Dan Ackerman has been a tech journalist for two decades. He spent many years at CNET, eventually leading the hardware news and reviews as editorial director, then joined Gizmodo as its editor-in-chief to help boost the site’s modern technology coverage. 

That’s when Micro Center came calling. The retailer has 28 physical locations across the country and caters to enthusiasts and professionals. It’s where you go if you want to build your own PC, or if you need the very best gaming laptop. Their team recruited Dan about 10 months ago to found and build Micro Center News as their first ever editor-in-chief.

I spoke to Dan about his favorite stories, how he’s built Micro Center’s news site, and why brand journalism has room to succeed where traditional news models are struggling.

What was the state of Micro Center’s branded content when you came on board?

They had a community site with discussion boards and they occasionally posted articles on it, going back years. And they had just hired a head of video – he came from B&H, the big photo/camera/technology/electronics store. Then they said, we need something more editorial, something that will give us credit for the expertise that we have and carry forth our mission to really help people. 

And as somebody who has been on the more servicey side of technology journalism for many years, that sounded appealing because it’s something that you need a certain amount of runway to do well. You need writers and a budget for products and testing equipment and all that other stuff, which is sometimes hard to do. 

If you've read something that I or someone on my team wrote, I want you to feel like we're taking your money as seriously as you do. That's my definition of technology service journalism, which CNET did really well, which Gizmodo has started to do really well, and now that Micro Center is, I think, doing really well. 

Yeah, I think of Micro Center as the place for people wanting to get into the real nuts and bolts – hardware and customizing – and people who work there who understand that stuff.

Yes, and if you have a small business and you need to outfit it with five or 10 PCs, routers, networking stuff, whatever it is, they've got a big group of people there who can help you. And it’s people that really enjoy it, as opposed to going to some other big box stores where you're not going to get good advice.

You're producing digital content, but people still want a physical store to go into and see things and touch them and talk to people, especially with purchases like an expensive laptop.

One hundred percent – it’s hard to spend $2,000 on a laptop based on a little photo on a website and some specs. You want to have that kick-the-tires experience and someplace you can go. If you're buying, let's say, a big desktop and something doesn't work right, you want to throw it in your car and take it over to the store, not find a giant box and ship it back and wait six weeks. So I think there's a lot of interesting stuff in that retail model.

@danacknyc

Let’s check out the @Micro Center Miami grand opening! More at microcenter.news!

So zooming out, can you tell me about your team?

It's a very small team. The video team has three people on it, and they do other stuff also,

but they're my video team when I'm doing videos. I've got one guy at the home office who helps me out; he's a really good editor and writer. And the rest is frankly all freelance, but it's great because I can bring in all the expert voices that I know from my 20-plus years in doing this. 

I have a lot of my favorite people I've worked with over the decades now doing freelance, people who worked at CNN, the Wall Street Journal, who have written for The Verge and Engadget and anything else you can imagine. I can give people pretty regular freelance work, so we get great stuff for our readers, and also these journalists have a great outlet for doing their kind of journalism. 

I noticed that some of the freelancer columns that you're running, like This Week in AI. I think that's really smart – you've got great subject matter experts writing in these verticals, which I'm sure helps build up credibility.

That's what it's all about – the subject matter experts. I know a guy who's a great networking expert and was a reporter covering that for many years. So if I have to do a networking story, I'm going to call him. Ian Scherr is great with the business side of things and AI.

Even though I'm very focused on hardware, I think AI and how people use it is the big story right now in technology, and that really needs a lot more explanation and expertise than it's getting. I think there's a lot of talk about AI that goes over some people's heads, even if you're a tech person. We have that ability to say to people, this is how it actually affects you and this is what you should watch out for in the next year or two.

There's such a wide variety of topics you can cover and products to review. So how do you approach that and set an editorial calendar? 

It's a mixture of evergreen technology stuff, like how-to articles, product reviews that can also stand for a while. Products get refreshed every year, every year and a half, sometimes every six months.

And then new stuff, you get something from embargo, or there's a big event coming up, or things that happened during the course of the week that seem really interesting to our readers and relevant to the topics they're interested in.

So in any given week, we could do a laptop review and a how-to on something in Windows 1, and a news story about how the Notepad app in Windows is getting its first update in 20-something years. Then we'll do something like, this new video game is coming out, can your lame work computer run it? It’s mixing the contemporary stuff with the evergreen stuff and coming up with whatever feels like the right balance.

How do you measure success of the content? 

Bigger picture, I'm looking to build Micro Center in people's minds as a place that you could rely on for expertise and not just advice, but good advice. When you learn something from the site or from one of our videos or articles, that's great. And then when you need to get something, you think, oh, these guys are great, they've steered me right so far. I'm going to go to the store. 

How closely do you work with Micro Center corporate?

They have a very nice marketing team that's involved in the videos, in the community and social media and a lot of other things; I work with them a lot. I talk to the CEO, Rick Mershad, at least weekly. It was his idea to build this new site and make it its own kind of news vertical. I don't spend a ton of time in the corporate nitty-gritty. I'm really focused on our audience and cool products and what we're doing with them.

It's very similar to being at a traditional publication. Yes, you talk to the business side people sometimes, but they're not there in the everyday mix.

What are some favorite stories you've gotten to work on in the past nine months? 

I will tell you my absolute favorite, which was earlier this year, when we were still, frankly, at a much earlier AI age than we are now. I discovered that Micro Center had a March Madness internal company pool,

and I said, I'm going to use AI to make all my picks. I used a couple of different AI systems and asked questions in different ways to go from the first round of games and then took those projected winners and narrowed them down, narrowed them down. And then I wrote a little article about that.

A month later, I won the company pool with my AI picks. So then I had to update the story and make a video about it about how AI won. So that was my favorite, finding a practical use for AI and then being able to show the payoff.

I feel like we’re seeing more brands that are understanding the value in this kind of journalism, they're willing to put more resources behind it, whereas newsrooms are just narrowing and narrowing and narrowing their focus.

I spent 20 years trying to figure out some of these business models, and for a while it was page views, which lead to display ads and making money, or it's uniques. And then it was affiliate click-through content where you got a bounty on each lead that you sent through.

That kind of performance marketing journalism had its moment and did really well and still does well in some ways, but in the last 18 months, the bloom is really starting to come off the rose, because I think affiliate rates have gone down for a lot of the big companies, and readership is down. 

Google is a big part of that. AI is a big part of that. So many publishers have seen their traffic plummet. And you're just competing over best air filters or best wireless routers with five million other websites and AI and Google aggregating that content and presenting it to you themselves, that’s not a sustainable business model.

I don’t know what the answer is, but at least in my little corner with what I’m doing, having a longstanding successful brand behind it is fantastic, because unlike a traditional publisher, the whole business is not predicated on making money through the number of page views you get.

Is there a topic that you haven't covered yet that you would love to start covering? 

I'd like to do more about what people build in their homes and businesses. Like, hey, I got a Raspberry Pi and it built a whole smart home system from scratch that does everything for me. And I'd love to go to their place and see it in action. The same thing with small businesses who come up with their own ways to automate and use technology in new and unique ways.

That's really fun, because I bet people come up with ways to use technology that you and I have never thought of. 

Look at all the amazing stuff people started to do with AI immediately that Chat GPT and Open AI never thought of. People came up with their own lessons and workarounds and put different software apps together and had them talk to each other. 

My kid went to a summer camp for two weeks, a sleepaway camp. And all I had was a crumpled up piece of paper from the camp with a list of things you need to bring to camp. My wife had gotten all the stuff that we had sitting around together and put it on the coffee table. You know, shampoo, toothpaste, two hairbrushes, whatever.

So I took a picture on my phone, literally of the crumbled up piece of paper, not even a digital file. I took one picture of the coffee table with all the stuff spread on it and I fed that into Chat TPT and in two seconds it said, all right, here's what you got, here's what you still need to get. It knew the brands and sizes of everything.

That’s something somebody had done a tutorial on, and it worked. Then I gave that idea to a freelancer, who wrote an article for me about using that same methodology to pack for a trip or a vacation. 

If you were consulting for a brand considering starting their own branded content channel, what advice would you give them? 

The number one thing is, don't think of it as a press release factory, and don't think of it as a performance marketing play where we just put links in and expect you to click through and make purchases. Think of it as building your brand and your expertise and actually being helpful to people. If your company can show that it has utility to people besides the transactional, I think that's the real benefit for doing this kind of content. 

What’s your advice to anyone who wants to work in branded content?

I would say, hone your skills in terms of storytelling, expertise, being a reader advocate, because that's really what journalists are at the end of the day. If you take that mentality and bring it over into content that's financially supported by a brand, I think you're going to be way ahead of other people who just treat it like a transactional piece or treat it like PR.

What I’m reading/watching/listening to

Because a marketer is only as good as their creative inputs.

NONFICTION 📖 The Tetris Effect, by Dan Ackerman (hey, we know that guy!) Dan describes his book as “the nonfiction, real-life, Cold War story of how Tetris was created in the Soviet Union and basically stolen by Western companies, and then the Soviets put together an economic hit squad to try to get the money back. It's a very John le Carré-style spy story.”

ARTICLE 📖 “She ate a poppy seed salad right before giving birth. Then they took her baby away,” by Shoshana Walter for The Marshall Project. It’s a shockingly common situation — hospitals drug test mothers in labor, resulting in lots of false positives from common medications, or the traces of codeine found in poppy seeds. I was TERRIFIED of this happening to me before I gave birth, and avoided everything bagels the week leading up to my due date. Turns out that wasn’t a paranoid idea.

TV SHOW 📺 The Perfect Couple, Netflix Impeccable cast, juicy Nantucket murder mystery, Nicole Kidman and Liev Schrieber as a fucked up rich couple? The perfect end-of-summer watch.

PODCAST 🎧 Reprogramming with Lindsay Hyatt I started with Lindsay’s episode “On the facade of the online coaching industry” and it’s VERY interesting. I love her even-handed but critical evaluation, and her vulnerability in sharing the story of how she got roped into the whole business herself. There are legit and great online coaches, and then there are hundreds (thousands?) of others with no qualifications just trying to get you to become a coach for other coaches. It’s giving “we’ll be watching a Netflix documentary about this in 2-3 years.”

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