On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, our hosts Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh discuss the upcoming 2025 cybersecurity prediction season and the evolving world of cybersecurity with Kevin Townsend, Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek.
Kevin’s role at SecurityWeek is at the intersection of his two passions, writing and learning. He notes, “You cannot say you’ve done security, because tomorrow, something new is going to happen.” He lets his passion for learning guide him when determining his coverage areas. Often, he chooses topics he’s never covered to gain a better understanding of the subject from his conversations with the experts. To keep his coverage interesting even in “predictions season,” he shares what led him to develop SecurityWeek’s Cyber Insights series.
SecurityWeek’s Unique Approach To Predictions
With predictions season upon us and PR professionals and security vendors gearing up to share 2025 cybersecurity perspectives, Kevin offers helpful insights into his process of collecting commentary for SecurityWeek’s Cyber Insights series, including what types of predictions resonate most.
Kevin explains how SecurityWeek takes a slightly different approach and categorizes predictions in a variety of key topic areas, including AI, zero trust and identity. Given that he receives hundreds of predictions related pitches every year, Kevin shares what makes a prediction stand out to him, along with the importance of pitching from a place of respect and honesty.
One of Kevin’s key tips for pitching journalists? “I want the PR industry to deal with me personally and not make me think that I’m just an afterthought, along with 100 other journalists. So that’s the respect side, make it personal. The honesty side is, reduce the hype.”
To hear more from Kevin on his career, how to pitch SecurityWeek, and his own predictions for 2025, listen in to the full episode or read the transcript below.
Timestamps
0:44 – Why Kevin Chose Writing
1:22 – Kevin’s Journey Into Cybersecurity
2:55 – Kevin’s Career at SecurityWeek
5:51 – How SecurityWeek Approaches Predictions
9:50 – The Way Kevin Collects Insights
12:56 – The Predictions The Stick Out
15:46 – Kevin’s 2025 Predictions
17:48 – How to Pitch Respectfully & Honestly
21:14 – What Kevin Enjoys Outside of Work
24:05 – Kevin’s Favorite Part About Journalism
Want 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.
Hi everyone. This is Christine Blake, one of the co-hosts of Inside the Media Minds, and I’m here with Madison Farabaugh, my other co-host. And we are so excited today to welcome Kevin Townsend, Senior Contributor at SecurityWeek. So Kevin, thank you so much for joining us today and coming on the podcast so we can learn more about you.
Kevin Townsend (KT): Thank you. Thank you for having me. It’s, it’s a pleasure.
CB: Great. Let’s start out with just you providing a quick overview of your background. How did you get into journalism?
KT: I think, to be honest, it’s the only thing I can do. I don’t actually call myself a journalist. I call myself a writer, and that’s because I’m not actually a very good journalist, but I’m a reasonable writer. So…
CB: Okay!
KT: …on that basis, the the subject isn’t really important to me. It just evolved into into cyber security, because that’s the biggest market for a writer.
CB: Very good point. So did you go to school for writing? Or how did you kind of end up in cybersecurity as a writer?
KT: Okay, that’s that, that’s very difficult. Writing is the only thing I can do, because I’m not good socially. Writing is solitary. So it was and I love words, and I love ideas. So it was the obvious, but probably the only thing that I could do now, in those days, freelancing was really the only entree, if you didn’t have a career path with existing qualifications that direct you. I didn’t have that. Yes, I studied English language and literature, but I’ve never had any training, specific training. I’ve never had any journalist training. I’ve never had any specific training in how to write, nor have I had technology training. So everything that I know it has been through picking it up as I’ve gone along. And I was, I was lucky. I wanted to write. I knew that freelancing was the only way that I could do it. And it was the it was the very beginning of current technology. So there weren’t anybody, there weren’t any freelance writers around. So I took my luck and got in.
CB: I love that. That is great. And you obviously excel at writing, especially in this topic of cyber security. So can you tell us a little bit about your role at SecurityWeek? What you what types of topics that you are interested in, and what you cover over at SecurityWeek, when you write there?
KT: Okay, I was working for, for a closed security of CISOs. I was writing up their conversations, etc. Unfortunately, they folded, but they had had a journalist from SecurityWeek visiting them. It’s easier. So SecurityWeek was on my mind. I’ve found out who the editor was. Phoned him up and said, do you take freelance articles? And he said, Yes, but so we chatted for a couple of weeks and and he gave me a try, and I wanted to stay in security, because talking to the CISOs in this closed community, I love them as a group of people, they are so honest. They have very little side or egotism to themselves. I asked one once if he blamed another CISO who had just been breached. And the answer always to such questions was no there, but for the grace of God, go I. And it’s just that realistic attitude, which you don’t often find.So I love the idea of security. I went to cyber to SecurityWeek I was given the chance. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten the question
CB: That was, yeah, that was it. I think you answered it perfectly. How you ended up there. That’s a cool story. I’m glad you put yourself out there. You know, met a great group of people, and it seems like you authentically, really enjoy covering cybersecurity.
KT: I do. I do, and the reason I do is that it’s constantly changing. One of the things that I enjoy in life is is ideas and thinking through, throughout my career, what it’s worth once I’ve done something, I’ve lost interest in it, and I’ve wanted to move on to something else. You cannot say you’ve done security, because tomorrow, something new is going to happen. So it’s a constant learning exercise. And if you put learning and writing together, they’re the two things that I most enjoy in life. So the topics I cover are anything that I don’t understand because I want to learn about them, and I learn through writing.
Madison Farabaugh (MF): I love that that is such a cool perspective to have on covering, covering the things you still want to learn about. I definitely relate to that I feel like just working in this industry, it’s been very exciting, because no two days are the same. I feel like every single day there is, you know, something, something new that we have to learn about, and kind of how to work with our clients on that. So thank you for sharing all of thatkind of transitioning into the next section of this podcast. One of the reasons we wanted to have you on, specifically Kevin, was to talk about predictions. And you know, as we’re getting into Q4 of 2024 I know this is something that a lot of different publications might start focusing on. So we wanted to ask you, how does SecurityWeek as a publication approach the topic of predictions.
KT: Predictions are a problem. There’s something that you have to do, there’s something that every company has to do, but the result is, frankly, very often boring. The prediction is the same but worse, and that really is this, oh, same, but worse, but we can save you now. That is so boring, and you get that from mold or magazine gets that from multiple different sources that basically all saying the same without saying anything so well. About four years ago, I approached the editor and said, look, I don’t like predictions. And he said, “well, don’t do them,” but we have to so from that idea of trying to stop it being boring, trying to make it more meaningful to the reader, we we came up with the idea of accumulating all these different predictions under subjects, rather than under companies. The companies obviously included, but it’s the subject. So what, basically, what we do is, each year, we now do a series of articles, which we call cyber insights with the year. And I think this is our third or fourth year. Now we take a major area of interest. So AI has to be one quantum has to be another zero trust, identity and identity and so on. So we, we’ve, we’ve got 12 this year, I think then it’s a case of getting collecting the predictions, and that’s where I’m at now. So basically, the schedule is November. I collect the predictions. I try to guide them a little bit, because there are things that companies want to say, but I don’t want to hear. So I tried to guide them a little bit, but at the moment, I’m collecting the email addresses that I have to send the details out to. Now, that process of sending out the um my queries, gathering and all the responses, sorting and sifting them, putting them into the right bucket. That’s going to take the whole of November. Then I will have the whole of December to write 12 articles ready for publication in January. So that’s that’s the basic theory. Cyber insights. Oh, this is going to sound arrogant, but I consider cyber insights to be predictions on steroids.
CB: I like that. I think we would agree with you. Isn’t it funny how it’s just kind of an expected thing that vendors have to do every we call it predicts season, and it’s every, you know, every fall, you have to round up the predictions. And, you know, we often try to guide them, you know, vendors to also be, you know, not taking a sales approach, not taking a problem solving approach, but really stating what could happen next year and what could the state of the industry be like. So we agree that your take on predictions is a very good one and a lot more insightful and strategic than maybe some others that we’ve seen. Kevin, you mentioned how you do ask? I think you’ve mentioned that you ask for commentary. How do you go about collecting insights? Do you ask certain executives or certain thought leaders for their predictions, or do you wait to be pitched? Because I’m sure you’re pitched predictions as well. How do you go about that?
KT: Yes, I am. I am pitched. I mean, basically, for the last month and a half, I’ve been ticking placing ticking ticks in my inbox against subjects that I think we should follow up on, and I’m going through them now making this list. I don’t actually like Q and A’s. I prefer a conversation, although I’m not particularly good at conversations, I prefer conversations because they are alive. Once you get a Q and A it’s dead, it’s there’s no life to it. If it’s a conversation, you can say, wait a minute, I don’t quite understand that. And you can dive off in different directions, and you get a far, far more interesting take on the subject. Hence my two other series, which are CISO Conversations and Hacker Conversations. They are actually live conversations. Cyber Insights can’t be handled that way, if you consider that the process of write, the process of gathering data for each article, I probably get in excess of 50 submissions per article. Now, sadly, they can’t all be included, but the most insightful are, there’s no way I could talk to 50 different people in 12 different articles in one year. So I enjoy doing Cyber Insights, because there is so much data, it’s a pure writing exercise, and I do learn some things along the way. It’s not as exciting as a conversation. It’s different. So and also with something I often say is, it gets me through the two darkest months of the year, which is, which is very useful. Yeah, it’s just Q and A, basically.
MF: That makes sense, though. And to your point, earlier of a lot of vendors will say, “Oh, here’s our predictions, and here’s how we can help you.” And sometimes that cycle can sometimes get boring to you. Have there been any predictions that have really stood out to you over, you know, the time that you’ve been working on Cyber Insights? Are there certain ones that have been shocking, or maybe they were odd, or ones that you just found to be the most helpful. In this case?
KT: This is where I become boring, because it’s very difficult for me to answer that. I don’t throw away, but I don’t include things that I think are going to be boring. I don’t mind including ideas that I don’t actually believe in, because they’re not my predictions. So if somebody says something that I think isn’t going to happen, like when, when AI first broke, if you like, which was, I’m thinking of renaming BC to “BAI,” but November 22 it’s a pivotal date. Everybody said AI is going to change the world this year. Now, I never believed that, yes, it would change the world, but not this year. So I was writing predictions on what was going to happen to AI, knowing that those predictions or feeling myself that those predictions were wrong, they’re coming through now, but we’re now two years later, and it’s going to be massive next year. Now, I find that whole thing fascinating. I think it was Bill Gates. Now, he’s not, can I say this out loud, he’s not my favorite person, but he did say one thing, I think it was him, that predictions for the next six months are always overestimates and underestimates for the next six year, five years. And I think that is so accurate, most predictions are right, but too soon. I don’t think I’ve answered your question, but I’ve waffled on anyway.
CB: No, I think, I think you did answer it, because it’s there’s so much to go through. And, you know, I never thought about it that way, how most predictions could come true, but they’re just early. I think that’s a really good way to look at especially with AI
KT: and Quantum.
CB: Yeah, exactly. We’re seeing a lot more of that now, which kind of leads to our next question for you. We’ve talked about vendor predictions now, as a writer who’s covering this all the time, what are some of your tech predictions and cybersecurity predictions for next year.
KT: Oh, good. I do know I
CB: We’re flipping that script now.
KT: I know what I want companies to do, which is to better understand risk management. How they do that will vary from company to company, but the purpose of being in business is to make money, or is to make a profit, either so that you can sell your company and retire, or make another one, or just create jobs for your employees. But you have to be in profit, the idea that you will be able to prevent a breach is a false paradise. You’re going to get breached. So you need to understand the risk. You need to understand it’s not it’s not even a case of what areas you need to protect in terms of pure protection, it’s it’s a case of understanding the areas that you need to be able to maintain. So resilience becomes more important than pure protection. I mean, you need to, you need the defense as well, but you need the way to be able to grow out of a disaster without this losing your company. So I think it’s, it’s, it’s understanding the threats and understanding how you can ride the peak waves of those threats and still survive. So I think all companies have to be working on that, and I hope that’s the way things go, because we’re not going to solve security. We just have to survive insecurity.
MF: I love that. I love that phrase that you just mentioned, I think that’s very applicable. So then for our last kind of predictions, focused question, as we head into 2025 is there anything you anticipate will change in terms of how you know, PR and marketing professionals engage with the media. Any big changes you foresee happening?
KT: I can’t, I can’t give you predictions on that. I can tell you what I hope, and what I hope for is that, in general, the PR industry becomes more honest and more respectful. Now the respectful side is the easiest one to to handle. You have to remember that a writer is arrogant. He’s he or she is putting her persona into the words. So that means that they have a very high opinion of your set of themselves, particularly me. So by respect, I mean, don’t send me information that is addressed to 1000 other journalists via PR news. I want you to deal you. I’m sorry. I want the PR industry to deal with me personally and not make me think that I’m just a an afterthought, along with 100 other journalists. So that’s the respect side. Make it personal. The honesty side is reduce the hype. Now you’ll hear this from a lot of lot of writers and journalists that most of the pitches they get they don’t even read, and that’s based on the first sentence. So when, when? When a marketing person tells me such and such company the best, so and so, as soon as you say the best it, it loses interest to me because you haven’t proven you’re the best. And similarly, things like, next year, we’re going to lose $3 trillion worth through cybersecurity. Really? Where do you get those figures? Can you justify them? And the answer is, No, you can’t. So it’s honesty. Tell me the truth, not what you want me to believe, but what is truth? And treat me with treat me with the respect that my arrogance requires.
CB: Great advice. And you know, almost every interview we have on the podcast always talks about doing research and making the pictures personal, but you just provided some really good context that goes along with the reasoning why, and I think we can all appreciate that.
KT: So really, you just told me that I’m not original. So moving on.
CB: No, you are original. I think the context that you provided about personalizing pitches is really unique and insightful. So thanks for that. We always have a segment on listener questions and a little bit kind of a different, different vibe, less about some of the day to day, and more about you on a more personal and looking back at your career sort of level. So what is one of the things that you enjoy doing outside of work?
KT: It’s easier to well, my life breaks down into two halves, if you like, then not halves in length, but halves in experience. Years ago, I was a sportsman. I actually had to choose, because I’m single tasking, I had to choose between university or professional soccer, and I chose University. I can’t do both, but I remained a sports person. So I would run seven miles a day. My partner and I would go for massive, long hikes over Dartmoor with our dogs. Those things in this part of my life, I’ve lost my health. I’m not a sportsman, and I lost my partner, so I can’t go for those walks. I’ve I’ve turned in on myself to that extent. So the things that I enjoy these days are thinking and listening to music, but the music, the music tends to be Chinese, modern Chinese songs, because I just, I just love the sound, and they always tend to be relaxing. Thinking is, is a different matter. So I can’t stop thinking things come into my head like, like, is there such a thing as time? And so I think for ages, trying to work that out. What’s the difference between reality and perception? Can…can…is the human mind capable of imagining something that doesn’t actually exist, which means that if we do imagine it, does it exist somewhere? I can’t always get answers, but I like exploring those contexts.
CB: Yeah, sounds like you truly think through some of life’s most important and profound questions. So very interesting.
MF: Yeah, I was gonna say I would love for Kevin to have his own podcast. I would listen to all of those.
KT: Yeah, mostly silent, of course.
MF: I think so. Our last listener question, just for the sake of time, Kevin, that we wanted to ask you, was about, you know, over the course of your career in writing, has there been, and it doesn’t have to necessarily be for SecurityWeek, or, you know, cybersecurity related. But has there been a favorite story or project that you’ve worked on, and why?
KT: It hasn’t really been a specific story. And that goes back to my pleasure in learning. I like exploring ideas so new things. I have this say, and I’m sorry about this, but very often I write an article and a company will, pitch me afterwards and say, “Oh, read your article. If you’re going to do a follow up, include this.” And my response to that is simply “moving finger writes and having written, moved on.” And my my mind does the same. Once I’ve written an article, it’s done, it’s gone, it’s finished. I want the next good idea, or the next thing to explore, or the next thing to write about, so that there are some things. I did an article on hype. I’ve done several articles on artificial intelligence. I’ve done several articles on quantum and the theory of post-quantum cryptography. See, there’s there, there’s a thought NIST calls it post quantum cryptography. And I think, I think that’s a total misnomer, because they think we’re all idiots, and they’re probably right, but we don’t need post-quantum cryptography. We need better cryptography than we have had, because it’s going to be broken. But it may not be quantum computers that break it first. So it’s it’s any new article that explores an idea that I hadn’t talked about before. That’s what I really enjoy.
CB: Very cool. And that’s a great answer. It sounds like you’re really invested in learning a lot about the subjects that you cover, and it really does show through a lot of your articles.
KT: You’re very kind, but certainly I I enjoy exploring things.
CB: Yeah, very cool. Well, Kevin, thank you so much for being a guest on Inside the Media Minds. I know we love talking to you. Learned a lot about the predictions that you’re working on and the whole process there, and we really enjoyed getting to know you a little bit better. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the on the show.
KT: Well, thank thank you, because you’ve been a pleasure to talk to. I don’t talk a great deal. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and the time has gone past very fast. So thank you very much.
CB: Yes, it sure has. Thank you so much. And to everyone listening, we appreciate your time, and please join us for our next episode. Thank you. Thank you for joining us in 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 @MediaMindsShow, and you can subscribe anywhere podcasts are found.