On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh sat down with Byron Tau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who most recently worked with the Washington, D.C. bureau of the Associated Press and is now heading into a new role covering national security for ProPublica.

Byron didn’t set out with a plan to land in Washington journalism, but he caught the reporting bug during his time working on his college newspaper. He moved to D.C. in 2008 with no real plan and a rough job market ahead of him.

As he was waiting tables at the Cheesecake Factory on Wisconsin Avenue, he was earning a journalism degree at night at Georgetown University and hunted for internships that would soon get him into the newsroom. His hard work paid off when POLITICO hired him as an editorial assistant – kickstarting the career that has taken him to The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press and now ProPublica.

Investigative Reporting vs. “Everyday” Reporting

Byron described investigative journalism as having the luxury of time and resources to take big swings. “Unfortunately, ours is mostly a negative business,” he explained, noting that investigative teams focus on where accountability and transparency are lacking rather than covering routine news.

Sometimes the day a story is published will bring its own unique kind of stress. Byron recalled fact-checking his part of a border patrol story into the final hours before it went out. “I probably read it maybe 50 times that day before it went out,” he said. “There is a tremendous amount of relief, but also the run-up to it is very anxiety-producing… you’re not out of the woods when you get the story out.”

Approaching Companies and PR Teams

Byron broke down the reasons an investigative reporter typically contacts someone in PR, which could involve needing context for a story on a company’s competitor or regulator, or looking for a neutral industry voice to explain how something is supposed to work.

His advice to communication professionals: understand that a serious investigative reporter usually gives companies a long lead time to respond and is more concerned with a proper step-by-step process of fact-checking.

Byron explained that a firsthand perspective from companies is going to be placed “high up” in the story no matter what the reporter may find. Concerns of false details are always taken seriously, and sometimes, the angle of a story may not be agreed upon within both parties.

In terms of collaborating with investigative journalists, “having an open line of communication and not hiding the ball, I think, is really the most important thing and the most important part,” said Byron.

Stories That Need More Attention

Byron highlighted a handful of stories that he believes deserve more attention than they’re getting in the media, including how the U.S. is in a competitive power play with China and Russia and the “tremendous desire to control the most advanced chips and the biggest compute.” He’s also interested in looking more into the amalgamation of government entities and private sector entities, and how they share and obtain data within this era of geopolitical instability.

Heading into a newly formed national security team at ProPublic, he looks forward to bridging the gap in parallel conversations occurring between industry insiders, policy journalists and The Hill, and the broader public conversation.

“I think the role of journalists is to highlight undercover things to serve an education function, to shine a light on things that are a little bit boring and a little bit dry or a little bit esoteric, but are going to have big consequences,” Byron stated.

To hear more from Byron, including the inspiration behind his book, Means of Control, challenges of building relationships with sources, and his new role at ProPublica, listen to the full episode of Inside the Media Minds or read the complete transcript.

Timestamps

2:03 – Byron’s Career Journey 

3:59 – Pulitzer Prize Winning Investigative Story 

6:53 – Investigative Journalism vs. “Everyday” Journalism

17:52 – National Security/Tech Trends That Need More Attention

19:18 – Where AI Can Help Investigations

26:18 – Byron’s Inspiration Behind Means of Control

Transcript

Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. We are your co-hosts, Christine Blake 

Madison Farabaugh (MF): and Madison Fairbaugh. 

This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio here at W2 Communications, let’s go Inside the Media Minds.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Inside the Media Minds. Madison and I are speaking with Byron Tau, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and experienced investigative reporter, most recently for the D.C. Bureau of the Associated Press, and he’s currently transitioning to a new role as a reporter at ProPublica. 

So it was really great to talk to him and hear more about how he approaches investigative journalism. It was really interesting to hear how long the process takes and how collaborative it can be amongst different reporters. Madison, what were, your, some of your takeaways?

MF: Yeah, I really loved hearing Byron’s perspective on how, you know, he and his team have used AI in the past, what that impact on the journalism industry is like in general. I thought he had some unique strategies for how he leverages it, so I think listeners will definitely enjoy hearing that. 

And then I also liked hearing his perspective on just different, different ways that an investigative reporter might reach out to a company or a person when they’re trying to gather information, and what that typically looks like in terms of process.

CB: We also heard about his book and how that was a result of several investigative stories that he was working on as well. So we hope you all enjoy this episode with Byron. 

Hi there, Byron. Welcome to the podcast. We’re excited to have you on today.

Byron Tau (BT): Thanks for having me.

CB: Yeah, absolutely. So Byron, right now we are thrilled to talk to you because you’re kind of in between roles, leaving your position at the Associated Press and then moving into your new role as a reporter at ProPublica. So, we’re excited to hear about that. But let’s go ahead and start with an overview of your career journey. What got you interested in journalism, and where has that led you here today?

BT: Yeah, great questions. And yes, I am in the middle of a little bit of unemployment or an adult summer vacation, and start a new job soon. What led me to journalism? I think in some ways it’s a lack of other alternatives. I know a lot of reporters like to joke about that, but I was always a strong writer. I was always interested in civics and history, particularly American history. And I think, like a lot of people who have that particular set of interests and skills when they’re young, they gravitate towards Washington, D.C. or other big media markets like New York City, and end up as journalists. So that’s kind of what happened to me. I got the bug writing for my college newspaper. 

After graduating, I moved to Washington, D.C. with not much of a plan, and this was 2008, so the job market was not particularly great. So I kind of bided my time. I waited tables at the Cheesecake Factory on Wisconsin Avenue. I started getting a journalism degree at night at Georgetown, and just kept kind of hunting for internships and other opportunities that would get me closer to journalism. And that’s kind of how I got my start. Eventually, Ben Smith, who was then at POLITICO, hired me as his editorial assistant, and that kind of launched my career in journalism.

CB: Cool, that’s excellent. I love that overview and how it all kind of folded out for you. We are Cheesecake Factory fans too.

MF: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, and so I know, as we mentioned, you’re coming from the Associated Press, and we actually saw that your team there had won a Pulitzer Prize this year for a global investigation into state-of-the-art tools of mass surveillance. So we would love to hear about what that reporting process was like and what made this story specifically astonishing to you all.

BT: Yeah, so I was part of a team at the AP that was looking at the U.S. role in spreading essentially surveillance technology around the world, and the story started a few years ago when my colleague Dick Kane and a freelancer named Yael Grauer got essentially a pile of documents about China’s surveillance systems, and, and those documents, in a lot of ways, showed the role that U.S. tech companies had played, and that role was a far bigger one than had been previously understood. So, they embarked on a couple of years of reporting on that. I came into it rather late, but I, my part of it was to look at specifically how the Department of Homeland Security and other U.S. immigration agencies were doing, were using technology that you know sort of pioneered abroad as kind of tools of mass repression in many instances, and how those tools were being used in the United States, not you know always for exactly the same purpose, or and, and not always in in the ways that authoritarian governments are using them, but tools and techniques that were somewhat similar to what we saw abroad. 

And so, I and a colleague did a story on how the border patrol was monitoring the movement of millions of cars in inside the interior of the United States, and on finding ways to single out drivers whose behavior they found suspicious, so there was nothing kind of in, in someone’s personal background, or there was no real reason to pull this person over, other than they exhibited a behavioral pattern that, to the government, was indicative of drug trafficking or human smuggling, and you know we found some some pretty eye opening examples of you know innocent people who were caught up in this kind of thing and did a story on it.

So yeah, it was part of a package that the AP submitted to the Pulitzer board and that we were honored to win for. So really an incredible project that I, I played a small part in, but one that I, I think really showcases the AP’s global reach and ambition, the ability to kind of tap reporters on multiple continents and do a patient, long-form, long-term investigation. I think that’s sort of the strength of the organization, as well as to couple it with great video and photojournalism, and so yeah, it was one of the the best projects I’ve worked on, and, and it was both cheering to see that it, it won a prize, but more importantly that you know readers responded to it and policymakers in some instances reacted to it.

CB: That’s fascinating. I’d love to dig into that a little bit more, specifically your take on investigative journalism. So, at the AP, obviously, you were an investigative journalist. So, what would you say, or how does that differ really from like everyday reporting?

BT: Yeah, I think in so, in some ways, all reporters are investigative reporters, but investigative journalism is a particular subset of it that, where you honestly have the luxury of time and resources to take big swings and to do big projects. You know, unfortunately, ours is mostly a negative business. We don’t generally investigate. You know, all the, all the planes that land, we tend to investigate wrongdoing, and we tend to investigate where there’s areas of you know where more accountability or more light or more transparency is necessary, and often in cases where big institutions, whether public or private, are falling down on the job in some way, and so you know it is, it’s, it’s, it’s a unique sub-discipline of reporting because you know again I think most beat reporters they do get to write you know the basic breaking news stories sometimes when they’re you know they’re covering an institution there’s, there’s good news there’s, there’s opportunities to, to kind of highlight all different facets of that organization’s work, and investigative reporters tend to, to be a little more on the negative side, but, but in the public interest, right? 

Like, there’s generally some reason that we’re doing an investigation, or at least looking into something, and it’s usually because we either have been told or we hypothesize that there’s there, there may be something that the public ought to know at the other end of that. So yeah, it is a unique and special kind of reporting. You know, unfortunately, it takes time and it takes resources. And in today’s media environment, those things are rather scarce. You know, sometimes investigative projects can take years. 

Sometimes they can take weeks, but they’re rarely quick. They’re often difficult, and sometimes they are dry wells. Right. Sometimes you do investigate something, and you decide there is no story there. And you know, in the interests of fairness, you move on without writing something, but you’ve sunk a lot of resources into it. So, at the end of the day, for a lot of organizations, it’s a luxury to have a team that’s just doing that. And for a lot of us, it’s a real honor to be part of that team because there’s just so few of those slots in journalism.

CB: Yeah, and I’m curious too. What is the longest project you were a part of, like time-wise?

BT: Yeah, I mean, so you know, when I was at the Wall Street Journal, I did a lot of what are sometimes called rolling investigations. So that means that you’re focusing on a topic or you’re, you’re tracing some storyline, but it’s over the course of months or years. And so when I was there, I did a surveillance series that began in early 2020, and I kept reporting on that topic for, you know, almost four years, and that culminated in a book I wrote. And so often you can stick with a topic or a storyline for a long time and publish. Interim updates along the way, and, and that, you know, after the, at the end of it, you, you’ll have a pretty good corpus of work. 

So I’d say that was probably the longest kind of storyline I worked on in terms of a single project or a single story. That, that border patrol and surveillance project, you know, I came into it, and my portion of it took about a year, but again, it had been in the works for several years before that, and you know, it involved reporters all over the world, from China to Nepal to Israel and the Palestinian territories to us in the United States traveling around the country, and so that was probably the biggest single story I was involved in.

CB: It must be so rewarding once that finishes and it actually publishes.

BT: It is, you know. It’s also, there’s also a lot of anxiety that, that goes into it because when you’re publishing something big and high stakes and long, especially, you know, these stories tend to be long lengthwise. There’s a lot to get, to get right, and there’s a lot of details. And I remember, you know, just for my part of the border patrol story, we were fact-checking it in the like in the minutes that, that led up to publication. You know, I was I remember I was sitting in front of my fireplace with the fire going, and all night, I was just catching tiny little things. You know, I found a pretty major typo that would have required a correction had we let it go in, in an hour or two before. And I probably read it I don’t know, maybe 50 times that day before it went out. And so, yes, like when you get a story like that out into the world, there is a tremendous amount of relief, but also the run up to it is very anxiety-producing. So it’s, it’s, it’s very tiring. It’s exhausting. You fall asleep. 

Ours published at midnight, in which you know, and then I had to just basically go to sleep, and the world wasn’t probably going to see it really until the next morning. And so you know that wasn’t an easy night of sleep either. So you know, sometimes, sometimes when you’re publishing, the publication is just the beginning, and the reaction will start to roll in over time. And so you’re, you’re not out of the woods when you get the story out. But you know, eventually, yes, it is. It’s very rewarding to get a project like that out. It’s particularly gratifying when there’s you know when there’s a great public reaction to it, and you know there’s the sense of relief when there’s no corrections needed to it.

MF: And just thinking about kind of these, these stories or projects that you’ll be working on for a long time, I’m curious how you build relationships with those companies or individuals who your team might be investigating for one of these stories? You mentioned earlier how sometimes there is a negative connotation because you are looking for certain information. So, have you had any, you know, lessons learned from that experience?

BT: Yeah. So you know, there’s probably three reasons why an investigative reporter might call someone who’s in the PR industry. Two of them are good to neutral, and one of them is very bad. You know, first of all, we might be doing a story on your biggest competitor or your regulator, and want your perspective, you know, on very deep background about where they’re screwing up or doing wrong things. One other reason is we might simply be doing something on the industry and be looking for kind of a neutral voice to explain the norms or the way something is supposed to work, to highlight, you know, the way something might be broken. And the final reason, and frankly the most common reason an investigative reporter might call a company or an organization, is that, that we are preparing a story on you, and we want your comment. And often those are the most fraught and difficult conversations to have. And so, generally in investigative reporting, when we are developing relationships with at least kind of what we reporters refer to as at least through the what we call the front door, so going, going through the normal channels and then explaining what we’re doing and seeking interviews. 

You know, usually that’s, that’s for the first two purposes, right? Either that we’re reporting on some part of your industry, but you’re not the central focus of the story, or we’re looking for a voice to explain kind of how things normally go, or how things ought to go. When we’re doing kind of critical reporting, to be honest, we’re looking for ways around you. We’re looking for ways to talk to people that are not, that, that we’re not going to have a mediated conversation with the PR person sitting there. And those kinds of reporting activities are generally, ee often get a lot of flack. We often get angry phone calls. But you know, the one thing that it’s important to understand is we’re doing it for a reason. And you know, any good investigative reporter, any good reporter worth their salt, ought to be giving you a very long lead time for what they find ought to very seriously take, you know, if you tell me something is wrong. I, I don’t just say okay, I’ll put I’ll note that you say it’s wrong. I’m going to go back to my sources. I’m going to go back to the documents. I’m going to make sure everything I say is, is buttoned up. And so, you know, just having kind of an understanding of that, especially when you’re dealing with an investigative reporter, I think is, is really important for both sides. 

And recently, I was doing some reporting on an organization, and and the you know the, the PR person I could tell was not happy with what I was doing, and and probably had at some point been ordered by his superiors to call me and tell me to stop calling everyone that previously worked at this company, and you know, I think he had the understanding that he couldn’t really do that, and that wouldn’t be productive. But you know, I told him that I don’t, I don’t write, I don’t. There’s no surprises. I don’t, I’m not going to call you and say my story’s going up in an hour, and you have, you know, like there’s gonna, you’re gonna have weeks to respond. 

And I think we came to a good understanding. And frankly, the story never published because nothing we, we, you know, we couldn’t substantiate it. And so you know, just having an understanding of that kind of process and being fairly straightforward with the people you’re communicating with at companies, and assuring them that, at the end of the day, you are going to give them an awful lot of time that their perspective is going to be very high up in the story no matter what you find. That if you tell a reporter that something is wrong that they’re going to take those concerns seriously that we may not ultimately agree on the angle or the thrust of the piece but having kind of an open line of communication and not hiding the ball, I think, is really the most important thing and the most important part in dealing with institutions.

CB: Yeah, makes sense and good to know. I’m curious too. What, tell us a little bit about your, your upcoming role as you start at ProPublica? What are you going to be interested in covering there? What is your role going to be there?

BT: Yeah, so I’m going to join a newly formed national security team at ProPublica. There’s they’re going to announce a spate of a couple of hires, and we’re going to be digging into essentially you know national security agencies and and do journalism in the public interest, trying to understand how the Defense Department, the intelligence agencies, and other national security entities are going about their mission, and trying to inform the public a little bit more about what goes on inside these relatively opaque and secretive institutions.

MF: And as you head into this role, have there been any trends recently, whether it’s been in national security or even surveillance or privacy, that have been very top of mind for you that you’re kind of looking forward to exploring a bit more?

BT: Well, I think that you know I can’t open up an article or a newspaper without seeing the words AI, without seeing the word AI somewhere. So I think, you know, like in many other industries, artificial intelligence is transforming the national security establishment. So that’s, I think one big giant storyline, and that you know, we, our our country conceives of itself in a great power competition with rivals like China and Russia, and there is this tremendous desire to control the most advanced chips and the, the biggest compute. So that’s going to be an ongoing national security story. I also think the amalgamation of data, both by government entities and by private sector entities, and the ways in which those, those entities share and obtain data is going to continue to be a big story, and you know beyond that, I think you know we’re in a, we’re in an era of relative geopolitical instability. There’s a war in the Middle East. There’s, there’s tensions around the world over trade and migration, and so I think it’s just going to continue to be a very interesting time for reporters, and there’s a lot for us to report on in this space.

CB : Yeah, and a lot of reporters and writers that we’ve spoken to recently talk about how even the media landscape is changing as a result of AI. Have you noticed any changes from that perspective?

BT:  Yeah, I mean, from my perspective as an investigative reporter, I consider AI to be a tremendous boon to a lot of my work. It’s made doing research, especially research that involves some sort of data or coding, to be a lot easier and more accessible. So I’m, I’m not, despite me covering a lot of technical topics, I’m not a coder. I don’t understand, you know, Python or R or any of these languages. But you can spin up AI tools and scrapers really, really fast to collect data. Now, of course, this is a double-edged sword because, you know, we insist on accuracy and process and so, so often you need to check that data and you need to manually go through lots of it, but just in terms of making a research process that at least will help generate leads, will help give you a start in, in doing investigative reporting. 

AI has really made that job a lot easier if you know how to use the tools responsibly, and you know using them responsibly is always very, very difficult. But there’s all sorts of things that have made my life a lot easier, from being able to kind of collect large amounts of information from websites and sort it much quicker than I used to be able to do manually, to you know, automating certain very boring and repetitive tasks like checking websites for updates, or digging through the Wayback Machine, or doing some basic research on, on a topic that I’m unfamiliar with. I think AI can very much help. Again, it’s very important to use it responsibly to understand its limits, I don’t generally use it for writing because I, I think I’m a better writer than AI. Although it is very, very good at proofreading and fact-checking in some instances, or you know, and I found some processes like giving a draft story to AI and just asking it to ask me how I know every fact, right? That, that’s not having the machine do your thinking for you. That’s just going through an iterative process with the machine. 

So, I think I’m actually fairly excited about the possibilities in a lot of cases. Again, it’s, it’s a matter of how you use it and what kind of guardrails you put on it. And I, I would never say that I would never, we we, we, we journalists who are trying to use it responsibly do not just take AI output and put it in our stories. Everything’s checked. Everything’s vetted. Often, a data team of very sophisticated programmers and engineers who do know how to code will look over AI’s code or they’ll repeat something that AI did to make sure that it’s, it’s correct. So you know, I don’t, I don’t want anyone to, to get the impression that you know investigative reporters are just pulling, pulling things Claude tells us off, off the, off the screen and pasting it into her stories. That’s, that’s not how we’re using it. But as a starting point, as a tool, as a beginning to do research, as a way to surface leads that will later be checked out with human sources or by, by other people, it’s a really great tool, and, and I’m excited about a lot of the possibilities for journalism.

CB: Yeah, I, I totally agree with you, and I think I love what you said about iterating with it and asking it to fact-check you and like kind of get, get that response with it. I think that’s a really smart way to use it.

MF: Yeah, yeah. 

BT: I think there are tons of uses out there like that that, that aren’t kind of turning your thinking over to the machine, but are doing something in concert with it that, that help, that use it to help look for blind spots and errors and areas that you might your human squishy gray matter brain might have overlooked, but that a computer that’s a little bit more exacting and and doesn’t get tired can really help surface. So yeah, I think there’s tons of different use cases like that.

MF: And speaking of kind of those blank spaces or areas where you know research or more reporting could kind of fill the gaps. There, have you noticed any technology, security, or even surveillance trends that perhaps the media hasn’t been covering as much that you think deserves more attention?

BT: That’s a good question. I think in general, like very technical topics, like you know, what government agencies have access to which datasets is stuff that the, the public doesn’t always pay attention to, but are quite important. You know, I think, you know, a lot of the the geopolitical battles over access to like rare earth minerals and, and advanced computer chips are going to end up shaping a lot of the, the rest of the 21st century and that’s , that’s stuff that’s paid attention to in kind of a a very specific niche but isn’t always breaking through to the ordinary person. I mean that’s, I guess what comes to mind immediately, but you know there’s there’s all sorts of things out there worth investigating, and you know I think sometimes, especially in an era where attention is so fragmented and where it’s, it’s so hard to to maintain public attention on any given topic for any length of time, like some of the, the big longer-term trends in tech and national security are kind of going under the radar, even as they get covered. 

I mean, I don’t think they’re like a tremendous part of our, our public conversation. I think that’s true of a lot of different areas, including you know energy and transportation and technology as well. So you know, often they’re, there’s kind of two parallel conversations. There’s the conversation among industry insiders and policy journalists and the Hill, and then there’s the broader conversation that the public’s having and the stuff they’re paying attention to. And they’re not always the same. And I think the role of journalists is to kind of often, to highlight undercovered things to serve an educational function, to shine a light on things that are a little bit boring and a little bit dry or a little bit esoteric, but are going to have these big consequences. And so that’s what I’ve tried to do in my career, and I’m going to keep doing it no matter where I work in journalism.

MF: I think that’s where the human perspective is so, so valuable. You can only have AI do so much research, but then, as you mentioned, perhaps some of those stories that might not initially have as much human interest, that’s where the investigations or just all of that background research to get the actual experience that people are having with whatever topic it is. I think that’s something that AI can’t, can’t yet replace. So I think that’s where roles like yours are super important.

CB: Yeah, Byron, we have a couple listener questions before we wrap up with you. But you mentioned your book earlier. We’d love to hear more about that, Means of Control. What inspired you to write this book? Do you have any other books in the works?

BT: Yeah. So I mean, that book came out of a series of stories I did for the Wall Street Journal, you know, at the kind of two years into this project, which was essentially about how governments buy up lots of data on the population and are using it for law enforcement or national security most of the time without any sort of a warrant or some sort of oversight or court process, and how that kind of thing was, you know, kind of upending our traditional understanding of limited government and civil liberties. And so, kind of two years into writing these stories for the journal, you know, it just occurred to me that I had a lot of colorful details and characters and people in my notebook that never kind of shined through a daily newspaper story, and so, you know, I thought I had a lot more to say on it. 

So I, you know, I went looking for a book agent and ultimately put together a book proposal and pulled it together, and you know, took a couple months off my job at The Journal to write it. I lived in the woods of upstate New York, and, and just basically got up every morning, brewed my coffee, ate my breakfast, worked on it for you know six or seven hours. I would often, you know, go for an afternoon walk or a hike in the Adirondacks, and then come back and cook dinner and work on it some more. And so I did that for months, and at the end of it, I had a book, and yeah, it came out in February of 2024. Still available anywhere books are sold, and yeah, as you said, it’s called Means of Control.

CB: Yeah, I love that.

MF: That’s every writer’s dream, I’m pretty sure, unless you don’t like the outdoors that much. But to me, that sounds wonderful. It

BT: It was. It was really. It was really wonderful. It was. It was lucky. I, you know, kind of. I didn’t have any real family responsibilities or, you know, other, other reporters and writers who, who try to do things like that often run into the reality of their small children or their families. But at the time, I was. I was, I was just, I was running solo, and it was a great experience.

CB: Yeah, sounds like it. 

MF: That’s awesome. Thank you for sharing. I think our last listener question for today is: What are you looking forward to most as you head into this next chapter of your career?

BT: Yeah, well, I mean, I think what’s exciting about working for ProPublica is that they really do give you the time and the space to go deep on things, and often are looking for kind of human stories, or you know, to go beyond just the fact that something is happening, and to look for the harm and to find a character or a person to illustrate it. 

And at the end of the day, there are just very few outlets that have the time and the inclination and the resources to do journalism like that, and so that’s what I’m the most excited about. But it’s in many ways a continuation of work I’ve done at other great media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, and I’m very excited to start.

CB: Yeah, well, we are excited to continue following your journey as well. So, thank you very much for your time today, coming on the podcast. We learned a lot and really enjoyed speaking with you.

BT: Thanks so much for having me.

CB: Thank you for listening to today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds 

To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please visit us at w2comm.com/.

MF: You can also subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

On this special Black Hat edition of Inside the Media Minds, Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh spoke with Bree Fowler, an experienced freelance journalist covering cybersecurity and consumer tech. 

With Black Hat USA kicking off next week in Las Vegas, Bree shares how she plans her schedule, what she’s looking forward to on the show floor and what it is really like freelancing in today’s ever-changing media landscape.

Bree’s Career Journey and Shift to Freelancing

After spontaneously covering a major data breach when she was a reporter on the AP’s tech desk, Bree has navigated writing about the cybersecurity industry in some manner ever since. She moved from the AP to Consumer Reports, where she helped build out the publication’s IoT security and privacy testing program, and then spent four years at CNET before shifting into her current role as an independent freelance journalist. 

As a freelancer, most of Bree’s work comes to her rather than the other way around, leveraging relationships that she formed over years of conferences and industry connections. However, she’s seen firsthand how uneven the industry can be.She explains how some publications treat freelancers well, while others seem to take advantage of reporters without full-time jobs, offering little pay under the guise of offering “exposure.”

On a broader scale, Bree highlights how layoffs in the media industry have created a shrinking pool of reporters covering security and what she calls the “SEO apocalypse.” As a result, earned media is drying up, with publications starting to chase clicks and affiliate revenue rather than substantive security reporting. Her response to this shift has been to lean into content that reads like authentic journalism even when it’s created for a company website: Q&As, thought leadership and subject-matter expert commentary that she says audiences can tell apart from thinly veiled marketing.

Bree’s Approach to Black Hat

When it comes to conferences like Black Hat, Bree employs a playbook built around realistic time management. “It’s about balancing content creation and also writing stories,” she adds. “No matter how you look at it, we all have not enough time to get what we need to get done.” 

Because sessions are recorded and streamed at Black Hat, Bree will prioritize live attendance for keynote speakers. This gives her a chance to read the room, catch up with sources and maintain the bandwidth she needs to absorb recorded panels later. 

To Bree, logistics matter just as much as the schedule itself. She warned against relying on coffee shops that vendors have likely rented out for private meetings, cautioning that Starbucks lines are “a mile long” and to skip offsite dinners and parties entirely. Her hard-earned advice for surviving Vegas in August: don’t underestimate the heat, always grab a free bottle of water and build in real breaks.

Bree’s Priorities at This Year’s Conference

Over the years, Bree has been fascinated with how far deepfakes and AI-generated videos/images on social media have come – how what was once easily identifiable is now highly convincing. 

“It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to shake up the world of cybersecurity… the ability and the affordability of AI technologies is going to change the industry,” she said.

Bree also looks forward to seeing how people are breaking AI and getting past safeguards, specifically what researchers are finding when looking at agents like Claude Mythos and other frontier models. 

“Social engineering has become a huge deal, and anybody without any kind of technical expertise is capable of pulling off that kind of stuff. This is kind of like a quantum Y2K thing without an end date,” she shared.

To hear more from Bree including advice for vendors and PR professionals attending Black Hat, the shift in AI and social engineering, the link between cyber criminals and mobs, and the new wave of pay-to-play at events like Black Hat, listen to the full episode of Inside the Media Minds below or read the complete transcript.

Timestamps

1:58 – Bree’s Career Timeline and Background

4:22 – How Bree Finds Freelance Work

5:11 – Why Earned Media is Harder to Get

11:01 – Her Approach to Black Hat as a Reporter

22:44 – For Vendors and PR professionals: Cutting Through the Noise at Black Hat

28:36 – Media Landscape Shifts from a Freelancer’s Perspective

Transcript

Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. We are your co-hosts Christine Blake 

Madison Farabaugh (MF): and Madison Farabaugh. 

CB: This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. 

MF: From our studio here at W2 Communications, let’s go Inside the Media Minds. 

CB: Hey everyone! Welcome to Inside the Media Minds, our special Black Hat episode. We’re gearing up for the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, which will be August 3rd. So we had the pleasure of talking to Bree Fowler. She is an experienced freelancer focused on cybersecurity and consumer tech. Previously, she’s written for CNET, the AP, and Consumer Reports, and has experience as a TV analyst and conference speaker. She had some really great insight about how she approaches the Black Hat conference, from her schedule to interviewing different types of experts at the show, to attending sessions. So it was really useful to hear her take. Madison, what did you think? 

MF: Yeah, I also really enjoyed hearing Bree’s perspective on just the freelance industry right now. So we kind of got a behind-the-scenes look at how she approaches different projects she’s working on. Also, just what it’s like to be a freelancer right now, as the media is changing so much and the landscape, and how AI is even impacting that. I think listeners will learn a lot from Bree in that regard.

CB: Yeah, agreed. And she had some really good advice for vendors to break through the noise at Black Hat as well. So we hope you all enjoy this episode. 

Hey, Bree, thank you so much for joining us on today’s podcast. We’re excited to talk to you.

Bree Fowler (BF): Excited to be with you.

CB: Yeah, thanks for joining. We’re talking about our special, this is our special edition for Black Hat coming up at the beginning of August, and before we dive into talking about Black Hat, we’d love to get to know more about your background and your experience. We’ve worked with you over the years in various capacities, but can you give us a quick overview of your career journey and where you are at now?

BF: Yeah, I have been in journalism for a very long time now, but specifically in tech and cybersecurity. I’ve been covering cybersecurity for probably, I want to say, about 15 years. You know, I got thrown into it kind of unexpectedly when I was a reporter on the tech desk at the AP. There was a major data breach. We didn’t have a cybersecurity reporter, and I happened to be there. I got really interested in it. Ended up writing a lot of stories, and it just kind of snowballed from there. I covered cybersecurity for the AP, then went on to Consumer Reports, where I helped them set up their IoT security and privacy testing program, and eventually to CNET, where I spent four years until about a year ago when I left and started freelancing.

CB: Great, that’s an awesome overview. We appreciate that, and I know as a current freelancer, you probably have a lot of different perspectives and background as well.

BF: Yeah, freelancing has definitely been different. The media landscape has changed a lot. There aren’t so many full-time reporters out there anymore, and there really aren’t a lot of people covering cybersecurity like there used to, used to be. So I’ve kind of tried to balance writing about cybersecurity and tech for a variety of consumer, business, enterprise, trade publications, general news, that kind of thing. With doing content creation for cybersecurity and tech companies, you know, doing more on the other end of that. Companies are starting to focus more on owned media. You know the stuff that they create themselves. It’s really hard to get earned media these days. So I’ve been helping by writing news stories, doing thought leadership interviews, podcasts, videos, social media posting for things like LinkedIn. You know whatever companies need.

MF: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so, as a freelancer, how do you typically, I guess, approach new projects? Is that something that you’ll pitch to these companies that you might be writing for these publications, or do they ever reach out to you and request your services? What’s the kind of ratio and breakdown there?

BF: You know, generally they reach out to me. I haven’t really been soliciting. I mean, when I go to conferences and meet people, and I have connections in the industry that I made over the years. You know, I talk to people at PR agencies, companies, you know, and tried to make connections and find projects that way, but mostly it’s been companies approaching me, and I do a lot of you know consulting with them about what they need to see if maybe there there’s some work that I can do to help them out.

CB: Yeah, as someone who’s been in the industry for a while and writing in different, in different ways, I’m curious what you said about paid and sponsored media being a lot more prevalent now, and how earned media is harder to get. Why do you think that is?

BF: Well, there’s just less media out there. You know, we’ve seen so many layoffs in the industry. You know, especially when it comes to stories that don’t make money. I mean, I was at CNET for four years, and we used to think that you know, security, you were Teflon coded because there was such a learning curve to writing about this stuff, and there was an interest in protecting consumers and protecting enterprises, and writing about those kinds of topics, you know, I’ve done a lot in election security. You know, in 2016, 2020 with the elections, a lot of political, you know, looking at disinformation, misinformation. 

These stories just aren’t getting the same kind of pickup from publications that they used to. I mean, I think a lot of it is due to our political climate, but it’s also due to the SEO apocalypse. You know, tech publications want stories where you people are going to click on them and actually go to the story versus the AI summary, and then buy something because they’re getting kickbacks. And unless you’re writing about VPNs, there just really isn’t that in cybersecurity or even AI, which you know we thought was such a big deal.

CB: Yeah, and it kind of goes into the impact that AI has had on journalism too, and SEO versus GEO and all of that.

BF: Absolutely, and it makes it harder for PR companies and for companies to pitch, there there’s no journalists to pitch to. You know, where do you get your experts placed? Where do you get that your own SEO? And that’s by having content on your site or you know placing things in paid publications. Which I mean, I think a lot of people kind of look at those suspiciously because they’re you know trying to pass themselves off as real journalism when they aren’t necessarily. You know, I think it’s I’ve focused more on creating quality content for company websites that are written like journalism, where you know maybe you’re doing a Q&A with a CEO, or you know, some other kind of thought leadership or expert commentary. I think that’s a lot more genuine, and I think people really do see the difference.

CB: Yeah, I like that approach, and I think yeah, I think that’s a lot more authentic and helpful for people visiting the website and to get the messaging across.

BF: Absolutely.

CB: So, obviously, you’ve written for consumer tech. You mentioned election security, cybersecurity, B2B, B2C. What, what kind of topic interests you the most personally?

BF: You know, I, cybersecurity has always been fascinating to me. It’s one of those things where you’re always learning something new. You think you’ve seen, well, some people will think they’ve seen it all. I know I haven’t seen it all. Hackers are some of the most creative, interesting people out there. Whether they’re you know playing for the good guys or the bad guys, and you know it’s always interesting to see how people can break things and how you know you can get past the best safeguards. There, there’s you know, the nature finds a way. 

People find a way because they’re naturally curious and creative, and now they have AI tools to kind of do the grunt work to help them scale things. You know, people, cyber criminals use AI in the same way that you know people will use it for work. It’s about scaling. It’s about getting things done faster. You know, being able to make things more detailed and more sophisticated, and the applications that we’re seeing, you know, cyber criminals use are, are just absolutely fascinating at a lot of levels.

MF: Yeah, one of the fascinating things that I’ve seen in client research even is how different you know cyber criminal groups are using AI, and it’s almost like a business. Like they are operating the same way that many companies are, and like you mentioned, scaling in terms of how they’re deploying AI, how they’re trying it in new ways. So that’s been an interesting trend to monitor as well.

BF: Yeah, I mean, AI, I mean, cybersecurity has always been a business. It’s always been run top down. It’s organized crime. You know, whether you’re talking about you know the Italian mob back in the day. That was business too. It’s just not legitimate business. Look at drug lords. That’s that’s a Fortune 500 company. It’s just illegal. Cybercrime is no different, and honestly, it can take it to levels that those guys had never even thought of, had even before AI, there’s just so much you can do with computers. So much you can do to remain anonymous. You know, you don’t, you don’t need guns. You don’t need any kind of violence or or whatever. It’s, it’s just amazing, and, and law enforcement knows that too, you know. They, they’ve been fighting these guys for a long time, and you know that they’re looking at it the same way, and they’re looking at how they can protect consumers, how they can protect businesses, because without internet security, everything falls apart on so many levels.

MF: Yep, absolutely. Transitioning a little bit into the main focus of this episode is all things Black Hat. So, Bree, I know you’ve attended in the past. Would love to know how you typically approach reporting at conferences such as Black Hat, and even how you’re thinking of approaching this year’s conference.

BF: You know, it has changed now that I’m a freelancer and doing work for companies and doing work for a handful of different businesses and organizations versus just having you know one publication and one set of marching orders. You know, it’s about balancing content creation and also writing stories, and no matter how you look at it, we all have not enough time to get what we need to get done, and the playbook remains the same. You know, you have to overplan. You need to figure out what you absolutely need to do when you’re there, like if something, if, if you want to watch a panel and you don’t actually need to do it right then you know these things are taped. They’re, they’re streamable. Do it later when you know your brain has a time to just take a take a step back from all that, and I think too that with especially with panels and things like you can have a better idea of what you actually need to sit through, you know, and what you can fast forward or just skip entirely after the conference is over. I like to go to keynotes, if anything, more to talk to people and, and get a feel of the vibe and just the general themes of the conference. I don’t think they’ve announced keynotes yet, but definitely something I’ll be looking for. 

Other than that, it’s mainly meetings, and it’s very tempting to go back to back to back to back and have a dozen a day, but it is exhausting, and especially in the days leading up to the conference, before there’s a press room, the Mondays and Tuesdays, you have to have some kind of location. And I feel like those, you know, it’s a lot of running back and forth through Mandalay Bay to different areas, only to find out that that coffee house, coffee shop that you thought you were going to be able to meet someone that has been rented out by a cybersecurity company, and you can’t get in there and forget about Starb, Starbucks is the worst place to meet anyone. The line is a mile long. Everyone has already drank too much free coffee, and there are no chairs ever. So it’s, it’s always good to kind of have backup plans and to keep things local. 

I don’t do anything offsite. I’ve gotten invited to some really cool parties that are outside of the Mandalay Bay complex. I generally do not go, or to dinners. It’s just just being able to get anywhere in Vegas. I’m a New Yorker. I think I can walk everywhere. I’m a runner. Like I’m in great shape, and I prefer to go places on my own two feet. You cannot walk in this Vegas heat. I remember my first year thinking I could walk to a meeting at a different casino. Oh, it’s, it’s only a mile, and it’s 7 a.m. Like, how bad can it be for a, for a breakfast meeting, and I got halfway there, and I was already a puddle. So, and you know, escalators and things like that. So, leave extra travel time. Don’t overdo it. Drink lots of water. If anyone offers you something to drink during a meeting, if you’re in a suite with like you know the setup of beverages, grab a bottle of water to go, even if you already have one, and make sure that you schedule in mental health breaks to eat, to hydrate, to you know just let your brain relax because you’re going to eventually forget who you’re talking to, what they actually do for a living, and and when things get so jumbled, it really doesn’t do anyone any good, and the meeting is just pointless.

CB: Yeah, great tips, great advice. Totally agree. Definitely not go to Starbucks. But I always wonder that with journalists because you meet some, some, some people like you meet back to back to back, and it’s, who did I talk to about what topic? And it’s, it can get a, very jumbled, like you said. So you mentioned going to keynotes. I get that. That makes sense because those are kind of exciting. It’s the big room, all the excitement around the keynotes. Are there any other topics that you’re interested in exploring this year specifically?

BF: I mean, I definitely am very into the political end of things, we’ve got midterms coming up. The last couple years just haven’t been great for those kinds of panels. I think the Trump administration has kind of put the kibosh to having people go to Black Hat and DEF CON, so you get a lot of just the same people from the last administration showing up and and saying the same things, so that you know, I’m hoping maybe they’ll they’ll be a good keynote in that area. AI is so very tired at this point, but it is important. 

I’m interested in seeing how people are breaking AI and how they’re getting past safeguards, things like Claude Mythos and these frontier models are super interesting to me because security researchers are taking a good look at them, but they are going to get out at some point. And are we prepared for that? This is kind of like a, you know, quantum Y2K thing without a, without an end date. You know that that’s all interesting to me. You know I, I still like the demos of hacking various IoT. Those are a lot of fun. People always find new creative things, and they make for good stories. And I probably will end up doing something about deepfakes and how we’re seeing those in the wild, and and social engineering. You know, we’ve really seen as much as AI has become so high tech and made cybercrime high tech. Social engineering has also become a huge, huge deal, and anybody without any kind of technical expertise is capable of pulling off that kind of stuff.

CB: Yeah, so true 

MF: And as you’re prepping for these different, that was super helpful to hear all of the topics that you’re, that you’re keen to hear more about this year. As you’re kind of prepping your schedule and perhaps reviewing any pitches from PR or even cybersecurity vendors, how far in advance do you typically book briefings? And are there any, is there any interest in booking briefings, you know, pre-Black Hat or post-Black Hat? I know it can be very noisy around that specific week, and so in terms of balancing your schedule, is there interest in pre-briefings, or how do you typically like to balance yourself out?

BF: Post briefings I just generally I am too burnout and tired, and I’ve already talked. The whole point of going to a conference is to meet people face to face and kind of like internally vet them. You know, does this person know who they’re talking, what they’re talking about? Are they, you know, actually, an expert in what they say they are, and can they form a sentence? You know, are they worth using for stories down the road? Without that, there’s really no point. That said, like especially when I was working for CNET and for the AP, you know, I did a setup story. I would do pre-reporting and pre-interviews, so I could have a story out there before it started, and then I could update it as I went along, and just kind of add comments and things because you just don’t have when you’re writing need to write in real time. You just don’t have the the time and the bandwidth to do that, and you want to make things as easy as possible.

Plus, a lot of us are-you know-we’re on the West Coast, but we’re working on an East Coast deadline. So, you know, which is has its benefits and and its, and its drawbacks too. It’s not great waking up to a ton of email in the morning, but and and having to get you know stories done by 2 o’clock potentially, so editors don’t have to stay way past their, their time. And you know, especially with the AP, when we had newspaper deadlines to worry about, with the internet, things are definitely it’s easier to update stuff, and we are in a 24 hour news cycle, but now I mean things are a little less less crazy for me, and it is nice to have people kind of go away at 2 o’clock and and let you you know do the rounds. I hit a lot of parties and receptions and events because that’s where you actually meet people, and in a more low-key environment. So I like to definitely have my evenings free for that kind of stuff.

CB: Yeah, that’s good to know. We were going to ask you about that actually, and I do think there is value in going to those informal events because you can talk to different people in a different kind of vibe setting. You know, so that makes sense.

BF: Definitely.

CB: Something that, that you mentioned, and it’s you know going to conferences to meet people face to face, and I think we’ve seen the media list for this year. We’ve talked to a lot of our friends who are reporters, and it seems like there’s a little bit less media attendance this year, and been that trend. And I’m curious, what’s enticing about going in person versus covering the news that happens there from afar. Is it that face to face, or is there some other kind of component that should entice reporters to go in person?

BF: It is definitely the face to face of being able to meet with people. You know, cybersecurity like pioneered the whole remote work thing way before COVID. They were one of those, you know, industries where I would ask people like, “Where’s your company based, and where are you right now? And it was always something very different and often wacky. You know, you’d have, “Oh, I’m at, you know, in Thailand or my vineyard in Napa, or, you know, they’re they’re all over the place. So when people are spread out like that, even if you are based in San Francisco, which is probably the closest thing we have to a hub, a lot of these companies aren’t, and their people certainly aren’t. And this is the one time that people get together. 

And Vegas, you know, people come because they just want to come to Vegas. You know, a lot of people stay for DEF CON; they do it on their own dime. So you know you have all sorts of people come, and Black Hat is definitely more of a lure, I think, because then RSA, RSA is so expensive to go to. The badges are incredibly pricey. Getting a hotel in San Francisco for especially during RSA is prohibitively expensive for media. I didn’t go for many years, even when I was offered, you know, panels and to speak. I really had to fight for it because it just wasn’t in budgets. You can go to Vegas and stay, you know, pretty close to Mandalay Bay for less than 100 bucks a night, so people will come and they’ll eat the free food and they’ll they’ll convene and see their friends that they haven’t seen for a year, and it’s it’s a great experience. They call it Hacker Summer Camp for a reason.

MF: I love that. Lots of lots of incentives there. It sounds like. What and with I guess all of the noise around Black Hat. How do you recommend, this is a question we love to ask because it’s, it’s very helpful for our audiences. How do you recommend cybersecurity vendors or their PR teams, communications teams, cut through the noise leading up to these events, perhaps onsite at these events, what typically catches your attention there?

BF: It’s it’s really hard. Booths are crazy expensive, and it’s so much marketing noise, and so many salespeople that actually don’t have a lot of expertise that are just talking solutions. Like I hate the word solutions because it means nothing. For, you know, that they don’t actually understand how they work, and it’s a lot of demos and a lot of free T-shirts, and it’s so much money is spent. There’s one you know CEO of a smaller company who told me you know he gets a suite at the Four Seasons and entertains actual clients there, and they have food, and people calm down, and it’s nice and cool, and they have a nice view. And he spends so much less than he would on a booth. You know, smaller companies they’re trying to get their foot in the door. They have that kind of presence. Big ones, they’re always there. 

Others have, I’ve seen big companies, blue chip companies, just not do it anymore because it’s not worth it to them from a money in, money out standpoint. It it is really hard to cut through the noise, especially if you’re going that kind of marketing route. Wacky booths are always fun. I love interactive anything where I can pick locks or crack a safe for a free T-shirt. I’m like a moth to a flame, but I’m not actually buying their products, so I don’t know how much that actually helps them. You know, it’s just really hard. It helps to have good experts on site. 

I mean, if you want to connect with the media, put your smart people out there, bring them to Vegas. There have been cutbacks in cybersecurity too, and their, you know companies have gotten rid of non-essential travel. I’ve talked to you know I’m a part of a run club at DEF CON, and I know a lot of people aren’t coming this year because they their their companies have just canceled non-essential travel, and the because the money isn’t there, or they’re worried about you know gas prices or tariffs or inflation. Like it’s it’s really uncertain in a lot of ways, and you wouldn’t think that would hit cybersecurity like other industries, but it it actually does. So you know you got to get the most, for your buck, and I really think it pays to bring your smart people and leave the salespeople at home.

CB: Yeah, agreed. That’s going to get through that noise and get more more visibility with the right audience. Are you running at, in Vegas this year?

BF: Oh yeah, I am again training for this, will be my fourth New York City Marathon, and I’ve run other marathons too. But yeah, I don’t have a choice. And DEF CON has a great run club. We’re out there at 6 a.m. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, doing way too many miles in the Vegas heat. But you know, when it’s all hackers, it just adds like a level of wackiness that gets you through. Well, it’s only 85, and it’s a dry heat. You know.

CB: Dry heat. That’s, that’s the difference. Yep. I love, I’m with you on the wackiness and the,the spectacle that it that is Vegas. I, I find it fascinating and hilarious and weird and all that so. 

BF: Yeah. 

CB: Wanted to ask too something that comes up a lot with cybersecurity vendors that we work with is the, the value of putting out research at the show. To what extent does it have to like really make a splash? A lot of them are talking about doing it maybe the week before, the week after to kind of like get around the craziness. Like, what are, what are your thoughts in terms of research at the show or news at the show in general?

BF: Yeah, I mean, I definitely wouldn’t do it the week after. A lot of people go on vacation, like, or they’re doing mop up from the events. I have a hard enough time writing up the interviews that I actually did do, during the event. I’m not going to do more. Releasing stuff under embargo ahead of time is great. I think you really need to promote it, though, because a lot of people do, do that, and it better be worth the time of the people you’re pitching it to. This is not the time for inside baseball. This is when you want those, you know, things that people are going to write about. 

You know, when we write a story in any kind of journalism, any kind of event, it’s it’s got to answer the question: Why do I care? You know why, why is someone going to read this? And cybersecurity sometimes, like you can have great research that is super in the weeds and absolutely brilliant, but if it doesn’t resonate with people or if people don’t understand it, it’s it it just doesn’t matter. But yeah, I mean, especially if you can peg it to the like broad, overarching themes that people are going to be writing about. Like when I did the previous stories, it’s great to have numbers and research and, and things like that to put in there from the get go. So that’s great. That that said, like people, if you send out stuff too early, people put it off and they forget about it. I’ve done, I’ve done this myself, and then it’s a mad rush. But you know, especially if you can make researchers available for interviews ahead of time, that can be super helpful too. The worst thing is when PR people have offered me interviews with people, and then they’re not available.

MF: Yeah.

BF: And it does happen.

CB: Yeah, no, I’m sure. Yeah, no, thanks. Thanks. This is really helpful, and it’s helpful to hear you kind of walk us through the best approach and how to navigate this type of a situation because it’s always a big high pressure environment with expectations, and it’s good to kind of understand what works best. 

So before we wrap up, we do have a couple listener questions for you, Bree. One of them being: Given your current status as a freelancer, what are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the media? Kind of a different experience to different publications.

BF: You know, one of the biggest changes is that there are so many freelancers now. I was laid off from CNET along with about half of the staff. It took four rounds of layoffs to finally get to me. There are a lot of good people out there that are freelancing, and I would love to have a full time job right now and not have to constantly hustle. But that you know is not in the cards right now, just based on the current media environment. So you know, certain publications that are dependent on freelancers are very nice to freelancers. 

Others just completely abuse the fact that people don’t have a full time job and are offering pennies, literally, for words. And you know, oh, you’re doing this for exposure. Well, you’re not really that big of a publication, so it’s really not exposure, you know. And people, people deserve fair money for their quality work, and also for people to return emails and you know, honor agreements to publish things, stuff like that. You know, you never know when you’re going to need someone, and it’s, it’s good to treat people with respect and decency.

CB: Yeah, agreed. 

MF: And then our last listener question. What was the last conversation that shocked you, Bree? Whether that was an interview with an expert or a new report that you had covered, what conversation really either caught you off guard or had some surprising new finding for you?

BF: You know, honestly, I feel like it’s been a lot of the same lately. You know, it’s interesting not, not so much shocking, but I’m always amazed at what AI can do and how it’s gone from being marketing buzzwords and you know what was really machine learning when you would walk the the floor of Black Hat. You’re, you know, pre-COVID, people were talking about AI, but it wasn’t AI; it was machine learning, or it was just complete marketing buzz. But now AI is real, and it’s a prerequisite. And people are finding ways to use it to break it to do things that we never thought would be possible. 

I mean, you look at deepfakes. A few years ago, I would go to Black Hat or DEF CON, and they would do a demo of a deepfake, and it just, it was fake. It looked like a fake. You could pretty much figure it out. And now there are deep fakes out there that are shocking. That are, you know, they look so good. And even when you look at videos on social media, these AI-generated, you know, not just slop, but videos that people are creating creatively, you know, that are transparent about the fact they’re AI – generated. They are a lot better than anything we would have seen a couple years ago, especially outside of a academic or state-sponsored kind of setting. And it’ll be real interesting to see how this continues to shake up the world of cybersecurity, and how you know those videos, the the just the access and the ability and the affordability of AI technologies is going to change the industry.

CB: It’s accessible to everyone right now, so yeah, definitely. Well, Bree, it’s been great chatting with you and hearing about your background and your approach to Black Hat and all of that. So, thank you for joining Inside the Media Minds, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at Black Hat in early August.

BF: Thanks very much for having me.

CB: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please visit us at w2comm.com/. 

MF: You can also subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh sat down with Sasha Ingber, host of SpyCast, the International Spy Museum’s flagship podcast on global intelligence, espionage and covert operations. 

Sasha is also the founder of HUMINT, one of Substack’s top international newsletters covering the intelligence community through the people and the emotions behind the headlines. A former national security correspondent for NPR, Smithsonian and Scripps News, Sasha brings a reporter’s instinct and honesty to every conversation. 

Sasha didn’t set out to cover espionage. After a stint at the State Department debunking Russian disinformation in the wake of Crimea’s illegal annexation, she found her way into national security journalism, going on to cover events like January 6th, the fall of Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. After being laid off, she launched HUMINT to keep telling human stories inside the world of intelligence. This led the International Spy Museum to bring her on as SpyCast’s host, though she had never hosted a podcast before.

Impact of Technology and AI on Espionage

Sasha noted there is an increasing prominence of open source intelligence (OSINT) due to geopolitical shifts. Since the Trump administration has fired people in parts of the intelligence community, AI has become more mainstream to help augment the work of humans. 

Technologies like the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency’s Project Maven show how AI is being integrated into intelligence work, in this case, using AI for geospatial tracking to identify military targets. Yet even with these advances, human connection and communication remain central to FBI intelligence.

Sasha explains, “Seeing patterns in analysis, whether that is satellite images or the written word, as well as identifying ways to recruit people and even masking identities. You can use programs to literally change your appearance, change the sound of your voice, change your gender, change your nationality… this is more about augmenting than it is replacing.” 

Sasha explained that agencies like the CIA are testing agentic AI, but the technology is enhancing human operations rather than working on its own. 

“AI cannot break into Putin’s desk and see what’s on his table. We’re never going to lose that… this is more about augmenting than it is replacing,” she shared.

How Espionage Differs by Country

Sasha explained how different nations approach spycraft based on leadership, capability and goals. She described how Russia’s autocratic system led its own domestic intelligence service to feed Vladimir Putin inaccurate assessments ahead of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, specifically how mass expulsions of Russian officers under diplomatic cover pushed Moscow to use less experienced proxies. 

“They’ve also started using teenagers that they’ve recruited on Telegram to actually help conduct some of these operations,” she explains. 

By contrast, she pointed to China’s willingness to target an American regardless of status, Israel’s focus on the existential threat posed by Iran and France’s deeper regional access rooted in its colonial legacy in Africa and the Middle East. 

“Everybody is spying on everybody else. Everybody’s trying to manipulate and exploit weakness for their own country, for their own government…the difference comes down to capabilities, goals and tactics, which can be affected by leadership,” she explains.

Storytelling From the Front Lines

Sasha’s reporting instincts honed from time in Ukraine during Russia’s bombardment, inside a raided Chinese police station in Manhattan and investigating a clandestine bio-lab tied to the Chinese Communist Party. These experiences continue to shape how she approaches her guests on Spycast. Some of her favorite stories from the show include the case of Katrina Leung, a onetime top FBI informant on China who was secretly working for Chinese intelligence, and conversations with figures like former CIA chief of disguise Jonah Mende and longtime CIA technical officer Bob Wallace. 

“These are conversations that you’re just not going to get anywhere else… and I mean, some of it is really surprising, the number of people who started off outside of college and were given immense responsibility at such a young age and continue to be humble today,” she explains. 

To hear more from Sasha Ingber, including SpyCast’s origins under founding host Peter Earnest, her favorite exhibits at the International Spy Museum, and what’s coming up next on the show, listen to the full episode of Inside the Media Minds or read the complete transcript.

Timestamps

2:44 – Sasha’s Journey at the International Spy Museum 

6:52 – How Sasha Chooses Guests and Storylines for the SpyCast Podcast 

11:47 – Process of Dividing the Work 

14:23 – How Espionage has Evolved with AI 

20:40 – Sasha’s Favorite Story 

28:26 – Sasha’s Favorite Exhibit at the International Spy Museum

Transcript

Christine Blake (CB):  Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. We are your co-hosts, Christine Blake 

Madison Farabaugh (MF): and Madison Farabaugh. 

CB: This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio here at W2 Communications, let’s go Inside the Media Minds. 

Hi, everyone. On today’s episode, Madison and I sit down with Sasha Ingber, the host of SpyCast, the International Spy Museum’s flagship podcast on global intelligence, espionage, and covert operations. Sasha is also the founder of HUMINT, where she explores the intelligence community, through its people and the emotions that drive them. This conversation was amazing. We love talking to Sasha and learning about her background, and she’s so passionate about this topic as well. 

She had so many interesting stories to share about espionage and how different countries are approaching it. We asked her about how AI and technology has impacted espionage recently, and she said that it’s really a tool that’s augmenting spies. One anecdote she shared is, you know, they can change their voices or their nationality or anything like that, but an AI tool can’t break into Putin’s office, and I thought that was a good way to look at it. Madison, what did you find interesting about today’s episode?

MF: Yeah, I really enjoyed just hearing how Sasha can bring a story to life. So, I think out of all of the guests that we’ve had on Inside the Media Minds, her background experience with just people who have been on the front lines of espionage campaigns, so she’s gone to, you know, restaurants in New York, and kind of learned about different operations that were taking place there, so it’s kind of that behind the scenes perspective that I think she has done a really excellent job of getting from the different guests that she’s had on the podcast. And even her background in journalism and her experience reporting for major publications like NPR, I think it was great to hear how she transferred so many of those reporting skills into the International Spy Museum’s podcast. So, yeah, her storytelling capabilities are just amazing. I think listeners will really get a kick out of that.

CB: Yeah, we hope everyone enjoys the episode. Go ahead and listen to this one, and then listen to SpyCast right after. 

Hey everyone, we have a very special guest today on Inside the Media Minds. We have Sasha Angber, host of SpyCast, the International Spy Museum’s flagship podcast on global intelligence, espionage, and covert operations. Welcome, Sasha. We’re happy to have you on the show today.

Sasha Ingber (SI): Thanks so much for having me, Christine.

CB: Yeah, we’re excited to get to know more about you and SpyCast, and what brought you to SpyCast. So, let’s start there. I’d love to hear a quick overview of your journey and how you ended up hosting the podcast for the International Spy Museum.

SI: Well, the short story is that I moved to Washington, D.C., where the museum is, to get a Master’s in nonfiction writing. And I really wanted to be a journalist, but I couldn’t make my way in and pay my bills that way, so I ended up taking a job at the State Department, where I was fairly quickly put onto a tiny team tasked with debunking Russian disinformation. This was right after Russia illegally seized Crimea from Ukraine and started occupying the Donbas. It really made me want to be a national security reporter. 

I was able to pivot to Smithsonian, so a little bit of that museum journalism blend, and then I went on to NPR, and then Scripps News, where I was their national security correspondent, covering things like January 6th and the fall of Afghanistan, the war in Ukraine, when the full-scale invasion began, the Israel-Hamas war. And as happens in journalism sometimes, I got laid off, and then I decided to start something of my own, and became an independent journalist. I started a media company called HUMINT, which stands for Human Intelligence, where I started telling stories that intersected the intel community and more of the human side of the experience of working in that world, in the form of articles, short- form videos, more in-depth interviews, and started exposing things that nobody knew about.

Like there’s this apartment building in Washington, D.C., in a residential neighborhood that is actually where many of China’s spies are living, and they’re affiliated with the embassy. How the US government has been testing a device thought to cause anomalous health incidents, or Havana syndrome, which is an affliction that has affected a lot of spies here in the United States, as well as diplomats and military personnel, and some more personal stories about, like, the NSA director who was fired while he was overseas after he had submitted cyber offense plans regarding China. His name was General Tim Haugh and what that did to the NSA. 

So, because of these experiences and how I was kind of forging new ground, I think that the International Spy Museum decided that I would be a potentially good candidate to lead their podcast, and I did not have a podcast background. I came from print, and then digital, moved into radio, and then went into television. So, the podcasting world was really a change for me. 

CB: It sounds like your background really aligned well with joining the Spy Museum podcast. It sounds like right up your alley with that investigative, really interesting journalism style to the podcast.

SI: Yeah, I mean, I think that the subject matter was something that I had experience in, and what I was able to do was to continue the sense of curiosity, the mix of empathy and skepticism, keeping it accurate and educational, bringing in some elements of entertainment, so that people kept wanting to tune in for episode after episode. That’s really kind of how I’ve approached it, and one thing that makes doing this different than say working for a standard media outlet is that there isn’t that frenetic, frenetic go-go-go sort of mentality, which means that you can slow down more, and frankly, that’s really hard for me to do, because it’s been programmed into me to just constantly be producing, and the team has really helped me sort of take a more gentle pace.

MF: Yeah, it sounds like you had a lot of really great transferable skills, and even lessons learned from your prior experience as a journalist that you brought to the table for the International Spy Museum’s podcast, which is very cool, very cool journey to hear about. Can you give us a little bit of background about how the SpyCast podcast kind of came to be, and how your team approaches, you know, selecting guests, selecting which storylines that they might want to focus on?

SI: Of course, this podcast is actually the first podcast on espionage in the country. It is 20 years old. It started in 2006 and this was the work of the museum’s founding executive director, Peter Earnest, who himself came from the CIA, spent 36 years there and retired as its chief spokesperson. He literally started this podcast with a pair of microphones in his office, and it was very DIY situation, where there was apparently a copy of Podcast for Dummies, that book lying around, and we believe that he just took the audio and uploaded it to the website, very, very simple, but he was doing incredibly important work. 

One of the first interviews was actually with former Major General Oleg Kalugin, who led foreign counterintelligence for the KGB. They talked about the spy games between Russia and Georgia, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, and essentially what this shows was that the museum was on the cutting edge before not only most museums but even most media outlets understood the value of podcasting, the concept of podcasting, that term actually was coined just two years earlier, and the team and I, you know, we spend a lot of time, we get a lot of pitches. 

It’s a conversation that’s always ongoing, and we’re trying to represent different parts of the globe. We’re trying to jump into different times and different perspectives, and for me, it’s been really exciting to be able to jump into so many different spy moments in our world, in our history, you know, from narrowing in on an intelligence operation during a war, or talking about how a mole was caught, or how a person navigated their intelligence career. 

It’s really about learning what that person went through, what their knowledge base is, and then catering the questions specifically to them. And you know, before this job, I was – my experiences included walking into a secret Chinese police station in Manhattan, in New York, that had just been raided by the FBI, and I actually was able to walk inside with my videographer, going to a secret dilapidated bio lab that I was later able to tie to the Chinese Communist Party. My time in Ukraine, from being in the midst of Russia’s bombardment, all of those experiences also I think help form the conversation, because I was on the ground.

CB: Yeah, that’s incredible that you have all those experiences, and then you know you’re probably, you probably learned so much going through that, and then you probably learned something every time you speak to another person on the podcast, right, you’re always uncovering new things, always learning new things. I’m sure that’s what keeps you really engaged and wanting to cover these types of stories.

SI: It really is for me. My last day of college, actually, this is a pretty embarrassing confession I’m about to make, but my last class was a screenwriting class. We had a pizza party. I walked out of the building, and I just sat down in the grass and bawled, because I did not want to stop learning. 

And one of the best parts of this job, and being a journalist, is that you get to meet people who you would not normally ever meet. I mean, I got to be at the Pentagon when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited and was appealing to Congress for more military aid. I was standing in the room with President Trump in his first term during his Merry Christmas rally when the House first voted to impeach him. The people that I get to talk to and the moments that I’ve gotten to capture is really, it’s just a privilege to be able to do that.

CB: Yeah, I believe that. Yeah, it seems like such a cool opportunity, and you’re very passionate about it, and it shows that you have that love for learning. So, I’m glad that you found a role that you were able to continue doing that with.

SI: As much as I’ve been laid off, I mean, I definitely have some scar stories, and many therapy sessions under my belt, by the way.

CB: Yes, no, I’m sure. Oh, go ahead, Madison.

MF: I was gonna say the news industry, the PR industry, all of these that center around kind of what’s happening in the world. I feel like that’s such a key skill to have, though, is that adaptability, you know, as things get thrown at you, as we have to kind of be always on our feet, so that’s really, really impressive, though. I think it shows that you have, you have those skills to kind of take what you’ve learned, go into new environments, and succeed there. So very cool. 

I was also just curious, as you’ve mentioned all of the different people who you’ve interviewed, these different journeys that you’ve been on, in terms of how the podcast selects guests, because you also mentioned you get a lot of pitches there. What is the process like for selecting who will be on the podcast? Is it – are you paying attention to current news cycles and perhaps the pitches that are most relevant to what’s going on now? You might lean towards those, or do you ever hear of things happening and you, you go out of your way to kind of research? Oh, that would be a really fun guest. How do you kind of divide the work there?

SI: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s no one way. I think we have multiple streams where sometimes our producer finds something interesting and presents it to the group. I am speaking to sources all the time, so I might stumble on something that I think is important, and I might get a story that seems really compelling and would work well for a SpyCast. 

There are times where we know, or I anticipate that something is going to be really important. So, let’s get ahead of it. Let’s find the right person, sit down and talk about it, and try to time it to when it will be most powerful for our listeners and viewers to learn about, so it’s really a mix, and it’s also a combination of what makes this story unique, people who are giving us perspectives that nobody else can, and that are at the top of their game in terms of their expertise, those are really important, because this is an experience for people, this is giving you a sense of the museum from more of a storytelling side.

CB: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think that museum aspect is something you have to consider, right? People are coming all over the world to visit the museum to learn about this topic area, and you have to take that into consideration when telling these stories and putting life to it.

SI: Exactly.

CB: Yeah, and I’m curious too. You’ve been covering this space for a while. I’d love to hear your perspective on how espionage has evolved since you first started covering it, and now with AI and technology in the forefront, how has that impacted everything?

SI: Well, I really began focusing on the intelligence community in 2020 during Covid, and it was fascinating because my relationships began through a screen, and I used the commonality, the universality of all of us being stuck in the lockdown, not knowing what was going to happen as a way to sort of bond or at least relate to people, and I think that that gave me a leg up in trying to understand how to cover this very mysterious and secret world, and a lot of the people that I met then through the screen I now still talk to, and we see each other, and it was very funny in the beginning when I finally got to see them in the three dimensional world, but I think that the biggest shifts that I’ve seen since covering it are, I guess, number one, that open-source intelligence, what’s called OSINT, has become more prominent now, the world has gotten much more chaotic in terms of geopolitical shifts and alliances and different wars. 

So, intelligence agencies are incredibly busy on many different fronts. The Trump Administration has fired people in parts of the intelligence community, which has brought some insecurity and instability, though some of those changes may be warranted, and as you mentioned, of course, AI has become more mainstream. In terms of AI, you know, the CIA has been testing artificial intelligence, especially agentic projects, meaning autonomous AI, but it’s really more enhancing than it is working on its own. Generally, you know, human is human intelligence. It’s about relationships between people, and AI cannot break into Putin’s desk and see what’s on his table. We’re never going to lose that. 

What I think AI is particularly useful for in the intelligence community is things like identifying military targets to strike, which the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is doing with its AI, called Project Maven, seeing patterns in analysis, whether that is satellite images or the written word, as well as identifying ways to recruit people, and even masking identities. You can use programs to literally change your appearance, change the sound of your voice, change your gender, change your nationality, and so again, this is more about augmenting than it is replacing.

CB: That’s definitely a trend that we’ve been seeing too, when it comes to every, every use of AI, when it comes to cybersecurity, when it comes to defense against it, when it comes to attacks, like all of it is just that augmenting of what humans can already do, and making it another layer more challenging.

SI: Yeah, absolutely.

MF: And your observations of how different countries might be approaching espionage, have you noticed any major differences between different countries or regions in how they approach this?

SI: Oh, I certainly have. One of the similarities is that everybody is spying on everybody else. Everybody’s trying to manipulate and exploit weakness for their own country, for their own government. I think the difference comes down to capabilities, goals, and tactics, which can be affected by leadership, and I mean, if you take a country like Russia, which has an autocratic leader, a lot of corruption. We saw the FSB, the Domestic Intelligence Service, not providing legitimate, accurate intelligence to Putin when it came to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He thought that he was going to be able to take Kyiv in a few days. 

Fast forward to the mass expulsions of spies under diplomatic cover, and they started to lower their tradecraft level to have proxies who were oftentimes very incompetent engaging in some of their sabotage, and they’ve also started using teenagers that they’ve recruited on Telegram to actually help conduct some of these operations in Ukraine, and they have killed them in these operations by detonating bombs remotely, so that is very different than what the United States would be doing when it comes to targets. China is fascinating in this realm, because we have seen for years now that there is no, there’s really no line that they aren’t willing to cross. 

Every American has intrinsic value, and therefore they will prey on anybody, and I don’t think that most people understand that, even now. They also have such a large population. We see that in their intelligence services they can bring so much to bear because of those numbers. There are some countries that are very good in regional ways. Israel sees an existential threat in Iran. One, so that is their priority. 

France has a colonial legacy, so it has the ability to have deeper access in certain countries in Africa and the Middle East. I’d say that every country operates differently, but the alliances are also a part of this conversation, and this is always evolving based on who’s leading a country, who’s leading the intelligence services, and even some of those smaller decisions that get made on the ground in the operations themselves, because a person like Putin doesn’t necessarily know every single thing that’s happening when it comes to his intelligence community.

CB: That’s a great point you make, too, about it’s always changing based on leadership, based on alliances, based on the whole geopolitical climate of the world. So, I think that’s a really interesting way to approach it. When it comes to the way that you convey these stories and really look at the different ways countries approach espionage. What is one of the most intriguing stories that you have heard on the podcast?

SI: Okay, this is where you’re going to get a much longer answer than you wanted, because it’s so hard to choose just one. I mean, I love the counterintelligence stories where you learn the backstory of how they caught the mole. There was this one woman, Katrina Leung, who had been the FBI’s top informant on China, but she was actually working for China’s Ministry of State Security, and there were concerns that popped up about her over the years, and all of it was being swept under the rug by her FBI handler, because she was sleeping with him, and she even ended up marrying this guy. They divorced their spouses, and they got married, and lived happily ever after. 

There was a FBI special agent who’s still in the bureau who told me about how he lured a spy out of China and to eventually the United States, and this was the first time the United States had ever been able to take a Chinese spy out of China to face justice in the United States, but there are also really personal stories that are very, very meaningful in a different way. There was one woman who drove from Michigan to D.C. to describe how she personally came out as a lesbian in the midst of her polygraph to keep her job at the CIA. Oh, wow, this was back in the 80s. 

There was another woman who sat down with me to talk about how she discovered not only that her family had been Nazis in Germany, but then that they had been sent to Hawaii by Joseph Goebbels, and they ended up spying for the Germans and the Japanese, and her grandfather confessed to providing intelligence leading to the Pearl Harbor attack, and the shame and the complication of having that legacy. And the last category are really the insider accounts, people who are leading areas of the intelligence community and making a difference in very humble ways that you, you wouldn’t even know what incredible stories they have until you sit down with them, but these are people who are just so.. actually, let me just say that one section again, if you don’t mind, and the last category are really these insider accounts, people who are leading their own facet of the intelligence space.

Whether it’s the chairman of the house’s intelligence committee, Representative Rick Crawford, who came here and sat down in these very funky socks and talked about what his plans were for the committee to the former director of the CIA’s Covert Action Branch, which is the paramilitary, talking about what it was like to lead this part of the agency through COVID and the fall of Afghanistan, and so many other eras, and really, these are these are conversations that you’re just not going to get anywhere else.

CB: Exactly. Yeah, these are amazing stories that you’re able to talk about, and it’s so you don’t even think about the personal interweaving of different people and family members and countries. It’s fascinating, really. So, what a fun, what a fun podcast. So interesting. 

SI: It’s been a real privilege to be able to have this job, and I mean, some of it is really surprising, the the number of people who started off outside of college and were given immense responsibility at such a young age and continue to be humble today. I mean, there’s Jonna Mendez, she was the CIA’s chief of disguise, and she just took me into this wild world where she was traveling through Asia and Europe. She made two fake Shahs and presented them to Jimmy Carter to try to quell the protests in Iran in the 1970s revolution. And there’s this guy, Bob Wallace, who was the director of CIA’s Office of Technical Service in the 90s and early 2000s and he talked to me about how, you know, he was just hilarious. He talked about how the CIA actually took covert communication practices from the porn industry, and that helped inform their – or let me just say that one bit again. He actually described how the agency took their covert communication practices from the tactics being used by the porn industry when the internet age began.

CB: Wow, that’s fascinating. It’s interesting. It’s interesting too, like we hear so much about spies and the movies and fiction, and it’s amazing to think that these things really do happen, but it’s a kind of a good segue into some of our listener questions here before we wrap. I guess, what is one of your favorite fictional spy characters or movies?

SI: Well, I love foreign films. There’s a German film called The Lives of Others, which was about a Stasi officer in East Germany who’s bugged the home of a playwright. He’s listening in on this man’s life, and he really develops an affinity and a fondness for this man. It was a story that had a lot of moral ambiguity and intimacy in it, in a way that I found to be incredibly memorable. Terms of TV, I thought The Americans was an amazing show to learn about Russian illegals, and if you like sci-fi counterpart, where there are basically two parallel worlds that actually meet underground, and one group of people who look exactly like the other group of people are going and gathering intelligence and conducting operations on the other, so it’s like some kind of sort of magical realism. It was just such a good series, I think. Where I find myself a little bit frustrated is that I don’t think there are that many truly substantive spy films and movies about women that don’t involve someone who’s super hot and sexy. I just like, I don’t care about that. I want there to be something more nuanced and, and deep that show what women who work in the intelligence community go through, and we have movies like Zero Dark Thirty, which was directed by Kathryn Bigelow, but we just need so much more of that.

CB: Yeah, no, exactly. I totally agree with that.

MF: And I bet you’ve spoken to a lot of women in the past who would be great characters for inspiration, for, for something like that.

SI: Yeah, there could, I could create a very cool hybrid character, and yeah, I could make a pretty, pretty awesome badass spy lady.

MF: Love that. Well, we’ll be looking forward to that one day. Perhaps that’s the next project.

SI: Yeah, when I leave the studio, I’ll just start working on that novel.

MF: Awesome. And then one of our final listener questions is, what is your favorite exhibit in the International Spy Museum?

SI: Okay, this is another tough one, because we have so much, it’s so much good stuff, and like, let’s not even talk about the kinds of gadgets that one could spend a lot of money getting, because you know we do have like the rectal tool kits and things like that. There’s the weird, but we also have things that you could never ever get anywhere else, because there’s one of a kind, and I’m thinking of the ice pick that killed Trotsky, which still has his blood on it. We have the bodice of Mata Hari. There’s so much here, you could spend hours and hours and hours, and you probably still couldn’t see it all.

CB: Yeah, I went there a couple years ago. I definitely need to go back and know that listen to your podcast. I need to go back and learn more about everything in there. That’s incredible. So, Sasha, before we wrap up, what’s the future of SpyCast look like? Anything coming up that we should look forward to?

SI: Well, we have had a long stream of amazing guests and stories, people who have given us access to current events in a way that you really can’t get anywhere else. An upcoming story that we have is actually about a special espionage focused unit inside the Naval Criminal Investigative Service about how that unit caught a person who had been sharing intelligence with a foreign government and, kind of like takes us back in time to his different communications with this foreign person, and why this person shared intelligence, how the person copied and pasted information, and like was rather lazy, and the handler is like, can you please give us more. Can you please not have so many typos in that work?

I will be speaking with a person about intelligence and the services in Cuba as it relates to the situation with the United States right after we finish here, and just right now we have a piece about Africa Corps, which is sort of like Russia’s private military, the Wagner Group 2.0 and its efforts in Africa, in Ukraine, the Shadow Fleet, which has, of course, been trying to evade sanctions on the seas, and how it all fits together. So, we have a lot of good content coming out, and we have been at the forefront of the spike podcasting world, where the in the 1%, top 1% of podcasts globally, so really good stuff ahead, thanks.

CB: Yeah, it makes me want to go on like a road trip and listen and binge all the episodes coming up. They sound so good.

SI: Thanks. Well, yeah, go for it. And then you can, you can tell me which one is your favorite. 

CB: We will get back to you on that for sure. Well, Sasha, thank you so much for coming on our podcast today and talking about SpyCast. Clearly you’re a great spy expert, and we’ll be tuned into your podcasts, and we’ll definitely report back to you on our favorites.

SI: Thank you so much for having me, you guys.

CB: Yeah, thank you. 

CB: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please visit us at w2comm.com/. 

MF: You can also subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, our co-hosts Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh get together with Kelly Jackson Higgins, Editor-in-Chief of Dark Reading and Vice President of Cybersecurity Editorial at Informa TechTarget, to learn about the Informa TechTarget merger, the 20th anniversary of Dark Reading and the future of the cybersecurity media landscape.

A veteran technology and business journalist with more than three decades of experience, Kelly currently leads editorial strategy across three major cybersecurity publications: Dark Reading, SearchSecurity and Cybersecurity Dive. Since the Informa Tech and TechTarget merger, her role has expanded, placing her at the center of a newly united media powerhouse. 

Building a 360 degree Cybersecurity Media Ecosystem

Kelly offered her perspective on how the merger reshaped not just internal workflows, but the editorial philosophy behind each publication. Rather than collapsing brands into one voice, Kelly’s focus has been on clarity, distinction and collaboration.

“We’ve been working together this past year as a group, the three brands, to make sure we’re distinct and not cannibalizing one another,” she said. 

Each of Informa TechTarget’s cybersecurity publications play a decisive role in this new ecosystem. Cybersecurity Dive is highly news- and newsletter-driven, designed for CISOs and executive leaders who need quick, actionable insights. SearchSecurity leans into deep technical analysis and long-form reporting for readers who want to fully understand emerging technologies. Dark Reading spans both worlds: covering breaking news, threat analysis and industry trends for everyone.

“What I like about the three brands working together is, even if it’s rare that we cover the same exact story, they are different stories. You’re going to learn something from both those articles, which is, I think, really cool,” Kelly said.

The Future of Cybersecurity Media

Kelly further shared how cybersecurity journalism is evolving under pressure from industry consolidation, artificial intelligence (AI) and changing audience behaviors.

“The media industry is tough right now,” Kelly explained. “But if you’re doing something unique, if you have a loyal audience, that still matters. People want to read what you have because you’re giving them something they can’t just get from an AI summary.”

Rather than chasing every headline, Kelly emphasized the importance of context, originality and being open to change, both for journalists and for the vendors trying to break into the news cycle.

“I think that’s part of what makes the media industry so fun and interesting, is that it is always adapting to what’s new,” Kelly stated.

Looking ahead, she is focused on growth: the growth of audiences, formats and collaboration across brands. Kelly sees the next phase of Informa TechTarget as both a challenge and an opportunity – one rooted in staying close to the cybersecurity community and honoring the publication’s legacy while pushing it forward.

“It’s an exciting and challenging role,” she said. “And I’m really excited to do more with it this year.”

To hear more from Kelly about the Informa TechTarget merger and what she’s watching closely in 2026, listen to the full episode of Inside the Media Minds or read the complete transcript.

Timestamps

0:22 – Christine and Madison’s Podcast Preview

2:03 – Kelly’s Role at Informa TechTarget

5:57 – Differentiating Dark Reading, SearchSecurity & Cybersecurity Dive

10:36 – Lessons Learned from a Complex Merger 

12:36 – Happy 20th Anniversary Dark Reading!

14:24 – Cybersecurity’s Evolution 

17:41 – The Evolving Cybersecurity News Cycle 

19:31 – Generative AI, the Cloud, and Other 2026 Security Priorities 

23:44 – Covering RSA vs. Black Hat as a Unified Team 

27:19 – What Reporters Need for Rapid Response

28:51 – Kelly’s “Publicly Hacked” Black Hat Story 

31:26 – The Future of Cyber Media at Informa TechTarget

34:15 –  Kelly’s Goals for 2026

Ready to listen to more from Inside the Media Minds? Find all of our past episodes here!

Transcript

Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. We are your co-host, Christine Blake, 

Madison Farabaugh (MF): and Madison Farabaugh. 

CB: This show features in-depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet-peeves to their favorite stories. 

MF: From our studio here at W2 Communications, let’s go inside the media minds.

CB: All right. So, on today’s podcast, we have Kelly Jackson Higgins, who is the Editor-in-Chief of Dark Reading and VP of cybersecurity editorial at Informa TechTarget. She leads editorial strategy for the company’s three cybersecurity media brands: Dark Reading, SearchSecurity and Cybersecurity Dive. She’s an award winning veteran technology and business journalist, with three decades of experience, and reporting and editing for various technology and business publications and major media properties. 

This is a fantastic episode. We really loved chatting with Kelly. She had so much to share. I mean, we really dug into what the past year has looked like since the Informa TechTarget merger, and how each of the publications she oversees approaches their coverage in a different way. A really fun conversation. Madison, what was your favorite part? 

MF: Yeah, I loved hearing Kelly’s perspective on just how the industry and covering security has changed in the almost 20 years since Dark Reading first published its first piece. And I also liked hearing her perspective on how the CISO recognition and acknowledgement has changed. You know, back then, the CISO term, it wasn’t even really widely talked about. That position didn’t exist as much. But now today, of course, those are some of the most sought after perspectives that they’re looking for at these security publications. So, I think our listeners will definitely love to hear more about that. 

CB: Yeah, we also heard about their approach for RSA this year, so tune in for that. And then Kelly also shared a really funny, embarrassing story of her first couple years at Dark Reading back in 2007, so we hope you all enjoy this episode. 

Hey there, Kelly, welcome to the podcast. We’re so happy to have you on Inside the Media Minds today.

Kelly Jackson Higgins (KJH): Hi there. Thank you so much for having me. Christine, it’s great to be here. 

CB: Yeah, thanks for joining us. So we’ve had you on the podcast before, back in 2018. A while ago, and gosh, back then we talked so much about Black Hat, back in that August 2018, and it goes without saying, so much has changed since then. This year, 2026 marks 20 years of Dark Reading, and it’s been just over a year since the Informa TechTarget merger. So, I’d love to start the conversation there. Tell us a bit about the decision to merge these entities and what the past year has looked like for you. There’s been so much going on.

KJH: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, it has been a very big year. So, the what happened was year and a half ago now, every year ago now, our company, Informa Tech, which Dark Reading was part of, merged with Tech Target. So interestingly, Informa Tech also owned Industry Dive, but they were very separate from us. They operated a separate entity. So we never really met them. Didn’t work with them. But when the merger happened, we merged, basically merged, in my case especially, three different media companies into one group. 

So we brought over, we basically broke a lot of the silos, right? And suddenly you had TechTarget, the Informa Tech brands, you know, Dark Reading, InformationWeek, AI Business, all those folks, Light Reading, and then the Dive publications. So in January of last year, the Informa TechTarget executives created what we kind of called, like, different industry groups. So my job changed dramatically. I became the VP of the cybersecurity editorial team, which encompasses Dark Reading, SearchSecurity and Cybersecurity Dive, so I oversee the strategy for all three publications. I’m still Editor-in-Chief at Dark Reading, I’m also default Editor-in-Chief at Cybersecurity Dive, because in the merger, they kind of reorganized and lost their editor. So I also work with them on a daily basis. So I have, I wear probably a few hats. 

CB: That is a lot, that is a lot.

KJH: But bottom line, we, we now have this really, I want to say, like a powerhouse, especially, I mean, across the company. But of course, in my area, the cybersecurity side of things, we have the sort of powerhouse of the hottest brands, and I would say, are the rock star, journalists and editors, and we’ve been working together the past year as a group, the three brands to make sure we’re distinct and we’re not cannibalizing one another. 

Number one, number two, to also amplify one another’s content. We do projects together. I can talk a little about that if you want to hear about it. But really, I look at this group as sort of the 360 of cyber media. You know, you have three brands who approach things differently. We have very little overlap in our audiences, which I think is really interesting, even though we’re all kind of, you know, we want to target those CISOs and all the big folks, but also we do talk to different people, and we do it in different ways and different types of content. So, I think it’s a pretty complimentary approach, and it’s been really exciting to sort of evolve this group. We call ourselves the cyber media team. 

CB: Okay. And we love it.

KJH: We meet once a week, and we actually really, we have a really good, I would say, really good chemistry with the three brands among the three groups. I think we look at ourselves as a team. You know, obviously doing our own things, but also trying to support one another as well.

MF: Love that. And as you said, these three brands are definitely a powerhouse, and our team thoroughly enjoys working with each one of the individual brands, for sure. Yeah, we would love to hear a bit more about, kind of, how these brands are each different, how the maybe editorial approach is different for them and even the audiences that you all are specifically targeting. Could you elaborate a bit more on that?

KJH: Absolutely, thank you for that’s a really good question, Madison. That’s something we’ve been really working on refining over the past year. So, I’ll start with Dive, since they’re the smaller team of two. But Dive, you know, traditionally, has always been aimed at the CISO, C-level folks. They’re, you know, the very news newsletter forward, obviously. The newsletter comes out at noon et every day, so that’s 9am for Pacific Time executives and lunchtime, if they take a lunch break, for the East Coast, the idea being, you know, getting them the really important news that they need to know about and what they can do about it. So, I would say Dive, does not dive as deeply into the technology side of things, and is really talking to the higher level folks and cyber risk, CISO, C-level people. So every morning you know you’re basically triaging, you know, what those key news stories are that those folks need to know about in their jobs.

So that’s Cybersecurity Dive. SearchSecurity has had an amazing heritage of this deep look into technologies, long form content about trends, you know, looking at someone who really wants to do their homework about the industry, right? They really want to know, I have to know a lot about this agentic AI thing. I’m going to just really study this thing, right? They’ve always done a great job of that kind of that kind of content, and that’s something, you know, we’re still emphasizing. They’re also starting to do some news of their own, like in their own form of news analysis that’s a little bit different than the way Dive does things and the way Dark Reading does things. So they are expanding a little bit in that direction. They recently launched a newsletter called The Cybersecurity Insider that goes out twice a week. And then there’s a third issue on Saturdays that encompasses all three of our brands, which is kind of exciting. So we can, and we all do, share in our newsletters each other stories and things like that. And  that group, SearchSecurity is headed up by Sharon Shea, and she’s, she’s incredible.

Dark Reading. Let’s see. It’s been a long journey. Been around there since 2006, and in some ways, our mission has not changed. I would say it’s evolved a bit. So we’ve always been about sort of providing all cybersecurity professionals with breaking news, news analysis, technology trends, feature pieces. We’re really expanding into different types of content now, led by Tara Seals and Fahmida Rashid, are doing more more video content, which we were able to do as well on our website until recently, when it was able to support it better. So we’re experimenting with that a lot. 

And we’re doing, I think, Dark Reading, the difference with Dark Reading is we’re talking to all levels of the industry, right? We’re not just talking we’re talking to executives, absolutely, but we’re also talking to the security operations team. You know, these are the folks who are in the trenches. We do get more technical. We do help them, like, understand, you know, what the latest threat is, what they can do about it. I think the difference with Dark Reading we’ve always strived for is to have the sort of secret sauce we call it, or we try to provide context and analysis that nobody else is providing, right? We want to really lean into that and not just be writing about everything else, writing about everybody else is writing about. We really do try to, you know, add that extra to it, and also, every piece of content that Dark Reading writes is written for the audience and the audience in mind. We don’t write something just because this sounds cool. We want to sounds cool. We want to be like, what does this matter to the security operations team or to the CISO? Would they care about this? 

So that kind of, I would say, that’s the difference and the three what I like about the three brands working together is we all, even if it’s rare that we cover the same exact story, but when we do, there are different stories. So Cybersecurity Dive does a story and we do a story on the same topic. You’re going to learn something from both those articles and different things, which is, I think, really cool about it. We do keep each other apprised what we’re working on, so that there’s no, like, we’re not, like, reinventing the wheel, but we don’t say, ‘oh, you can’t cover that because, you know, dive is covering that, or dark reading is covering that’. We want to look at it from different lenses, and that’s what’s so great about our reporters. They’re able to do that, and the stories come out very differently, which I think is really interesting. And that’s a testament to this group of reporters and editors we have on all three brands. 

CB: Yeah, that’s amazing. And how you describe that really encapsulates the 360 view of cyber media, how you described it in the beginning. I think that’s a really cool approach. I’m sure it’s been there was a lot of adjusting when you first kind of merged together. Did anything surprise you over the past year? Kind of when you got used to the three different publications, these different approaches, what was the most surprising thing?

KJH: Yeah, I think what I really liked about this, it was, I’m not gonna say was easy, because no change is easy. A merger is really hard, and this was an especially hard one. I think most people would agree to that. But what I think I would surprise me in a good way, and it wasn’t always easy, was how the three media companies are learning from each other on how they approach things, and how we’re all having to evolve in this new world, and what we can learn from each other and how we can get better because of how the other, the other group, operates, right? We’re taking sort of the best of the, I guess, the greatest hits of all the three brands, right? And and using that in the business strategy. So I really appreciate that. 

I’m not going to say that was easy to do, friend, it was really hard on people, right? They were, you know, like, ‘Oh, no. What does this mean? You know, our way is wrong,’ you know. And I don’t think it was that. I think it’s more like, Okay, we you know, one thing I’ve always felt with, you know, over the years with Dark Reading, was we never should sit still. We should always be looking ahead. You know, the industry moves fast. Media has definitely gone through a lot. The media industry has gone through a lot. So, I’ve always tried to like, let’s look at the next thing. What’s the next thing we can be doing? Let’s not just sit here and be like, ‘Oh, we’re doing it great.’ This has been good for all of us to kind of sort of examine, you know, the ways we were working, the ways we were writing content, the way we were approaching things. 

And I think what surprised me was that as painful as that was, in some ways, it’s also been fun for people. In the end, yeah, everyone was a lot of people were hesitant about it, but I think the more we get to know each other, and the more we work together, then we realize this is actually really great for all three brands.

CB: Exactly. And it sounds like sometimes a challenge like that, can it really pays off. And from our perspective, it seems like it’s been going really well, and makes a lot of sense.

MF: You had, yeah, you had mentioned, you know, Dark Reading, starting in 2006 so just curious, we are coming up on about 20 years now of dark reading. Is there anything significant that your team might be doing to celebrate that, or anything, you know, the team is planning ahead for? 

KJH: This has been something I’ve been thinking about for two years, because I was like ‘we’re coming up on the 20th!’ So yes, we are. I’m actually getting ready to hopefully present to my team in the next week or so, we’re going to have a special content package that will roll out over the months. We did that at our 10 year. We did like 10. We use the number 10 as like strategic, but I think 20 is a little too much. So I’m not going to do these the 20 number, but we are going to do some special content, you know, between writing, video, podcast, and maybe bringing in some folks who used to work with Dark Reading. 

CB: Oh, cool.

KJH: The old industry pioneers who helped us get launched, like, get their take on things. We’re pretty excited about it. I’d like to have it culminate, hopefully at Black Hat with some sort of a celebration white industry folks to celebrate with us. We did that for our 10 year, and it was really it was really neat just sort of hearing from people, you know about their thoughts about us. We don’t know what people think about us, right? Are we doing this right? 

And then thinking hearing about how, you know, they saw us over the years and, you know, our early days. And I actually was just looking at our first issue on May 1, 2006 is on Wayback Machine. It’s hilarious. It’s actually great in some ways, but it’s also like, wow, this was a busy homepage. Hopefully some fun graphics and art to sort of look at where we were then and where we are now. So I’m really excited about it’s really nice to get to to look back at all the things we did, and the things we’re doing differently we learned, and all the people that sort of were part of that. So it’s pretty special time. 

CB: Yeah, I love that. That’s so cool that you have that and can look back at it. So, you know, looking at that 20 years you mentioned, like, the evolution of the industry, what are your thoughts on it? Like, back then? Like, how have things changed now? Everything’s AI. I mean, just what are your thoughts on the past 20 years of the industry? 

KJH: Yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about that because it’s just an I’m in awe. Sometimes, some things, I think, gosh, I’ve been talking about this for 20 plus years. We’re still talking about the same tissues. But then I look back and, you know, back then it was really, you know, the CISO term was not well known. There were maybe, maybe a handful of CISOs in the world, and nobody really talked about it. It was all you it was all, you know, people. The industry was still really new, and so much of the the news was about researchers breaking things and exposing them, because there was no, you know, vulnerability disclosure programs back then. So it was like all these cool things that were happening, like HD Moore doing his month of browser bugs. 

And, you know, getting to see, like, you know, the things that he found in browsers that were broken and publishing them. And we were writing stories on that, Dan Kaminsky figuring out how DNS had a big, huge hole in it, and how that, like, break the whole internet and, and so those kind of things were exciting. There weren’t a lot of vendors back then. So, the products were, you know, very focused on firewalls, on premise, right? That was, was not a thing yet, right, really, right? It was more on prem, you know, you had your routers, you had your firewalls, and you were looking at, you know, PC security. You know, there were no BYOD back then, you know, it was, it was a different world. They were, you have your smartphones. It’s scary to say all this.

CB: That’s crazy. 

KJH: Yeah, yeah, I feel very old talking about this, but so the things you’re protecting were, you know, a little more close to home, but there were still a lot of the software wasn’t secure back then Microsoft kicked off its secure development lifecycle back then, so it was still new to like, you know, have secure software written at all. But in some ways, I laugh, because I’m talking about, oh, we talked about oh, we talked about browsers, but now we’re talking about browsers again, right? We’re talking as something we’re not necessarily always securing well, even though they’re more well built than they were back then. So I feel like we come full circle a lot. 

I mean, I wrote about AI 20, more than 20 years ago, and I thought, ‘That’s not new,’ but we really were using it like we are now. So it’s interesting, some things stay the same, but the themes, but I really feel like the industry is obviously massively bigger than it was back then. We were able to, what was nice in our role, was we were able to kind of pioneer a lot of things. Because we were the we were one of the first pubs, one of the first. And we were able to, kind of like, you know, we met all the pioneers in the industry. We profiled them. We, you know, learn from them. You know, just dug into it. We had, it was like a greenfield for us to write about stuff, whereas now, it’s a fire hose, yeah. 

And we are rarely are able to cover everything. Like, well, we don’t cover everything. We are rarely able to keep on top of most of it, I would say, to be honest, even with the, you know, Dark Reading’s, a little obviously bigger stuff than than Cybersecurity Dive, for example. But it’s still not enough people to cover all the things that are happening. So that’s really different. Those are probably the main things to me. But looking at that homepage, I was like, ‘something seems similar.’ 

CB: Yeah, full circle.

KJH: Yeah, yeah.

MF: Yeah. And that’s such an interesting perspective you brought up about just the number of vendors and the vendor landscape expanding so much. So I’m just curious, after you know, your experience of covering the security industry for so long, how has that shifted? Or maybe, where are there still challenges with organizations, vendors who are trying to break into that cybersecurity news cycle? Is there anything that, overall, this time, you know, people still need to keep in mind, maybe things that still need to be improved there?

KJH: I think it kind of all comes back to, you know, most vendors, if you look at their descriptions of what they do today, kind of send a little alike in security, right? They all want to be AI forward, which I totally get, and that makes total sense, you know, they want to be, you know, seeing the cloud, they want to give you visibility, they want to protect all these things. So I think it’s hard for them, I do feel for them, like, that’s hard to stand out. But I think what it comes boils down to is it’s always telling a good story. What is it that you do that’s unique? Or, what is it about your your company that’s unique? You know, do you have a founder who was, you know, had some, you know, pioneering role in the industry, or why this idea that you had, that started your company actually got you here? I think those kind of stories are important to tell, because it’s hard as journalists, I’m not as much in the day to day anymore, but I still get all the emails, and I know how, like it can be overwhelming. Everything starts to sound the same. 

If you’re getting pitches and you’re like, ‘I think we wrote about this already,’ you know? And how do you you know? How do you get past the noise, right? So I think it’s hard. I feel like it’s always all about show, and this is true for the media like, for us to show what we’re unique. What do we do uniquely, how we write stories, uniquely, that what we bring to the table that nobody else does. I think that’s probably true for vendors too, and I’m no marketer, but you know, I do know that I think that’s the hard part. You know, from the journalist perspective, sometimes weeding through what’s just marketing speak, and what’s real. And everyone kind of wants to know what’s real, right? They really do are interested in that. What’s the new thing? What’s the thing driving this trend or this, you know, this, this vulnerability, or this threat.

CB: And similarly, with so many companies coming out with various AI solutions. Like you said, AI forward. What do you think is the most interesting thing about AI right now, and how are the informant tech target brands approaching that coverage? 

KJH: Yeah, so you know when, when generative AI first popped, boy that hit hard, right? It was like we’re talking about then we were talking about every day. I think now we’re getting to that settling in point a little bit about what it can and can’t do, right? Talking about from the news side of things, I think there’s a lot of interesting aspects from, you know, for developers, how they can use it. And everybody wants to use it to make their job easier, right? But I think we keep coming back to the same thing that we’re not surprised by: You still have to be a human in the middle. 

And, I mean, we’re even, even as journalists, like, how do we use AI, right? You know, research, you know, we’re, we’re thinking about this all the time. You know, our company is very, is very AI forward. They want to, they want to be innovative there. And we’re figuring out ways where it makes sense for us to use AI. I think for in the security industry, there’s a lot of really good options for it in terms of, like, same for any job, just, you know, easing the manual labor part of your job, like, get, you know, making it more efficient. But I think you always still have to keep in mind it’s not a person, even though some people have come to name their Chat. GPT, oh, yeah, I have a friend who does that. So, you know, calls him Chad. If you do that, that’s great, but there’s still, there’s, it’s still not a person like, the person has to be in there. And you do see things when you mess around with, when you do, when you do your own like, searches, like ‘that’s not right, or this doesn’t look right.’ 

So, but I do think there’s a lot of capabilities there that this, that security vendors are starting to put out there, and security teams need like, there’s always been the same problem in the sock. There’s too many alerts, there’s too many things coming at them. What’s the real thing? What’s the real needle in the haystack that they have to focus on? And I think that’s where AI is going to be the biggest game changer for them, is to getting them to that point where they’re not missing the one thing that they need to catch. 

MF: Yeah so, that makes perfect sense. And kind of switching gears a little bit. But beyond AI, what, what other topics are really top of mind for you this year, going into 2026. Is there anything you know that’s new or emerging that you think we need to be paying more attention to?

KJH: I mean, obviously AI is going to be part of everything. I think every discussion you know, we can get annoyed by it, but it’s going to be there. But I feel like, for me, just watching the cloud evolution, and I say that, I mean, in terms of, like, people’s dependency on cloud applications, cloud infrastructure, it’s becoming more secure, but there is still becoming more of a target as well. So I think that’s going to be a really interesting space to see how that shakes out. We’re seeing some interesting you know, some of the cloud providers are getting more proactive and providing secure built-in security, which is great, but I think that’s going to be more of an area where organizations are gonna have to kind of remember, just because you know your provider is doing it doesn’t mean you don’t have to worry about anything. You still have to pay attention, right? So I think that’s going to get more from what I’m seeing. That’s going to be more of an issue this year. 

And, of course, just where folks can use AI to, both how to defend, and also how the attackers are using it as well too. So I don’t lean too much in AI, but that one I can’t get away from. I don’t know. I think those two things. I mean, you know, we’re sort of talking about quantum, but it’s still far enough away that I don’t think it’s, you know, really on front burner for people right now. But, yeah, that’s definitely something. And then, like I mentioned, browser security is becoming more of a conversation again, which I thought, ‘didn’t we already resolve that?’ And then identity security is the other one. I’m sorry, that one. That’s an important one. It’s funny, because that’s been sort of part of a lot of things, but it’s been pulled out a lot lately because of the cloud, I think too.

CB: Okay.

KJH: Identities floating around, they have machine identities floating around. You know, managing that seems like it shouldn’t be so hard, but it really is. So I think that’s going to be a place where people need to pay attention. I think we’ll, you know, we’re covering it. We’re keeping an eye on it.

MF: We’ve definitely been seeing a lot more clients and other vendors putting out more research around identity security too. So we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that. 

CB: Yeah, one thing I’m curious about is when it comes to events, I know we’re, gosh, when this comes out less than two months out from RSA, what are you and your team looking to get out of major industry conferences like that this year, and how does the merger of these three entities impact that? 

KJH: That’s a really good question. We, so what we did last year, and we’re doing again at RSA and probably at Black Hat, we try to maximize our resources there, among the three brands, so we’re gonna have a crack team there and RSA. I think the shows are different. So RSA, because it’s so big, as you know, it’s like, everyone’s there, right? It’s more about getting behind the scenes of the market forces and threat trends that are sort of driving the industry. It’s really, I think there is a great place to get sort of a reality check of, you know, what’s really, what are the trends around the industry? What does that really mean for the cybersecurity professionals and folks who are, you know, tasked with selecting this technology and products, because that’s a big product show, right? So what’s, what’s, what are the things that they’re getting, you know, put in front of them, and what makes sense? 

So I think for our reporters that are going, they’re going to be digging into some of that, like, this is a chance to meet with everybody, almost everybody’s there, right? So you want to be able to get all your chances, face-time with everybody, and also to just really step back and go, ‘Okay, what’s the theme right now,’ this year, and every year, RSA has a theme. So whether it’s real or, you know, a theme, marketing theme, you know, figure it out like how that applies to what you’re seeing. And again, we try to do for Dark Reading and for SearchSecurity and Dive is we try to think about, okay, our readers, what is it they need to Know. So not just like, oh, this is exciting, because this is all over the show floor, but why would they care about this? Or is this something that they’re thinking about? 

So I think at RSA, there’s less news than a Black Hat, because Black Hat’s all the new stuff that’s, you know, coming out from the researchers. So this was our chance to, like, really innovate and dig into some of the trends in the industry and things that our readers need to know about in terms of, you know, product direction, strategy, that kind of thing, yeah. And then Black Hat, of course, you know, you’ve got all the latest policy folks there, the threats, attacks, technologies. There’s too much to write about there, so we’ll be, we’ll be covering all that. 

And I think I what I like about Black Hat. I like both shows. Black Hat, you’re like, This is the community of the industry, right? It’s smaller, a little bit smaller, still huge. Now it’s the community of the industry. It’s the people who help build this thing that are all there, you know, and they’re and they’re, you know, successors, all doing the same thing, trying to, you know, stay ahead of the cyber criminals and nation states as best they can. So, I think that’s always more exciting for people, just because there’s a lot of cool new things that come out. But I think all the reporters will be, you know, we do a really good job like divvying up who’s going to follow what, so we’re not like running into the same things. And if we do, we’re taking it from a different lens, but we’ll be strategizing and about that too. So both really hard shows, obviously.

CB: Yeah, and I think at the end of the day, it’s important to remember it’s your focus on what your readers want to know, regardless of trends, or, you know, anything that crazy that happens at these shows, that’s the, that’s the goal at the end of the day. 

KJH: Yep, absolutely. That’s what we have to keep in mind. I think that’s how we sort of our North Star, right? You don’t want to get sucked into, like, it’s easy to get caught up in all the, yeah, there’s just so much going on. You could easily lose your way if you weren’t keeping that in mind.

MF: Wonderful. Well, this has all been super helpful to know. Kelly, we do have a few final listener questions for you before we wrap up the episode today. So the first question kind of relates to the idea of rapid response. And as you went through towards the beginning of this episode, the difference between now, SearchSecurity, Cybersecurity Dive, Dark Reading, when it comes to things like rapid response for the security and tech industry. How can vendors, PR professionals, how can we best serve you and your journalists? Are there any misconceptions? Are there any challenges that you typically face where you just like to clear the air on that?

KJH: That’s a really good question. I feel like you should probably be asking my reporters, not me, this question. I’ll give you my experience with it. I think you know, having if you’re talking about a big news event happens, right? Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we always appreciate is when we can get the right people to talk to quickly, right? I know that’s not easy to do in this industry. Everyone’s busy, but if we can get the right voices in the story, you know, we and we’re one thing that I know all three brands want to be able to talk to practitioners more. 

So, even customers of the vendors are super helpful to get that reality check for our audience, right? So as many of those folks that we can talk to, I think, you know, sometimes Dark Reading, we try not to use, like, canned quotes, you know, when I know that’s it’s nice to have that when you want to get perspective, we kind of use it for background, but we really want to talk to the person. You know, that’s kind of what we shoot for doing. And I think that’s true with with Dive as well and SearchSecurity is trying to really get on the phone with somebody, if you can. On the phone sounded very ancient; on teams or whatever, on Zoom, but you know what I mean. And sometimes it is a focus on people, but basically being able to talk to them, because I think it is more like trying to get that extra insight into what this really means. 

Because again, with this industry, there’s so much happening at once, and sometimes things can get, the important stuff can get lost in the noise. You might be excited by the fact that this is a this threat groups doing this again, but there might be some subtle difference on there that they’re doing that we need to raise for our readers to watch out for. So I think having the right people to available to talk to in short order is, I know that’s not an easy task, but that is helpful. Everybody’s on deadline, so.

CB: Yeah, that’s good insight. Another listener question: What is one of the funniest of moments that you’ve experienced at Dark Reading in the last 20 years. 

KJH: Okay, well, this is an embarrassing one. It happened my first year at Dark Reading. So this is 2007 mind you, before smartphones, WiFi was the Wild West. I had written a story. I had a scoop on this new WiFi sniffer that Robert Graham and David Maynor, who are two old contacts of mine, who had been in the industry forever, had built and they were going to demo it at Black Hat. So I got the scoop on it. This was actually at Black Hat DC, which is no longer but there was a DC Black Hat that I went to and they were going to demo, and I’d already written about the story. So I’m like, I’ll do another section. I’m like, I’ll go another session. I’ll just, you know, I’ve already written about it. 

So I was in the session, next door to where they were, and I you know, back then you should never get on the WiFi at a show. And I knew this, and I was writing about it, but I have, like, I need to check my email. So I quickly jumped on, and I quickly jumped off, and then about two minutes later, he was laughing next door. I’m like, Oh, they’re having a good time over there. Must be the session. Must be going well. And then I got back to the press room when I had this frantic text message from Dave Maynard saying, ‘Kelly, we need to talk.’ They had sniffed me on the WiFi and blasted my name and password onto the screen with all the other ones they found on on the WiFi. So back then, I had to call the IT department on my, I had a flip phone, and call them to, like, fix my to change my password, because I just blasted out. It just got blasted on the screen. 

This was back in the day, as the wall of sheep, you know, one, and I knew better, but I was like, ‘Oh, one second is not gonna matter.’ Well, I was so embarrassed. And then I realized that people were laughing because they saw my name on there, and those guys had to come tell me. So to this day, they still joke about it, which I think is funny, and actually wrote a column about it in our 10 anniversary because I was like, ‘the time I got publicly hacked,’ and it sounds so dumb now, because now you can do that, you can be on WiFi at a show back then, you could not do that. So I learned a lesson. I was also humbled, as I thought, ‘so cool’ writing the story and then got owned by the same tool that I wrote about. 

CB: It’s crazy how fast that happened too. You’re like, ‘Oh, just a couple seconds.’ Nope. 

KJH: You got it. You got it. They were like, they just were like, ‘how did you? ‘They felt really bad. But they were also like, ‘how did you?’ I’m like, I know. 

CB: Yeah, gosh. And then when it comes to kind of the future of Informa TechTarget, do you see any more acquisitions ahead, or do you foresee any other media entities combining at this point? 

KJH: That’s a really good question. I don’t know about the company’s plans. I do know that, you know, cybersecurity is a very strategic piece of the Informa TechTarget puzzle for the company overall. So, I know that we’re our brands are very important to that. There’s a lot of other pieces to it. Of other pieces to it as well. So I feel like we’re strategic for the company, which I think is great that gives us so much room to grow and to, you know, try new things, and, you know, work as a group, and also ensure that we keep our individual brands unique. 

And I feel like, you know, the media industry is tough right now. A lot of, there’s been a lot of consolidation, a lot of, you know, shuttered doors, etc, but I feel like our industry especially is still so relevant that there will always be room for some, for cybersecurity, media, even in the AI world. You know, obviously, traffic has been affected. The last year, we saw that coming, right? We knew that was going to happen. But what always stands out on the analysis that we do is if you’re doing something unique, if you have a loyal audience that matters, like people want to read your they want to read what you have, because you have something that they can’t just find an AIO, AI, you know, summary. But I think it’s always going to be, it’s an ongoing challenge to kind of make sure you’re paying attention to that. You know, we’re very, we’re very cognizant of it, and working very hard to make sure we still but even, you know, when Dark Reading started, for example, there was really no SEO, and 20 years ago, wasn’t really a thing, so we didn’t even have that. 

So for me, it’s not shocking to my system, but it’s also like, okay, we need to, you know, think about other ways to and the key is really keeping our audience, our audience engaged, and that we’re still doing what they need, we’re giving them what they need, right? I think that’s true for all three of the brands. We’re really leaning into that and trying to, you know, just, try new types of content, new ways we communicate with our readers, you know. So that’s definitely like, I think survival for all brand, all media, to be more, you know, open to change.

CB: Yeah, absolutely.

MF: I think that’s part of what makes the media industry so fun and interesting, is that it is always adapting to what’s new. I know we’ve had some guests on in the past talking about how even journalism, it kind of goes back and forth. You know, at one point it was podcast, now it’s videos, now it’s journalists creating their own almost profile or not, not necessarily in the same way as an influencer, but reporters making more of that profile on social media, on these different platforms. So, I think it’s very interesting to see how all of these different publications and some corporations are doing it differently, for sure.

And then our final listener question for you, Kelly, we’re about a month into the new year, so any professional or personal goals for you this year that you’d like to share? 

KJH: Oh gosh, well, I think you know, we’re now a year into this merger, so I really want to take us to the next level. The three brands grow each of them, their audience, their market, and make sure that we’re, you know, still complement each other, but also each growing in our own way. I think that’s really important. You know, there’s always new things we can be doing. I don’t want to just think we’ve done it all like there is no way we have. So I think that’s really important to me.

 And you know, I this 20 year anniversary has really made me think a lot about how, you know, thankful I am that I’ve been with this. I’ve been doing this for so long, even before I started Dark Reading, I was doing this. And you know, I’m always trying to honor my late friend colleague, and mentor, Tim Wilson, who co-founded Dark Reading, and his imprint on the brand is, remains the foundation of Dark Reading. And I’m really proud and honored to be able to lead it and grow it and now help this whole Informa TechTarget, cybersecurity, media portfolio grow. I think that’s a, it’s a, it’s really, it’s an exciting and challenging role. And I’m really, I’m excited to do more with it this year. I think that now we’re settled in where we’ll be able to do more things, and I’m looking forward to that. 

CB: Yeah, well said, Well, Kelly, this has been amazing. Talking to you, learning more about the merger and talking about the 20 years of Dark Reading. So thank you so much for coming on Inside the Media Minds today to talk about it with us. 

KJH: It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Christine and Madison. Was great talking to you. 

CB: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for everyone for tuning in.

CB: Thank you for listening to today's episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and to hear from some of our past guests, please visit us at w2comm.com/.

MF: You can also subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.

For our first podcast of the year and inaugural episode as part of the N2K CyberWire network, my co-host Christine Blake and I chatted with Roberto Torres, Editor at CIO Dive, to learn about the AI trends he’s paying attention to and hot topics he’s looking to cover in 2026.

From writing punk rock concert reviews in Venezuela to now covering enterprise technology, Roberto has always enjoyed telling niche stories and connecting with people who are passionate about what they’re doing. Naturally, at CIO Dive, Roberto has a strong focus on telling good stories on trends and areas of interest for Chief Information Officers (CIOs) that help them do their job better. “We are obsessed with the questions that CIOs are getting on the day to day, right when they show up for work,” Roberto explained.

One particular area that fascinates Roberto is the current pipeline for professional development within the technology industry, including where AI may be replacing jobs and where it is creating more. 

“There are some jobs that are going to be automated away,” he said. “But when you think about the net effect, we are creating a lot of opportunity in areas like data science. And companies are going to need people who know this stuff.”

AI Governance for CIOs in 2026

Roberto believes this will be a big year for AI governance, considering AI systems now live in nearly every organization, in the hands of employees and in interactions with customers. Organizations must ask themselves if their governance framework is strong enough to ensure their systems operate appropriately.

“AI has been billed as this tool that is plug and play. It is not. It is a very complex task to make sure that a technology like this reaches everywhere where it needs to in an organization.”

Over the past decade, the CIO purview has expanded beyond just technology concerns to broader organizational operations and business goals. In 2026, Roberto anticipates that CIOs will focus on scaling AI adoption, understanding to a deeper extent the intersection between employees and the tools that they use, potential points of friction, and the training/resources needed to ensure an efficient and secure AI management program.

“‘How do we survive this rising competition from a more tech savvy competitor over here? How can we use technology to open up new channels of revenue for the organization?’ Those are the questions that CIOs are going to get in 2026.”

Listen to the full episode or read the transcript to hear more from Roberto about how AI vendors can set themselves apart in a crowded market, how AI agents can help with cybersecurity skills shortages, key takeaways from Informa’s AI Summit and more!

Timestamps

0:21 – Christine and Madison’s Podcast Preview

2:25 – How Punk Rock Led to Tech Journalism

4:50 – Roberto’s Role at CIO Dive

6:57 – The #1 Question for CIOs

9:30 – How the CIO Role is Evolving

11:46 – How AI Vendors Can Set Themselves Apart

14:10 – The Human Element of AI Governance

17:19 – AI Trainings & Employee Feedback

18:46 – How Roberto Gathers Insights

20:28 – Hot Topics for 2026

23:12 – Breaking News Adrenaline

25:07 – Roberto’s Free Time Interests

26:02 – Goals for the New Year

Ready to listen to more from Inside the Media Minds? Find all of our past episodes here!

Transcript

Christine Blake (CB): Welcome to Inside the Media Minds. This is your host, Christine Blake. This show features in depth interviews with tech reporters who share everything from their biggest pet peeves to their favorite stories. From our studio at W2 Communications, let’s go Inside the Media Minds.

All right. Madison, so on, today’s episode of Inside the Media Minds. It’s our first of the year, and the first one on the N2K CyberWire network. We had the pleasure of talking to Roberto Torres, the CIO Dive Editor. Fantastic conversation. We learned a ton about him, his background and a lot about AI and how CIO Dive is approaching the topic of AI. One thing I really liked about this episode is how he talked about the governance aspect of it, and how during 2026 they’re going to be focusing a lot on the governance aspect of AI, and what that’s going to look like for CIOs. What did you find most interesting?

Madison Farabaugh (MF): I think, building off of your governance point, I really enjoyed hearing how a big focus in 2026 will most likely be training. So not just, you know, AI implementation, but also, how are C-suites and other teams responsible for AI? How are they going to be empowering employees to onboard AI? How are they going to do that securely and efficiently? So loved hearing that. Loved hearing his takeaways from Informa’s recent AI Summit. So I think listeners will definitely be keen to hear about that. And then lastly, I really enjoyed his take on tech talent and how that’ll be a big focus for him personally next year, and seeing how how companies are kind of grappling with some of these skills shortages, and then how they’re kind of overcoming that and looking for tech talent in the future.

CB: Yeah, it was such a fun conversation. We hope everyone enjoys it.

Hi everyone. It’s Christine Blake, co-host of Inside the Media Minds, here with Madison.

MF: Hey everyone.

CB: We’re excited for our guest today, our first guest of the new year. Here we have Roberto Torres, editor for CIO Dive. Roberto covers the software industry, data analytics and the future of technology. You live in Philadelphia now, right? And you come to D.C. often we heard.

Roberto Torres (RT): That’s correct.

CB: Yeah, awesome. We’d love to hear more about your background in media, how you got your start, what keeps you engaged, and a little bit more about your role at CIO dive.

RT: Absolutely. Christine, Madison, thank you so much for having me. My, I guess my story kind of begins with punk rock concert reviews, like something that you might run into with a lot of other journalists. You know, you just follow what is interesting. And so I was really connected to the rock scene in my hometown of Cabimas, Venezuela. And I just I started writing up reviews on my blog, and I fell in love with kind of having a story, telling a story for an audience that was really interested in something niche. I started studying journalism in my alma mater, the University of Zulia, and then quickly thereafter, I started working for the kind of the college newspaper. And there, I kind of got connected with all these different areas of knowledge. And I had a chance to speak with people from, you know, architecture or, you know, economists and people in political science, all these different experts, but the technology has always been a fascination for me.

So I moved to the US in 2015. I was working there at the university for a while, and when I got here to Philadelphia, I spent three fantastic years covering the local tech ecosystem, covering startups, mostly, and that’s how I got plugged into this whole universe of technology. And then in 2019, I joined Industry Dive, and I became the reporter for CIO Dive, a publication that’s focused on Chief Information Officers, covering the latest in enterprise technology, and I’ve been there ever since.

MF: That’s awesome. Yeah. Really appreciate the background there. And definitely that’s not, that’s not a background we always hear, so very cool to hear about the rock, the rock experience there and then how you’ve now ended up in the world of tech. And so we saw that in 2022 you had transitioned from mainly that reporting role at Industry Dive to now more of an editor role. And so what did that transition look like, and how do you split your time currently? And what would you say separates CIO Dive from the other industry dive publications, as well as broader other tech security publications?

RT: Sure. So that transition, I mean, it kind of happened naturally. I got obsessed with my beat, and I got to know really well all the sort of services, and I, and I was very connected to enterprise technology leaders. And, you know, once we started bringing on other folks into the team, and kind of our team grew, I grew curious for, how do you shape publications’ voices. Like, kind of those more big picture questions. And that’s when, right around the time, I started kind of splitting my time. I still, I was still writing stories, but also working with other reporters, helping them hone their craft, helping them develop their sources. And that was a really interesting exercise for me because I love connecting with people who are passionate about what they’re doing.

And I am still kind of splitting my time. I write about two to three stories a week, but mostly working with my reporters and freelancers, helping sure, helping make sure that the publication tells kind of a cohesive story about what’s going on in enterprise technology. For your second question, you know, CIO Dive, our sharp focus on Chief Information Officers, we are obsessed with the questions that they are getting on the day to day, right when they show up for work. What are the questions that are landing on their desks? And we’ve been able to tell, you know, really good stories and identify specific trends, specific areas of interest for CIOs that help them do their job better.

You know, especially as we’re kicking off the new year, this is a time when we’re looking ahead at what are the questions that are going to be asked, what are the trends that we’re kind of trying to identify to make sure that CIOs, when they show up to go to work and they’ve read our daily newsletter, they have an opportunity to be refreshed and just get a sense of what’s going on out there?

CB: I love that, so I have to ask now, what is, what do you think is the number one question CIOs are getting asked?

RT: Well, so all of 2025 was basically from the CEO on down. Every single executive has had to have a really cohesive answer for the AI question, right? How do you do it? How are you implementing it? How is this going to save us money? How is this going to help our company run better? And I think all of, all of 2025 was really focused on getting a return on investment, right? There’s been several years of experimentation. Companies are trying to figure out how they’ve deployed this stuff, but 2025 was focused on paring back on the use cases that didn’t work. 2026 is going to be big on AI governance, right? These systems are already live in every single organization that you come into contact with. These systems are already in the hands of employees, already interacting with customers. And the question is, do organizations have a strong enough governance framework to make sure that those systems don’t go awry, to make sure that those systems are operating appropriately?

And I think CIOs this year are going to be really, really focused and on scaling adoption now that those tools are in the hands of employees, how do you make sure that adoption levels are where you want them to be? I don’t have the answer to those questions, because I’m not a CIO, but I think a huge focus is going to be on the human element, the intersection between humans and the tools that they use, and what are the kind of points of friction? We’ve heard from from different executives, that having the, you know, this, this really intense focus on things like training and making sure that that people have the resources and the tools that they that they need, is going to go a long way, because AI has been billed as this tool that is plug and play. It is not. It is a very complex task to make sure that a technology like this reaches everywhere where it needs to in an organization.

MF: Now, that makes perfect sense, and that kind of ties into what my follow up question was going to be in terms of the conversations you’ve been having with CIOs, some of these stories that you’ve been closely following. You mentioned, you know, AI adoption and implementation, that’ll be a big focus for next year and how they go about that. Have you seen conversations about how the CIO role is changing and evolving, and what has really stood out to you in some of those conversations?

RT: So, what one thing that’s really stood out to me is that CIOs are getting roped into more conversations now, right? A few years ago, the the narrative was the CIO is gaining a seat at the table. And I think the current thing is that they want the CIO to be at every single table, whether the discussion is about the employee experience, whether whether it’s a customer facing project that we’re talking about, or  whether it’s cost. CIOs are fielding a lot of questions about costs because these tools are very expensive, and I think the purview of the CIO is continuing to expand. It is gaining kind of a bigger outlook as to how an entire organization operates, not just technology. They are fielding more and more questions that are not directly related to how a technology operates, but what it actually does in terms of the business goals of a company.

And, we’ve been seeing that change kind of play out long, long ago, that the figure of the CIO was kind of a back office function. It was someone who got asked about, you know, the office phone and, you know, the fax lines. And we’ve witnessed in recent decades, you know, I would say over the past 20 years, that conversation as more systems become digital, as digital becomes a bigger part of company operations, the questions are strategic. How do we survive this rising competition from a more tech savvy competitor over here? Or, how can we use technology to open up new channels of revenue for the organization? Those are the questions that CIOs are going to get in 2026.

CB: No, those are good points and good questions, and it’s interesting too. Like on the vendor side, we’re seeing and hearing so many companies. It’s like, every single day there is a new agentic AI company and new agentic AI solution. And I’m just curious your take, because I’m sure you’re exploring a lot of these and kind of helping CIOs like learn about them through your reporting. How do you think this will really change the market, and how should all of these different AI vendors set themselves apart?

RT: A really interesting question. One thing that I’ll note is that I’ve been seeing a lot of kind of incremental developments from these big providers, right? It feels like the frequency at which companies are launching then relaunching tools is just dizzying, and CIOs are having to make sense of all that. Is it worth ripping apart the system that we’ve just spent a lot of resources building up to now come and add this this new capability, is this crucial enough? And there’s a couple of pieces to that from from the vendor perspective, like, how can they set themselves apart? One is just focus on the return on investment, which is the big question that we hear CIOs fielding. If I invest up front on this technology, what, what is the the the eventual outcome for for me and my organization?

But, the other piece of that that I think is really challenging is the human side. And I’ve heard from a lot of professional services firms that they’ve launched stand up solutions and programs to help organizations adopt AI to guide them through that journey that involves so many different moving pieces. And I think if some of these providers can, you know, help connect the thread between an organization and the tools that they need. And how do you make that sticky in a way? How do you ensure that employees don’t see these AI tools, as, you know, just something that got pushed on their computers, that kind of showed up one day in the enterprise tool belt, but something that’s going to enable them to succeed? Maybe a closer focus on on tech talent development, right, on the the increasing access to to the skills that that are needed to make sure that the AI systems are deployed. That’s something that I think could be a differentiator.

CB: Okay, I see, Yeah, that was one of the questions we were gonna ask you about too. Is, how do you think AI agents perhaps can help with cybersecurity, skill shortages or resource constraints, that kind of thing? And it sounds like there’s definitely room for that, but there’s also that human element, where the human has to, kind of help through, help people, help companies through that journey, and help them be successful with that human element as part of it.

RT: Yeah, definitely. You know, I just came back from the AI summit in New York. It’s organized by by Informa, and a lot of the questions that were asked were about the human in the loop model, right? You set an AI agent, and you create some guardrails, and you assign a human to make sure that that nothing gets broken. But more and more, there are questions being asked about this. There are kind of detractors to this model, where maybe a task can be performed efficiently, but the agent is either having access to data that it shouldn’t have had or, or, you know, breaking away from a preferred method for fulfilling a task.

The bottom line is that AI agents need clean, clear governance, and without the right governance framework in place, organizations are going to run into a lot of issues, deploying these, these systems and kind of letting them run wild. And it’s a it’s a management issue too. If you say that AI agents are going to be, you know, multiplying across the organization, but you need a human in the loop, then, at which point does that not become sustainable? So these are very, very complicated questions that CIOs are going to be fielding. I know that I’m going to be asking them for for their take on all of this in the coming year.

CB: Yeah, it’s certainly a super hot topic, and I love the perspective that you’re taking at CIO Dive with the CIO perspective. I mean, it’s so important to help them navigate that, and it just seems like such an overwhelming time to be a part of all these AI companies and seeing it all happen and play out in real time.

RT: Yeah, absolutely in cybersecurity. You mentioned cybersecurity, that’s a huge concern too, right? There are questions landing on the CIO desk about cybersecurity that they didn’t used to get because AI brings its own set of question marks around cybersecurity, right? You are having processes automated, and you’re having your I believe the expression is kind of an increased attack surface where you have bigger, you know, increased access to these very sensible databases by systems that could be compromised. And that, that’s another part, that’s another piece of the governance puzzle that executives are going to have to solve, and that that they’ve been trying to solve. This isn’t a this isn’t a new problem, and AI isn’t necessarily a new tool, but a but AI tools have are gaining new capabilities, which are making everything more complex.

MF: Yeah, this makes me think back to your comment earlier about training, and I’m sure in 2026 that’ll be a big theme as well, between trainings or tabletop exercises. I’ll be very curious to see how CIOs, CISOs, and, you know, broader, in terms of the C-suite, how they’re going to go about, I guess, implementing more training for AI adoption, you know, across an organization, versus just in a certain department.

RT: Sure, and it’s it’s about training, and it’s about exposing workers to the way that things should operate and getting a clearer, I guess, channel of communication between employee needs and the things that these new tools can do. Again, I was in the covering one of the talks during the AI summit last week, and I heard from from Paramount, for example, the CIO of Paramount talking about AI road shows. Basically, once they identified a few use cases that worked, it would take, you know, bring these use cases across different parts of the organization. Here is what AI can help you do and using that feedback to say, okay, we either have to shut this down, no one thinks this is helpful, to we need to scale this immediately to everyone and then everything in in between those two, you know, opposites, right? Using employee feedback to guide enterprise AI tool deployment is absolutely critical, and something that we’ve heard from from CIOs very, very frequently.

MF: So in terms of how you gather, I guess, insights from CIOs, what does that typically look like for you, and your process for you, know, reaching out to sources? Or is there any particular way you like to be pitched when it comes to whether it’s research or experts to speak to? What do you prefer?

RT: Sure. I love CIO conversations in person, and this year, fortunately, I’ve got to do a lot more of that than previous years and just traveling to events and having an opportunity to look at folks in the eye and asking them questions. You know, seeing stuff stuff that you can’t see, maybe necessarily over a phone call. So interviews in person at events or otherwise are fantastic, and I love them. I love speaking with people actually doing this job directly.

And then, you know, I love hearing from companies on research that they’ve done, especially if they’ve spoken directly to technology decision makers, and seeing what are kind of the trends, and especially what are the changes, the changes that they tracked over time. Like, tell me what it was last year and what it is this year, and kind of seeing that variation and having a way to formulate theories, or just ask questions about how, you know, what drove this specific change.

I love pitches like that that tell me about a a changing element in in CIO land, so to speak, and and we do a lot of outreach. We try to speak with CIOs at especially at enterprise companies that we know are dealing with the kind of scale that their peers are, so they will have useful things for executives in other similar organizations.

CB: And that’s great to know, outside of AI and the governance and all that stuff that you talked about, are there any other like hot topics you’re covering here in 2026 or that you’re looking to cover, any other trends you’re seeing?

RT: A couple, a couple of things. Listen, I’m obsessed with tech talent, and I think that comes from my time covering the local startup ecosystem because I saw what a technology job can do for people. It can very much transform their lives, right? Some people have started a company and then gone on to great success and learning about different areas of life. And I just think tech is such a fascinating pipeline for professional development, so but the thing is that CIO is really grappling with with access to tech talent, and it’s been a long standing issue where there’s, there’s just in certain categories of technology, especially now there aren’t enough people to fill these, these roles.

I think there’s been a lot of kind of hysteria about AI replacing jobs, when a lot of what we’ve seen is actually more on AI kind of job creation in some pockets. There are some jobs that are going to be automated away. We know that, but, but when you think about the net effect, we are creating a lot of opportunity in areas like data science. And you just you companies are going to need people who know this stuff. And so anytime I talk to a CIO, that’s one of my kind of staple questions. I’ve been asking that question, I guess, for a decade now, because if you include my time covering the startup ecosystem, how do you get access to the talent that you need to do these fantastic things you tell me you want to do in your organization? That is something that I’m always fascinated with, especially when companies kind of stand up concerted efforts to upskill the workers that they have.

One common, I guess, piece of advice that I’ve heard on AI adoption is that if you have an employee that is naturally curious and naturally savvy about your company’s business, you can then take that kind of institutional knowledge and pair it with AI training, and then magically, you have someone who is bringing the best of both worlds to a specific position. That kind of experience I’m really, really interested in. And any time any company that has something like that, I want to hear about it.

CB: Well, no, that makes sense. And it’s like the AI space is changing so fast, you have to have people who are passionate and willing to learn and adapt to it. So no, that’s that’s good to keep in mind. Well, we’ll definitely watch your coverage in that area too, of course.

RT: Thank you.

MF: Yeah, I was going to ask for an example, it could be on that topic that you just mentioned, or another one of maybe somebody you interviewed who really stood out to you, or maybe the story that you ended up producing from it that has been one of your favorites over the past year. What has been most surprising or fun for you to cover in that regard?

RT: Well, listen, you asked about fun. I think I have a lot of fun when there’s breaking news happening. That’s the first thing that comes to mind. There’s kind of an adrenaline and every reporter is a little bit of an adrenaline junkie in that respect. You love to, obviously, getting scoops is fantastic, but then if something breaks and you want to respond to it, I really like the fact that CIO Dive has this approach where we’re able to get news out there and then we’re able to come back with a day two story to kind of produce something that’s tangible advice for CIOs. How do you respond now to this thing that we just told you about?

So one of the areas we’re going to be closely watching this year is AI regulation. We covered earlier this year a trio of executive orders from the Trump administration on AI. We’re closely watching a recent announcement around state AI laws as well. That that’s a topic that I think is going to have some legs but, but I always have fun with anything that’s that’s breaking and also, you know, we’re CIO Dive, obsessed with the Chief Information Officer, and we love personnel news. So appointing, you know, high profile appointments at large organizations, that’s something that that’s always fun to cover.

CB: Yeah, is there ever a time you can combine CIO with punk rock coverage?

RT: That’s a great question. I’ve been trying to interview the CI, this is a quick plug, but if you’re a CIO at one of the guitar make, making, the guitar design firms, talking Fender, Gibson, I want to talk to you, just putting that out there into the universe.

CB: We’ll see what we can do. We might have some connections. I don’t know.

RT: Okay.

CB: That’s so fun. Another listener question that we have for you. How do you like to spend your time when you’re not writing or editing for CIO Dive?

RT: I work really hard, so when I’m offline, I like to spend time with my family, my wife, my sister. I enjoy a good Netflix binge sitting. I’m very much looking forward to the new Stranger Things, Christmas morning. And I’m a hobbyist musician, so I play guitar and cuatro, which is the national instrument of Venezuela.

CB: Cool. That’s awesome. I’m also looking forward to the Stranger Things latest release on Christmas.

RT: Very exciting.

CB: Yeah.

MF: Awesome. Well, we have one final listener question for you, Roberto, because you will be our first guest of 2026, so kind of ending it on a fun note. Are there any goals you have for this year, and that could be professional, that could be personal, you can take it however you want it, but what are some goals you have?

RT: That’s a, that’s a great question. I I want to become a more organized note taker, and I think part of it is going to be, you know, maybe counterintuitive. Intuitively, I want to take more notes by hand and have kind of like an organized system for making notes that don’t live in the digital, very noisy world of our computers, right? So I might have to pick up a special notepad for 2026.

CB: I like it. No to the Google doc notes, and hello to the pen and paper. That’s awesome. Well, thank you so much, Roberto, for coming on our podcast. It was great to get to know you better, more about CIO Dive, what you’re covering, all things AI. So really great to hear from you. Thanks for being our first guest in 2026.

RT: Of course. Christine, Madison, thank you so much for the time. I really appreciate it. It was great to talk to you.

CB: Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Inside the Media Minds. To learn more about our podcast and hear all of our episodes, please visit us at w2comm.com/podcast, and follow us on Twitter at Media Mind Show, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.