Two stories sat in the queue: one would expire by Friday, one would never expire

Two stories sat in the queue: one would expire by Friday, one would never expire

Newsjacking — hooking your comment onto a breaking story — and the evergreen asset are often pitched as rivals. A cybersecurity client let me run both in one quarter so we could actually compare the curves.

The newsjack came first. A major retailer got breached on a Tuesday. By Tuesday night our CISO had a 120-word reaction drafted and sent to eight reporters already filing the story. Three quoted her by Wednesday. The links arrived in 48 hours and the traffic spiked, then flatlined inside ten days.

The evergreen piece — an annual index of breach costs by industry — took six weeks to build. It earned slowly: two links the first month, then a long tail as reporters cited it whenever the topic resurfaced. Eight months on it was still pulling a link a week, including from the very breach stories our newsjacks chased.

"I keep your index bookmarked," one journalist admitted. "It's my go-to stat."

Lesson: newsjacking converts attention you didn't create into links you keep — but only if you're early and fast. The evergreen asset earns the attention back, forever, at the cost of patience. One is a sprint timed to someone else's gun. The other is a flywheel.