On this episode of Inside the Media Minds, our co-hosts Christine Blake and Madison Farabaugh talked with Nate Nelson, Reporter at Dark Reading and fellow podcaster. During the conversation, they discuss the start of Nate’s podcasting career writing for Malicious Life and the start of his journalism career at Threatpost, before finding his way to Dark Reading.
Nate views reporting and podcasting as a symbiotic relationship. He knows how to balance covering technical news, while keeping the storytelling interesting to general audiences. He is making a career out of existing in the middle of the deeply technical cybersecurity practitioners and the everyday people who are impacted by cybersecurity issues.
Nate looks for thought leaders with unique perspectives or interesting ways of distilling highly technical concepts into understandable formats. “It is too interesting of a field to talk like everybody else, in a boring way,” he explained. “The more it sounds like you are writing a business email, the less interested I am.” To this end, if Nate discovers a compelling resource who can do just that, he will continue to check in with them as topics they can speak to arise.
Power Politics in AI
Without a specific beat assignment at Dark Reading, Nate covers a wide array of news topics. Currently, he is most interested in the ongoing power politics surrounding AI innovations. From the financial interests in AI of the U.S. versus China and other countries, to where AI overlaps with copyright issues, Nate thinks these stories introduce a fascinating perspective on the way AI companies are engaging with data now and in the future. This is just one of the evolving topics that Nate is sure will be a discussion point in the technology and cyber space for decades to come.
If you’re interested in hearing more including the topics Nate is covering, how to pitch threat research to him, his most interesting story to date and his tips for writing approachable content, listen to the full episode or read the transcript below.
Timestamps
0:55 – Nate Kicks Off His Career
3:29 – How Nate Balances Reporting and Podcasting
7:54 – Nate’s Reporting Process
11:35 – How Nate Chooses Sources
13:13 – Topics Nate Has Been Covering
15:16 – Most Fascinating Stories to Nate
17:42 – Nate’s Recommendations For Standing Out
19:38 – Sharing Threat Research with Reporters
21:15 – Listener Questions
P.S. Host Madison Farabaugh shared her most inspiring quote following the episode. “Managers do things right. Leaders do the right thing.” It’s a quote by Peter Drucker that her dad has often reminded her of when they chat together about teamwork and leadership in corporate settings.
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. Hey, everyone, this is Christine Blake, one of the co-hosts of Inside the Media Minds.
Madison Farabaugh (MF): And I’m Madison Farabaugh, the other co-host.
CB: Today we are excited to have Nate Nelson on our podcast. He is a reporter at Dark Reading. Welcome Nate. Good to have you.
Nate Nelson (NN): Yes. Thank you both so much for having me. I think this is gonna be fun.
CB: Yeah definitely. I know you’ve been with Dark Reading a little while. You were formerly a reporter at Threatpost. You have your own podcast, Malicious Life, so we’d love to talk about all the things that you do. I guess, to start, can you give us a quick overview of your background and how you got into the industry?
NN: Sure, yeah, I got into it a little bit backwards. I came out of university where we created our own majors, and that was not a responsible thing to do as a young person. In effect, I graduated in nothing in particular. On my degree, it says Individualized Study, which is just a stand in for, for, you know anything in particular, and what does one do if one leaves college without any particular skill set? I tried to build a startup. That didn’t work, but the day that that fell through, I interviewed with a podcast company. I didn’t know that such a thing existed. That company was based in Tel Aviv, and so by virtue of sort of, what’s going on there, they had just recently started contracting with a cyber security company about a potential new podcast about the history of hacking, and that show ended up being Malicious Life, which I started writing for, I think the year is 2017 the summer of 2017. Somehow, we made that work. I don’t know how anybody gets an audience for a podcast. Frankly, it’s the most impossible thing to market.
But by virtue of writing a show about the history of hacking for you know, at that point it would have been five or six years. I was recruited to Threatpost by my still editor at Dark Reading, Tara Seals, and I didn’t think I was suited to it at all, but she said, “Don’t worry about it.” They taught me the ropes there. And then, unfortunately, Threatpost shut down for reasons that are a little bit murky to this day, but we don’t have to get into my conspiracy theories there. After that, a bunch of us moved to Dark Reading, and I just sort of followed suit, and it’s been really nice since then. Malicious Life is actually shuttered as of December, which is very sad. We had a seven-year run, though, so that was pretty good. And now I’m starting to write for another show, but I’m keeping it on the hush hush for now, because it’s not official yet. So that’s the abridged version of my story.
CB: No, that’s great. That’s a great summary. Thanks for clarifying that for us. I know you had a lot of different experiences with podcasts and reporting, so good to hear that. So how do you kind of balance your day-to-day role in regards to your reporting?
NN: Balancing in regards to like reporting and podcasting, or balancing with the rest of my life, or?
CB: Um, reporting and podcasting?
NN: Yeah, sure. I would say that it’s a balance, that it’s a sort of symbiotic thing, because news writing can be a little bit stayed by nature, and podcast writing is a much different thing, and for whatever reason, they seem to work together for me. So, I will write news stories on a daily basis for Dark Reading and where that might otherwise get you in the headspace of like following every single news item and being super up on everything. That’s not really the angle I’m coming at it from, I’m coming at it from an angle of writing for general audiences, for people to understand in a kind of entertaining way, because the other half of my work is writing podcasts. And you can’t write podcasts like news stories because people don’t talk like people write news. And so on any given day, I’m writing for Dark Reading maybe five hours, and then the rest of my time is spent either deep, diving some huge story from old 1980s hacker culture, or writing a version of a story that if it were in the news, it would sound. Sound, you know, sort of very professional and business like, but because we’re doing it in this other setting, I have to write the way that people speak. And so these two areas sort of infect one another in the way that kind of works for me.
CB: That’s kind of cool. I like how you have both perspectives on it. It’s like it is a good balance. I think you have both the pros and cons of both.
NN: Yeah, I’ll say that cyber security, it feels like in particular, people have a certain way of talking, and it’s very technical, and it’s because there’s a certain kind of person that’s attracted to this field. And I have just made an entire career off of existing in the middle between people who are very technical and really into this and like, could tell you everything you need to know about XDR or whatever, and people are kind of just interested in the subject and want to know more. Maybe they’re in the business world, maybe they’re just listening while they’re doing dishes. Oftentimes, those groups have tough time speaking to one another, and I very much enjoyed making that connection.
CB: I love that, yeah, because so many issues in cybersecurity and problems that arise impact the everyday person, right? So I think it’s it’s good to have that skill set to be able to explain it to the everyday person as well.
NN: Yeah, although I did, I was recently at a media event, and some guy who’s not in cybersecurity, when I told him I was, asked me, So should I be really worried about everything? Or what’s like the number one thing I need to be worried about? And I told him, I’m not sure you need to be worried about much. Most of the time these days, hackers have figured out that hacking companies is a lot more worth their time than hacking individual people. This is not what you’re supposed to say, but when you say that, yes, it does impact individual people through companies, but oftentimes people, I think, worry more than they actually have to. That’s a throwaway thought. No, I like that. We should have wrote that question, and I’m glad you answered it.
MF: Yeah, that’s a very interesting perspective, for sure.
NN: Yeah. I mean, I don’t want to get too cynical about it, but I think that, you know, cybersecurity, the industry is built off of problems they have to solve. So the more threats there are, the more solutions there are going to be for them. When there aren’t threats, it’s not as often talked about. And I think where, back in the day, a lot of people were worried about, like identity theft and credit card fraud and stuff, because that was happening a lot, and it’s not saying it’s not still happening, but hackers have figured out that actually companies are a lot more worth their time, and ransomware is really effective way to do that. So I’m not overly concerned about, you know, my parents and what scams they might fall for, although there is stuff like that. So anyway, just a passing thought, that’s all.
MF: No, I love it. That’s what keeps these podcasts interesting to us.
NN: Yeah…
MF: So you had mentioned a little bit ago just how you work. You enjoyed being kind of that middleman between different different audiences, different sources and experts who talk in very different ways. So that kind of leads into our next question, if you could talk us through just your reporting process, so perhaps how you decide what you want to cover or write about, or maybe who you want to interview, because I know different when you’re interviewing different sources, sometimes they can speak in a way that’s, you know, right off the bat, very easy for everyone to understand. But there might be other instances where the SME speaks in those very technical terms, so you kind of have to probe in different ways to get you know what you’re looking for. So can you talk us through that process a little bit?
NN: Yeah, Madison, you’re totally right. And in news writing, you can get away with being imperfect about that. It often helps to have someone who communicates well, but because what I’m doing is taking our recording and then looking at an AI transcript of it, and then pulling quotes and occasionally massaging the quote to fit grammar wise, you can often be flexible enough to use SMEs, experts, who do talk in that technical way. Typically, I look for folks who would have a unique perspective on whatever I’m covering for one reason or another. Maybe it’s a story that bears on some other region of the world where, you know, cybersecurity isn’t as often talked about. So I try to find someone in some interesting country, somebody who maybe has, like, a slightly different so, like, if you’re talking about AI, you could get a million experts, but maybe you get somebody who’s focused on, like, small businesses, because not a lot of people talk about that. Anyway, usually I get away with that in news writing.
In podcasts, it is much different, because you’re recording somebody as they speak, normally, normally, to a degree. I mean, the way. I’m speaking to you now is some version of how I speak out in the world. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s close enough. In that you have a lot more work to before you get to the recording to do a prep call where you don’t actually tell them that the whole point of the prep call is to see how they talk. Instead, you talk about, like, logistics and when do you want to record? And, you know, tell me a little bit about something, just so you could get a sense of how they think and how they speak. And, yeah, the podcasts are often much more reliant on good guests than news stories are. But in general, when you find somebody special who they could be even the most ordinary person with a regular job title, but they know how to translate technical concepts for broader audiences, including myself, by the way. I mean, you might have or might not have inferred from my background that I’m not terribly technical. I could not code an HTML web page. Well, maybe HTML, but I couldn’t perform cybersecurity, if you asked me. So a lot of my job at Dark Reading is just finding someone who could literally explain to me what’s going on, and then that has the positive effect of once someone like me can understand it, then I can translate it to anyone. So those folks are really great, and I tend to go back to them, but really it’s just about finding someone who has a unique perspective or a unique way of speaking about otherwise dry subjects.
MF: And that’s really interesting. So when you have a source like, let’s say you have a great experience with a source for a reporting a reporting story that you’ve done. Do you typically go back to those same sources when you have new questions on something that’s evolving? Or do you try your best to find new sources for things? What’s the balance there for you?
NN: I suppose it depends. I never want to annoy someone too much, although there are people who are so compelling that I just tend to write to them as much as possible. Luckily, at Dark Reading, I don’t have what you would consider maybe a beat. I do end up covering a wide variety of subjects, and so I literally probably can’t reach out to the same people, because they often don’t cross what I’m writing on Wednesday versus Thursday. So luckily, I don’t have to think about that so much. But if, like, a particular topic comes up, like an, like an Apple malware. I know my guy for Apple malware. If a cyber attack hits South Africa, I know who I’m going for South Africa. If I get a story about, you know, like some new malware, some new ransomware strain, or some new cyber attack in a hospital or whatever, then, you know, you you probe around to see who’s talking and maybe find someone new.
MF: Cool. Yeah, thank you for explaining. I was just curious, because everyone has kind of a different process for that. So, yeah, awesome. Well, speaking of, you know, Dark Reading, more specifically, we’re definitely curious over the past few months, what your biggest focus area has been. I know you’ve you said you kind of, you don’t have a specific beat, but is there anything that’s really stood out to you over the past few months that’s taken up more of your time?
NN: Yeah, totally. I mean, there are definitely subjects that come off, come up more than others. We are a more business focused site, and so I often end up covering subjects that are really relevant to corporations, like vulnerabilities and edge devices comes up all the time. I feel like I write a story about either Avanti or Fortinet, like once a week, for whatever reason. Lately, AI, chatbots have become a very big subject. I mean, it’s not just lately, like ever since Chat GPT but especially lately. I just wrote an article about a DeepSeek jail break that got so many views that I think my editors were just like, we just have to really ride this until people stop reading about this subject. So for the past couple weeks, I’ve written about any number of jail breaks in DeepSeek, or, you know, open AI models, or, you know, this stuff leaking to the dark web, and it has been received in varying ways, which has been fun for me to sort of read Reddit comments about my stories. Sometimes not so nice. So yeah, it really depends. And then every so often, I’ll get to cover something that’s particularly like, offbeat and interesting, and those are the stories that really stick with me the most.
MF: Yeah, awesome. Yeah, that makes sense. You mentioned DeepSeek, one of our questions that we were definitely curious about, just with all you’re seeing, related to DeepSeek, related to all of these companies, kind of competing for AI innovation, is there anything you mentioned your jailbreak story, is there anything in particular that you found most fascinating about what’s going on right now in the industry, or anything that’s been particularly surprising to you?
NN: Yeah, I mean, it’s such a big subject that it’s hard to nail down any one or two things. But I would say, firstly, the power politics around AI these days is as interesting or more interesting than the actual technology itself. A lot of the times people focus on, you know, the newest app or the, you know, most advanced capability. And I do that too. I mean NotebookLM’s, interactive podcast feature that they just released is so cool and fun. If you guys aren’t using it, it’s just the most hilarious thing ever. But I digress, the power politics around AI, like the financial interests of the U.S. versus China, versus other parts of the world, actually wired just posted a really interesting article about the UAE sort of balancing both sides. I think that that could be really interesting. I also think that where this stuff overlaps with copyright issues is often a fruitful subject. Recently, I recall it was going around the news cycle that OpenAI was complaining that DeepSeek trained on its models, which, frankly, it probably did. I guess I shouldn’t say that on a podcast, but like, you know, probably they did that. And I mean, the I don’t want to be too cynical, but for a company that trained on everybody’s data all around the internet without permission to then have an issue with another company copying what they did was a little bit, let’s say, interesting to me. So it’s a it’s obviously a fascinating part of the world that is going to bear on our lives for the next few decades, and there’s so much there. But yeah, from a cybersecurity perspective, it’s definitely the power politics, the way that they’re engaging with data, that kind of thing, that interests me the most.
CB: We’re seeing just so much on that topic, and I think we’ll continue to see a lot of it also, so we’ll be following everything you report about for sure. So many execs and vendors would love to be featured in Dark Reading. You mentioned earlier that the more cybersecurity problems that exist, and more vendors and solutions that exist, right and they want to, they want to help and make sales and all that kind of stuff. What advice do you have for companies who are trying to cut through that noise and either, you know, be featured in Dark Reading or just cut through the noise in general.
NN: Yeah, I’m gonna sound like a broken record here, but I think there’s a real opportunity for anybody who wants to to just not talk like everybody else. That’s the thing that because I get so many emails every day from PR folks with experts, and they send me quotes, and the experts say something about some story that’s in the news, and inevitably, they’re like, this story really highlights that companies should have a layered approach to cybersecurity with XDR, and they should focus on education and awareness among their employees and such. I’m like, okay, I mean, that’s something that I’ve heard 12 times today and 30 times yesterday. It is too interesting of a field to talk like everybody else in a boring way. In my view, cybersecurity is inherently compelling to me because it so well lends itself to stories about good guys and bad guys, or sometimes stories about people in the middle, that the more you talk about it like you know you’re writing a business email, the less interested I am. Every so often, somebody will come to me with a really unique way of looking at something, or they’ll just write the same thing as everyone else, but in a way that sounds like they’re talking to me and not just copy pasting from ChatGPT. I think that if people can sort of exit their bubble just a little bit, it goes a long way for a reporter like me that’s trying to talk to general audiences.
CB: I love that. That is great insight. Yeah, yeah, that’s really good, good advice to share. And then similarly, I know a lot of vendors put out threat research reports. They do threat intelligence, give that to their customers, end users, all of that. Is there a certain approach that you think that vendors should be taking with the media when it comes to sharing threat intelligence?
NN: Yeah, I mean, I recognize that it’s a lot of effort and investment they put into these reports and sharing them with the media, and that it’s hard to distinguish yourself, like if I go and I say, just find me some new threat actor or malware string, and that’s like a lot to ask of anybody. But, if there was one thing I’d suggest is that maybe just don’t worry so much about zhuzhing up whatever you’re sending me. Oftentimes, I’ll get emails where the subject is like embargo, and then it sounds like a really important thing, and I’ll open the email, and it’s kind of just like an embargo on two paragraphs that somebody has to say about some story that doesn’t really matter. So when you’re sharing threat intelligence, you know, highlight the stuff that’s going to be most interesting to me. Make it short because I’ve got all kinds of other emails of similar nature in my inbox, and rest assured that if it is worth covering, I’ll cover it. You don’t need to frame it as anything other than what it is.
CB: Good to know, great advice again.
MF: That’s definitely good insight, and I know so we have several listener questions. I think the last one we want to ask specifically about just, you know, Dark Reading, things you’re covering there. So I know we’ve talked a lot about what you’ve been paying attention to, what you’ve covered the last few months. Is there anything we haven’t touched on yet that you are looking to cover in the next couple of months? Or if there’s any specific topic that you are looking to dive more into that we haven’t touched on.
NN: Yeah, I wouldn’t say next couple of months scale, but in general, I think that if there’s one thing that I would like to get more into in the coming year or beyond. It’s something I’ve been waiting for for a long time, which is just sort of a different approach to the problem of ransomware. I cover ransomware a lot, just because it’s the best way to hack anybody these days, not to give anyone any ideas, but like, it’s really effective, you can do it, and there isn’t that much way around it. Currently, the state of advice that you’ll get from any experts, if you’re an organization, is just to, again, like, layer your security, try to prevent your employees from clicking on the wrong kind of link, and have sort of detection in place to prevent someone from getting into the wrong kinds of systems, and there’s a lot of technology and discourse around preventing people from getting ransomware onto your systems.
I almost never hear about the other half of the equation, which is just like why so many organizations have such dire data that they’re just storing indefinitely on their computer systems? I think this, this goes back to what I was saying earlier, that sort of the cybersecurity industry focuses on on, you know, the ways you can defeat hackers, but it just strikes me as such a simpler solution, if we start thinking more about how companies can hold less data, in ways that are less precious to them. The data that they do hold, how do we make it less valuable to anybody. So yes. Bottom line, if we’re talking about what kind of subject I’m really looking forward to, it would be to to cover ransomware from the other perspective, not necessarily just layering different halfhearted solutions in preventing cyber-attacks in the first place, but making sure that once hackers do get in, which is inevitable, ordinary people on mass aren’t going to be hugely affected, and companies won’t feel the need to pay 10s of millions of dollars.
MF: Yeah, awesome. That makes sense. Thank you. Definitely looking forward to seeing how that might unfold for you over the next year, we’ll definitely be monitoring for for some stories.
CB: And we’ll let you know if anyone can talk about that. I mean, I think that’s really valuable.
NN: Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t monitor it if I were you, though, because nobody ever talks about this, so it’s going to be a while longer probably, yeah, but when somebody does, it’ll be really interesting.
MF: Awesome. That wraps up some of our more specific questions around Dark Reading, your process there. So we do have several listener questions that people were curious to hear about from you. So our first one just thinking about your entire career in journalism. What has been one of your favorite or most memorable stories to cover, or you could take that another way. Have there been any standout interviews for one of these stories that you’ve covered?
NN: Yeah, there are a ton that are worth mentioning. The ones that come to mind as a news reporter with Dark Reading, I think it was last summer that I helped break a story about major Chinese crime syndicates that were enslaving people for purposes of pig butchering scams. That was a really fantastic story that Infoblox helped us to uncover. And it was really fascinating for me, not just because, you know, slavery, which would already do something for a story, but it had this really interesting angle where these Chinese crime syndicates were, still are it’s not a past tense thing, creating shell companies that would advertise in European football, European soccer. And I’m a big soccer fan. I love watching English, English teams, and there are a number of, you know, multi billion dollar Premier League English football teams, also in Italy, Spain, Real Madrid has partnerships with these people. Man United, all of these major football clubs that literally splayed on the front of their jerseys have Mandarin characters that I suppose even the football clubs didn’t know are just fronts for Chinese slave rings. I actually would wonder if they’re still advertising. I’m gonna have to look into that. But that was a really fantastic story that was globe trotting and fascinating.
I often really remember those global stories the most. There was a fascinating one that I covered about a year ago about Namibia, the country just north of South Africa, was trying to cut down on mobile cyber crime in the country, and their idea was to sort of register everyone with a phone number, but in the process, their major telecom company, while they were registering ordinary people, was collecting their biometric data. And the problem over there was that a lot of people didn’t realize just how sensitive their data was that they were giving up to this telecommunications company. It was a really fascinating look into what modernization looks like and how cybersecurity can affect communities that aren’t necessarily usually having to engage with that. And then I’ve gotten lucky to cover a lot of really great stories in podcasts. The one I always cite as my personal favorite is this story about an FBI operation called Flyhook. It’s sort of the perfect podcast story, if anybody wants to go back and listen to it. Basically, there are, there were two Russian, you know, 20 something year old kids who graduated with technical degrees and they had all these skills, and they lived in the middle of nowhere Russia, so they didn’t know how to monetize them. This is usually how cyber criminals come to be, and the FBI felt the need stop them, because what they were doing is hacking into major organizations and saying, your cybersecurity is not good enough, hire us, because all they wanted was a job. So the FBI comes in, they’re like you, we have to prevent these guys from hacking all these companies. So the FBI creates this whole fake shell company, LinkedIn page, website, whatever. They send these guys a job offer. They fly them out to Seattle. These guys finally think that they’re going to get the thing that they’ve been waiting for this whole time, which is just like American tech jobs that’ll pay them some money. They go into an interview room. There are right down to like, microphones and cameras and fake suitcases and lamps in the room. They get interviewed, they cop to their hacks because it proves their technical skill, and then they get arrested. And what’s really nice about the story is it ends well, because these guys get out of jail, and then they get American tech jobs. So it’s sort of the perfect, in my view, hacker story, although I’ve gotten to cover a lot of other great ones too.
CB: Yeah, those are definitely interesting. I like the global perspectives and then that that you’re right, it does tell a really good story. Yeah, those are fun for podcasts. Another question we were curious about, I know you’ve had a number of different interviews. Can you talk about an interview that went either like really well, or maybe one that went poorly?
NN: Sure, really well. Happens a lot. I’ve had the chance to speak with a lot fascinating people. Often the best interviews are with people who just again, broken record, talk in a way that’s really understandable in the past. The ones that stand out to me are I had the chance to interview guys like Bastian Obermeier, the guy who broke the Panama Papers story, if you recall that. Jake Goldstein, who was always a podcast guy who I looked up to when I was younger. Honestly, there are too many to name. Not that long ago, I got to interview a very nice elderly lady who was a retired professor at Michigan State, and she was so honored that I came to interview her about a paper she had published, like a decade and a half ago about the Linguistics of Nigerian scams, and she was so wonderful because she just felt like that English professor that you go eat lunch with during lunchtime because the other kids are bullying you.
The interviews that didn’t go well, a couple of them definitely stand out. Most of the time, it’s because guests aren’t willing or prepared to speak about what’s necessary, for reasons that are ultimately understandable. I’m thinking, for example, of I did a podcast about the APT Volt Typhoon with Microsoft’s Head of Threat Intelligence, something or other, I forget his title. Perfectly nice guy, not suited to a podcast, because Microsoft is a trillion dollar organization and they’re not inclined to help you tell a story. They’re just going to speak like a trillion dollar corporation. My favorite of my unsuccessful interviews was when I was just starting out in podcasts with Malicious Life, and I was a young, hungry, go-getting, kind of reporter, was around the time when the cybersecurity company Kaspersky was in the news a lot because the government was thinking, huh, these guys are Russian, maybe we should get rid of them in government systems, at least, and maybe in general. And nobody really knew if Kaspersky was good or a bad thing. Nobody could really prove that they were connected to the Russian government, but it seemed illogical that they couldn’t have made some sort of Devil’s bargain. And so I thought, in my hubris, that I could, just, like, get some info. And so I arranged a podcast recording with them, and they got extremely annoyed at some snotty 22 year old asking if they were connected to the Russian government. That was, that was on me, yeah, that was on me. That was not on them. That interview did not go well.
CB: I like the bold attempt, though it’s investigative journalism, you know?
NN: Yeah, that’s the nicest way to have put it.
MF: You live and you’ll learn. But kudos to you for, like, the guts to ask the questions, regardless of if you got them.
NN: Yeah, I’m just glad that that person who I spoke to didn’t care enough about me to actually remember me in any way, because I’ve since had relationships with Kaspersky experts. Um, he was probably just like, “What am I wasting my time with this kid for?” And that was helpful to me.
MF: I mean, they’re good growing opportunities too, for sure, which actually that ties into our last question for today. And you could answer this, you know, professionally or personally, but we’re curious, what is the best advice that you have ever received?
NN: Yeah, that is a really tough question, but as it pertains to this conversation, I would say that the best and most useful over time advice I ever got was from my dad when I was younger. He always emphasized that you should write how you speak. When you are in middle school, high school, whatnot, you start learning that writing is this thing that sort of exists separately from the way we usually communicate. You start using words like however and therefore, and all those funky ways, in conclusion, sort of. And then, if you don’t watch yourself, you’ll be an adult, and you’ll start talking about, you know, this story really shows how you need XDR and layered security and education awareness. You could really just end up talking like, end up writing, sorry, like you’re just doing business or writing some sort of technical manual. And I have been lucky enough to, as I said, make a career out of writing about something that usually people talk about in one way, in a way that’s much more approachable. So that was really useful to me. But before we go, I wanted to ask. I didn’t tell you guys I was going to do this. You guys have, as far as I’ve seen interviewed a lot of really talented reporters, more experienced and talented than I. I wonder if you’ve ever asked this question of them, and if you recall any of them having some really good advice that has stuck with you?
CB: That’s a great question. Well, first of all, I liked your advice. That’s a good full circle. You know, way to end, as you talked about how companies can set themselves apart and how you receive pitches and everything, so we’ll certainly take that to heart. Let’s see. I don’t know, Madison, if we’ve asked this question to a lot of people recently?
MF: Yeah, we usually try to make some, gather some unique questions from our listeners. But I think that one.
NN: Then I suppose I will just ask it of either of you, in general, what’s the bite the best advice that you Madison or you Christine have ever received before? And you’ll realize how hard that question was for me, by the way, to answer it now?
CB: Turned the tables around on us yeah, I feel like I have this like in my brain somewhere, because I thought about it before.
NN: You could also, I’ll, I’ll modify the question to be best advice you’ve received recently, if that’s easier?
MF: Hmm, mine is also from my dad, but I’m trying to remember the exact words that he had used, though, but it had to do with leadership though, just about how they’re like, the difference between kind of managing people versus leading people. But I’m trying to remember the exact words that he used.
CB: One of my favorites pertaining to that Madison, that I’ve kind of taken to heart to is how leaders don’t create more followers, they create more leaders. And I think that’s one thing that I kind of take to heart about, you know, managing others and teaching others as they grow in a communications field is just that they can have confidence, right and and believe in themselves and understand that they have an authority to speak on certain things, even if that they don’t feel like they do. So it’s kind of instilling confidence in others. I think that’s a big one for me.
NN: Cool. Yeah, all right, Madison, you’ll send me yours in an email later.
MF: Yes, I will. I will email it right after this. I gotta ask my dad, actually.
CB: We can put it in the blog. Maybe we’ll put it in the blog write up. We’ll think about it a little bit when we post we’ll each contribute a little bit more.
NN: All right, sounds good.
CB: So in conclusion, just kidding. I just wanted to say that that’s good. Very good. Conclusion, yeah, no. Thanks. Thanks a lot for coming on our podcast. We really appreciate hearing from you, and I think a lot of good insight.
NN : Cool. Thanks so much. This was fun.
CB: 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.