European technology is booming. European tech media is not. Deca-corns are getting minted while the outlets that should be covering them are retreating or realigning.
TechCrunch Europe has made recent changes to realign. The Next Web events and media signed out.
Into that gap steps European Technology Network (ETN), a live tech news show broadcasting from a brand new 1,500-square-foot studio in King’s Cross, London’s AI neighborhood.
ETN relaunched this week with a $1.6 million seed round and a launch lineup that included British politician Rishi Sunak, the CEO of Axel Springer, the CEO of Synthesia and Caspar Lee.
I sat down over Zoom with Alex Best, ETN’s chief of staff and a Bloomberg alum, to find out how the show works and what it takes to get a guest on air.
More about the show
“Luke and Ronan, the two founders, basically felt that there was a massive gap in coverage for European technology,” Alex told me. That was around the same time new media took off in the States, led by shows like TBPN. “They’ve really blown up, and they’ve paved the way for a new form of tech coverage, which is digitally native, on social media. It’s fun, it’s short, it’s human.”
The show is five days a week from noon to 3 p.m. London time. The first hour breaks down the day’s tech news. The last two hours are guest interviews in 15-minute slots. Guests in Europe come into the studio. Guests abroad join by Zoom. In Alex’s words: “It’s short, sweet, punchy.”
The audience is deliberately niche. ETN pulls more than five million impressions a month. “It’s never going to be a big audience,” Alex said. “But the real quality is that the viewers tend to be executives at startups, in tech companies, in Fortune 500 companies.”
The show bridges the Atlantic. “For American companies, we give them a voice in Europe,” Alex said. “For European companies, we give them access to the U.S. We like to do that bridge.”
Fair warning for West Coast clients: Noon to 3 p.m. in London is 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. in San Francisco. ETN guests have woken up for it, but for a major CEO it might flex the schedule. “Sadly, it’s an early wake-up for guests on the West Coast,” Alex admitted. Bring coffee.
What makes a great ETN guest
I pressed Alex on what he seeks in guests. He was refreshingly candid. Here’s what stood out.
Timeliness beats everything. ETN is a live news show, which means it hops on what is trending. When sovereign AI dominated the conversation, his team wanted spokespeople who could engage that day. “If we see something is trending on X or on social media, it’s really important for us to get a spokesperson who can engage with this topic,” Alex explained.
Personality wins. “You could have a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and if they’re reading their quarterly earnings, that is completely uninteresting,” Alex told me. What works? “What we want is someone who’s going to come on with character and share their opinions,” he said. “When we have speakers like the Alex Karp’s of the world from Palantir, people who are able to break down topics and even give controversial takes, that tends to perform really well.”
You don’t need a British angle. I asked whether guests need a UK customer, UK office or UK spokesperson. They don’t. Alex’s logic: “If you were a European founder, which a lot of our audience is, would you want to hear about the outstanding achievements of an American company, even if they weren’t European-based? Absolutely, because they are technically our competition.”
There are no forbidden topics. I asked what guests should avoid, expecting a list of ugly-American landmines. Alex waved it off. “Any guest that comes on, we want them to come with their full personality. Sometimes we don’t even talk about their product launch. We end up talking about something completely different based on where the interview is going. It’s laid back, it’s natural.”
How to pitch ETN
This is where ETN’s live format becomes a superpower. “We don’t need a big warning time,” Alex said. “Because we’re a live news show, we have the luxury of being able to book things day of.”
No six-week lead times. If something breaks and your client can speak to it, that’s a bookable moment.
The pitch itself is simple. A short email covering who the company is, who the founder is, their social following and the why-now.
Social following matters more than usual here, because X is ETN’s main platform. “If the guest has a social media following, it massively amplifies the message. It’s very mutually beneficial.”
And the prep? I asked Alex for on-camera advice, ready to share my usual TV guidance about powder and shine. He told me guests should treat its interviews like any other Zoom meetings. “It doesn’t have to be grand,” he said. “On the cosmetic front, I couldn’t possibly comment.”
Why this matters
New media outlets like ETN are rewriting how tech stories get told, and the smart move is building these relationships before your competitors do. As the principal of the Politely Pushy PR agency, I’m already thinking about which Bospar clients belong in that King’s Cross studio.
If you want to get on the show, details are at etnshow.co. And if you want help figuring out whether your story is ETN-ready, you know where to find me.
Alex signed his relaunch email with a line I can’t top, so I’ll steal it: What a time to be live.
