You were recently appointed Commercial Editor. Walk us through a day in your life. 
The commercial editor role sits at the intersection between the sales team and the editorial team. I work across marketing, events, projects, sales and with editors of the publications to meet the needs of the sponsors and audience. 

My role is largely responsible for delivering projects that have sponsorship and commercial support. This might be events like round tables and conferences, digital reports, video series, podcast series, and partner content articles. 

One of the main parts of my role is working with clients so that their key message is shared in a way that is relevant to our audience - editorial is held to a high standard and the audience expects that high standard from all content on the site. My view is if it's partner content, it should be as high quality as traditional editorial content. 
 
How closely do you work with other brands in the business? 
Before this role, I joined nextmedia as the Lead Journalist at Digital Nation and then became Associate Editor. My experience in journalism is very much as it should be - siloed from the commercial side of the business to remain completely impartial and non-biased. For that reason, my commercial role now is entirely different. 

I'm exposed to all the different teams in the business and we have to work together to make sure that the sponsors are getting their message across in the right way. We also make sure content is high quality and reaches the needs of the specific audiences because we have a different audience across CRN (the channel), iTnews (CIOs and CTOs) and Digital Nation (C-suite and boards). 

Do you share content across the brands? 
We are working more and more closely together. There are a few reports we started last year that we're working on this year as well, where we will approach a concept from three different angles. 

For example, we released the State of Sustainability report in January about sustainability decision-making and the role of ESG agendas in organisations. We looked at that from the perspective of iTnews, CRN and Digital Nation, so each section of that report was written for a different audience. This is great because we can tell a story more holistically - you can see it from all sides of the tech supply chain and it gives us an opportunity to share our content on different platforms. 
 
Are there any big stories you are keeping an eye on in 2023? 
There are a couple of key projects that I'm working on at the moment. The iTnews Benchmark Awards is kind of like our flagship event for iTnews, where we recognise leading IT projects from end-user organisations across different categories. Eg; federal government, state government, local government education, health, industrial, not-for-profit, sustainability, and talent management. There are 11 categories and the awards night is coming up on Thursday 30^th March. 

The next thing on my agenda is Digital Nation Live, and this year the focus is Digital as Usual. This is going to be a report and a launch event for Digital Nation audiences (any C-level executive that's not in the IT department but they are making IT procurement decisions) looking at how all those other business departments (like marketing or HR) and how they're leveraging digital to transform and improve their operations. 

We're putting calls out at the moment. For example, if you’re an organisation specifically focused on CFOs because you have a payments platform that might be useful to them, or if you are a human capital management platform and you're targeting CHROs, there are specific audience sets that we're targeting with that report. There will be a launch event in May where we'll have panels discussing the insights that came out of those chapters. 
 
You are currently hiring a Content Producer to join your team. What does the role entail? 
We are expanding our commercial content team and looking for a Content Producer to work with me across the three brands of iTnews, Digital Nation and CRN. Their role will be to work with clients, interface with freelancers, making sure the partner content section of the business is of high quality, meets our editorial guidelines and helps deliver the content needs of all of those campaigns. That might be writing EDMs, recording a podcast series, working with freelance journalists or writing partner content articles. It's all of the content elements of a campaign that we need help with.  

What we're really looking for, which might be a needle in a haystack, is somebody with exposure to business tech writing. If you've written business tech from a comms perspective or especially if you've written as a journalist in the channel, that kind of knowledge and background is really important. Obviously, these things can be learnt and trained but this requires someone to really get straight into it. 
 
Do you have any tips for professionals wanting to work with your brands? 
I think it's important that the PR understands our audience and what the needs of the audience are before they reach out. Stories resonate if it's clear to us immediately why it's of interest to the audience. 

It's important that people know I'm not on the news desk in this role so if you're pitching an editorial story, I will send you to the editors of those sites. I work closely with these teams because a lot of our commercial projects are editorially led but I’m not making decisions based on the daily news cycle anymore. But if you're looking for longer-form projects or you have a client that is interested in getting a particular message to our audience, that I can help you with.