Quentin Hardy: Talk a bit about leaving journalism for public relations.

Eric Savitz: I had been at Forbes for two or three years. In retrospect we had an unbelievably good tech team, with Kashmir Hill, you, Andy Greenberg, Mike Isaac for half a minute, Ryan Mac…Just great people. At headquarters, it was a pretty tumultuous period though, with the new leadership making it very difficult to enjoy being there.

QH: I was pretty glad to leave for The New York Times.

ES: Around the time I hit 50 I was thinking, “If I have another act in me, I should probably do something about it soon.” I was working on a story and ran into an old connection of mine, Amanda Duckworth, who was running the Brunswick office with Mike Buckley in San Francisco. I asked her if they’d ever thought about adding a journalist to the team, and that began about six months of back and forth talks before they made me a partner.

QH: What do you think sold them on hiring you?

ES: It was a mix of things. They were building out their technology practice, and I knew that business and had connections there. But even more, I knew how to tell stories, how to write, and how to speak with people effectively. It’s amazing how many people work in PR and aren’t really very good at writing, can’t do a good job telling stories.

QH: What are they good at?

ES: Crisis communications maybe, or selling the client, internal strategy. Brunswick really placed a premium on the ability to conceptualize a big story in a way that was approachable, even if it was something difficult, whether that’s an enterprise software company that does something really arcane, or the crisis work around bad news coming out. Managing and communicating in difficult situations.

QH: How was it going inside?

ES: I got there with the average journalist’s experience with PR, the ‘above the waterline’ part of the iceberg.
What a journalist sees is communication between a reporter and a Comms person –could be they have a story to pitch, either a feature or something breaking about an acquisition or a new CEO. Could be you’re calling them on breaking news or a feature. Meanwhile, below the water line, there’s all the preparation they did before your call, figuring out how to position this quarter’s earnings release, or telling the story about the acquisition. They’re wondering, “What are we going to say on behalf of the client about this piece of litigation that was just filed either by us or against us/…The CFO just resigned because of some bad behavior. How are we going to communicate about that?” If the journalist is calling them, it’s “What stories do we want to tell? Who is this reporter, what have they written before, how are we going to respond to a set of questions that maybe we’d rather not talk about?” There’s a lot more strategy.

QH: Anything else?

ES: It’s also a business, something reporters don’t usually have to touch directly. Nowadays if you’re running a newsletter you’re in the business side too, but if you’re, say, reporting at The Wall Street Journal, you’re not worrying about the ad revenue, the subscriptions, all that. They don’t want you in that. At Brunswick, you have to manage clients, and the client may or may not be happy. They might think they’re overpaying you, or know they underpaid you for something. They may not like somebody on the team, they aren’t happy with the results.

QH: Clients are even trickier than editors.

ES: They’ll say, “We have this great story around X.” And to them, it is – they worked hard on it, they hope it’s this big breakthrough in the market. As you’re listening to them, particularly as a former journalist, you may start thinking, “That’s a terrible story. No one cares.”

QH: Harsh.

ES: But true. Particularly with enterprise companies, the ones selling goods and software to other companies. Big business, but the general public probably doesn’t care. So you start probing, looking for some angle that’s maybe a story:

“How big is your contract for this?”

“We can’t talk about that.”

“Who did you beat for the deal? Are there proprietary breakthroughs?”

“We can’t talk about that.”

Pretty soon you have to then figure out how to do some hand holding, tell them this isn’t headed for The Wall Street Journal like they think it should be, maybe we can get a trade publication interested. Hand holding, advice giving, goal setting. That’s something some PR people are good at.

There’s similar kinds of work internally too, managing the expectations of senior people and teams about what’s possible. God forbid, someone promises a client in a boring business that you can put them on the cover of Vanity Fair. This happened to me, and it’s hard to walk that back. But then, journalists all have editors or senior bosses who demand you get an interview with the pope or whoever. Impossible asks.

Often internally you’re getting into negotiating fees, what you should charge as a monthly retainer or an hourly fee. You have to find a number that works for both sides. There’s a lot of internal stress if you realize you underbid a client, compared to how much work it is.

QH: Did you like it?

ES: It was a whole other business side. If you’re at a Barron’s or a Forbes you might be invited to speak at an internal sales conference, that’s about it. Forbes was a little more…porous…than most. But still, nothing like this. All writing has an angle, but this has more dimensions before you start communicating.You’re still trying to tell interesting stories, but you start from a very particular place, namely, “I’m going to tell the best story I can about the client.”

I liked many of the people a lot. Brunswick has a very active alumni network, I still know people there.

QH: Does this involve lying to people?

ES: I never had to lie. Lying is a bad idea. If you lie, if you’re discovered as a liar, you hurt your reputation and that of your client’s, and that’s terrible. PR is very much a relationship business. If you don’t want to answer a question, you can always say, “I don’t want to answer that,” or “I can’t answer that.” If you’re getting called about a rumor, it’s easy to say that you don’t comment on rumors. If a CFO has been arrested for embezzling, you better have something to say. Probably something canned, but something.

QH: How long were you there?

ES: I was five years at Brunswick, then I did a year in-house at Roku. They were a Brunswick client, and I left to help take Roku public on the NASDAQ. Working for a single client was very different from an agency job. Now there’s only one story to tell. If you’re coming from journalism, that is a very different kind of job. Less variety. Agencies are probably a more natural fit for most journalists.

QH: Or big companies that are into a lot of different things, if I may say. It plays to the journalist’s magpie attention.

ES: Roku had hardware and software and content ad advertising, but at the end of the day it was all streaming video. At least every reporter knew what that is, and lots of them had Roku boxes. So we could get coverage. But for me it became monotonous to sell one story. Maybe it’s different if your niche is something like a political candidate you feel super passionate about, where you believe in everything that person is doing. You’ll still be saying the same things though.

The story values were different, too. If I could get a great story in The New York Times, or I could get a great product review on CNET, guess which was more valuable? The CNET review is going to appear on a page at Best Buy.

QH: Ulp.

ES: It was eye-opening for me. There are some stories that are the equivalent of lead generation for sales. Stories that will be read in a Best Buy when they’re about to make a purchase.

QH: So that wasn’t as interesting for you. But what made you go back to journalism?

ES: I realized I didn’t want to be in Roku for the long stretch, and started thinking about what else to do. I did look a little bit at some other comms roles, but nothing was a good fit. During that time Barron’s, where I’d worked before Forbes, changed its top editor. Super smart woman, very intellectual. I had met her before, and reached out to say hi and congratulate her. I told her I was thinking about what to do next, and even though there weren’t any jobs we kept talking. This went back and forth for a few months. I thought I was close to a job offer, then she resigned. I figured, that’s over. Then they made me an offer anyway. That was five years ago. It’s a little less money, but enough that we could make it work, and this is a stable institution, unlike a lot of jobs in journalism now.

QH: What do you make of your experience, seeing this world from both sides?

ES: It’s been hugely valuable, for a couple of reasons. I’ve seen the inside of how companies work in a way I would never have as a journalist. I’ve sat around the table with CEOs and CFOs as they discussed their quarterly earnings, how they think about these things. I’ve watched them figure out revenue guidance – part science, part art. It gave me a whole new network of people in a lot of levels of a lot of important companies. A lot of the places I’m writing about now, I have a lot of relationships and a lot of trust. That Brunswick alumni network I mentioned has people who’ve gone on to work at a lot of different places too, and they help me speak to the CEO.

QH: And if a CEO at one of these companies does something hideous, are you going to be comfortable saying that? These are relationships, after all.

ES: I know what this job is. You can’t let your relationships get in the way. I’d be fine saying it, and I think both sides understand what each other’s job is about.

Postscript: After this interview, Eric left Barron’s to become Editor and Chief at General Motors, an entirely different job from either journalism or public relations.

QH: What occasioned the move?

ES: GM’s new chief communications officer at GM, Lin-Hua Wu, is a former partner of mine from Brunswick. I was in Detroit to interview GM CEO Mary Barra, and one thing led to another…she floated the idea of coming to GM to help them tell their story, and after a competitive interview process, I decided that I was ready to do something new and join GM.

QH: Do you see this as a kind of public relations in the form of journalism, journalism in the form of corporate sponsorship/imaging, or some other thing?

ES: Journalists tell stories, and companies tell stories. Journalists are generally better at it. Companies often get stuck in the weeds, issuing dull press releases, or pitching product news without useful context. There are so many interesting stories to tell about GM right now – EVs, autonomous cars, in-car digital services, to name a few. They have a huge staff spread on every continent, and a history that goes back more than a century. I bring both experience as a story-teller, and some understanding of corporate imaging building. It’s going to be a ton of fun.

QH: Was there something different in being back in journalism that encouraged this move?

ES: I don’t know if this is what you’re getting at, but I can tell you that this latest five-year run at Barron’s was certainly influenced by my experience in PR – I had a much better understanding of the way companies make decisions – and how the sausage is made.

QH: How do you think both Journalism and PR will affect what you write at GM?

ES: I’ll bring a journalist’s eye for spotting stories and understanding how to tell them – and a communicator’s view of what stories should be told. I’ll be looking for stories that can build and burnish GM’s corporate reputation by shedding light on things happening at the company that might not be well known by the company’s many constituent groups – customers, investors, employees, suppliers, dealers, regulators and elected officials. GM touches millions of people every day – I’m looking forward to helping them tell compelling stories about their place in the world.