, which tech firms have. And making sure you do good research.

Say you’re a cybersecurity firm: make sure your research is really buzzy and exciting.

There was a really good one today about refrigeration. This sounds like a boring story, right?

Refrigeration systems have this terrible vulnerability, which means they could be hacked, and you think, well, that sounds a bit dull.

But then you think of the dependence we have on refrigeration systems.

How many billions of people are fed by food that’s dependent on refrigeration systems?

If you’re plugging all these things into the internet, that’s a doomsday scenario.

So for tech firms, I think it’s making sure the research is interesting in the first place.

And I don’t necessarily mean in terms of doing a survey. I mean in terms of actually finding something out, or shedding more light on a problem.

Say you pick a topic like automotive security, and you manage to cover the background: it’s easier to hack cars than ever before, and things are about to get a lot worse.

That’s a story, I think.

So you could do research in a less numbers-and-survey sense: something is happening here, and something worse is going to happen in the future.

I often tell clients that one way to improve your pitches to the press is to put the word “crisis” in the subject line. If you say there’s a crisis, you’re going to get more engagement.

And the ultimate line you want to give the press, if you’re giving a comment on a breaking story, is something like, “Yes, this situation is absolutely dreadful, but wait, it’s going to get a lot worse, and here’s why.”

That’s the ultimate thing. If you can do a bit of research, shed light on a current problem, and show and prove that things are about to get really, really badly worse, then you’ve got a good story.

This is an interface between marketing and PR that I often see.

Marketing wants to be really positive: “Here we are, we’ve got this amazing product, everything’s lovely.”

PR needs to speak to the media, which basically wants to spread doom and misery. So you have some weird kind of interface.

I often tell marketing people that in a PR context, you don’t want to be telling the world how amazing your product is.

You want to be showing the world how dreadful things are without your product. “Dreadful” is such an English word, isn’t it? I mean, how awful things are.

And I think getting yourself into that sort of doom mentality is good for all PRs, to be honest. Yeah, doom and gloom.

Vince Nero: Hey, I spoke to a couple of local journalists last year, around the time a lot of publications were losing Google Discover traffic.

It was a Google event, and they were telling me that when traffic starts to die down, they lean back into things like car crashes and shootings, because that’s what gets clicks.

It’s a tough mindset to be in, but I think, as you say, you have to go where the community wants. And if that happens to be it, then you have to be able to strategically frame your product, or your business, or your news about the business, in that context. So I love that as advice.

How does AI slop impact media companies?

Jasper Hamill: There’s a crunch time in many ways, isn’t there, for communications and the media in general, and everything that depends on earned or unearned media. It does make me think, what on earth is going to happen?

I was very encouraged, I have to say, by LinkedIn’s AI slop button. I’m relatively new to LinkedIn. I say new.

I lurked for years and didn’t post anything. I only really started in earnest maybe a year and a bit ago, so I’m a bit of a baby on LinkedIn.

I’ve got two and a half thousand followers or something, which is really quite pathetic, I admit, but it’s going to get bigger.

I get quite a lot of engagement for that small number of followers, for some reason. I guess the era I call my PhD in clickbait taught me a few tricks.

I’m very encouraged to see that AI slop button, so you can report it.

The slop was getting egregious, and some of it was so dreadful.

That’s such a great opportunity for really good writers to punch through and be really authentic and fresh and original. Now we’ve got this button. I think it’s brilliant. I imagine this will go to other places, hopefully.

Actually, that’s part of the problem with earned media: journalists are overwhelmed with this tsunami of slop coming in from every angle.

Pitches are written by AI, they’re sent by AI, then they’re using something like Instantly or some sort of email outreach system, which then automatically responds.

Sometimes even the reply — I haven’t had this myself, but I’ve heard of it — the journalist will get a reply back and the response will be AI-generated. It’s this kind of nightmare of robots and inhumanity.

So I’m excited that we may be fighting back against that a bit, because I think that’s been detrimental to all involved.

Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d want listeners to know?

Jasper Hamill: I would just say: support the little people.

I’ve had a lot of support from PRs, actually, and every single one of them is appreciated.

We come and we go. Sometimes we can’t be there every day of the week or every hour of the day, because we’ve got to earn a living in other ways.

I think supporting the little people is exciting, because we’ve seen so many journalists leave the mainstream media and go off and do their own thing, on Substack and all the rest of it.

Some really great and interesting content.

I always said that I’d rather see the media as a galaxy of shining stars than a few supermassive black holes sucking everything up.

So, support the little people. We can’t get the tens of millions of readers yet, or maybe ever, realistically, but we offer something else.

And to be honest, we use a lot of the same traffic mechanisms as the big publications.

A lot of traffic comes from SEO still. A lot of traffic comes from AIO, whatever it’s called. That’s what I’ve heard it called sometimes.

SEWO is what I used to call it at the nationals, because I found it so formulaic trying to write for SEO.

Search engine homogenization.

That didn’t catch on, though.

So, support the little people.

We appreciate it.

And engage with the stuff as well.

Make sure you like stuff on LinkedIn, and make sure you get your clients to reshare stuff on LinkedIn (I’m showing my age saying “retweet”) and engage and all the rest of it, because small publications appreciate it.

It’s definitely a very different relationship with PRs.

When you’re at the nationals, you’re like, “I’m the big man. I don’t need anyone, I’ve got this.”

You start to think it’s you, that you’re this incredible thing, when actually it has nothing to do with you. You could basically put up any old rubbish and people would click on it because it’s massive.

That’s not quite true. It’s easier to put stuff up and get clicks when you’re big.

When you’re small, you’re looking for people to gamble a bit on you.

So it’s a very different relationship, and it’s very humbling, actually, in a good way. So we little minnows appreciate it when you and your clients support us.

I’ve definitely found some people like to be involved in supporting.

The first bloke I ever quoted in a story at Machine still likes everything that we publish. I’ve never met him, and I just want to go and give him a big hug. Whenever I see him I just think, you are the man, you’re the best thing that’s happened in my day.

There are a few people like that. You make these supporters, and it’s actually so heartwarming.

There aren’t many of them, I’m ashamed to admit, but there are a few, and you get to know them in a much more intimate way.

And yeah, running a publication is great. I

t’s not the path to wealth, although I guess it possibly can be, because you’re showing people what you can do. It’s a window on your own skills. If you’re a copywriter or whatever, and I’m mostly a copywriter, it’s, “Here’s what I can do.” And it means you don’t have to pitch to editors either, which is obviously a joy.

So yeah, support the little people.

That’s my advice.

Vince Nero: I love that. That’s, what is it, Seth Godin’s tribes, right?

You’re building your strong, mighty audience, and they tell other people.

Vince Nero

Vince is the Director of Content Marketing at Buzzstream. He thinks content marketers should solve for users, not just Google. He also loves finding creative content online. His previous work includes content marketing agency Siege Media for six years, Homebuyer.com, and The Grit Group. Outside of work, you can catch Vince running, playing with his 2 kids, enjoying some video games, or watching Phillies baseball.

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Website: https://www.buzzstream.com