Meet the Influencers: Mike Musgrove, The Washington Post

For this installment of our Influencer Q&A series, I spoke with Mike Musgrove, a consumer technology and video game reporter with the Washington Post. Mike provided gave me the download on how he got his start in covering video games and his thoughts on PR and the local consumer technology scene.

-John Terrill

What made you decide to pursue a career in journalism, and how did you wind up being able to cover video games for a living?
I wound up in this career partly by accident; a college friend of mine got me a job in the mail room here years ago and I liked it so much that I stuck around. I ended up writing about technology and video games because they were topics that interested me, but I've written pieces for several sections of the paper over the years.

How would you see the consumer technology scene in Washington as compared to its business and government side? Growing? Weak?
I don't know much about a consumer tech scene around Washington. As a class, the companies I'm aware of in this sector in the Washington area have neither grown nor shrunk.

On a side note, my editors are always more interested when I tell them some company I want to write about is locally based, so I always listen a little more attentively when I hear from a company based around here.

What’s your take on the shifting media landscape, as more and more readers are moving to getting their news online? Has it affected your coverage at all?
The shifting media landscape hasn't affected my coverage as much as it has changed how I do that coverage. It used to be that I would just take a notebook to events, but now I often take a digital camera and/or a video camera in order to grab some content to put up on washingtonpost.com.

Other than not sending you pitches on government contracting and business-to-business technology, how can public relations professionals work with you best?
The PR folks that I have the highest regard for seem to be the ones that read the Post enough to figure out how a story they're pitching might fit into the sort of writing & reporting I've been doing. They also understand that sometimes I have an interest in writing about their client, but have to wait for some other piece to fall into place to make a story feel like the "right" sort of thing my editors will go for. Sometimes I know what that piece is in advance, sometimes I don't...

If a company is based in the Washington area, I like hearing from somebody in the Washington area, for what that's worth. It always seems odd to me to hear from a PR firm in NYC or LA telling me about a company based in Fairfax!