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Rob Pegoraro @[email protected] · 2026-08-08 · 23:09 UTC

Here’s why Black Hat meeting pitches are almost always doomed with me

My seventh year of Black Hat is in the books, and once again I fought a losing battle with my own schedule. Which I would have lost by a much larger margin if I’d accepted more than a tiny fraction of the meeting requests I’d gotten from PR reps for various information-security companies exhibiting at that conference.

This collective quest for my in-person presence seems to happen every year with Black Hat (see also: CES), regardless of whom I’m writing for or how recently I’ve done any extended writing on infosec. I have to assume that it must work for some journalists and companies, but it almost never does for me.

First, there’s the onstage content of Black Hat: Most large conferences feature a lengthy series of panels, but Black Hat’s tend to be much more info-rich. That makes them easier to turn into posts and therefore into money–when I can find time to write.

Second, there’s the short duration of this event: After some opening pleasantries on a Tuesday afternoon and evening, everything is crammed into Wednesday and Thursday.

Third, this year’s edition of Black Hat gave me even less free time than usual because I was bouncing between that conference and another about two miles north on the Strip–Ai4, which ran from Tuesday through Thursday at the Venetian and paid me to moderate one panel Tuesday and another Thursday.

And some publicists compound their clients’ problems when they wait until the run-up to Black Hat to try to introduce me to these companies instead of picking almost any other time of the year besides (ugh) CES Advent.

Three weeks ago, I felt compelled to vent on LinkedIn: “PR friends, can y’all please explain this obsession with booking meetings at Black Hat? The conference only runs two days and change, with more than 100 generally info-dense talks and presentations filling the schedule Wednesday and Thursday while we’re also supposed to be writing and filing copy. How much free time do your clients think journalists have there?”

The replies I got were more enlightening than I perhaps deserved. To paraphrase a few:

Well, some journalists do take meetings, so we have to ask.
Developing one-on-one connections means a lot to us.
Some of our clients insist on this, even if we tell them it’s a bad tactic.
You can always say no.

About that last one: It is true that I can always reply to a PR pitch to say “sorry, no interest” and maybe even say why. But then I would spend a large fraction of my workdays doing just that–and no, I don’t trust Gemini, or at least the implementation of that AI service in the Google Workspace version of Gmail that I pay for, to send those replies for me. Sorry, but the lack of a reply remains the reply.

And as I noted at the start of this post, I did accept a few meeting requests. All but one had one thing in common: They were for events in the evening. (I would have accepted breakfast invites too, but nobody sent me any.) Everybody has to eat, and while Black Hat provides a wealth of exhibitor-subsidized dining options, ones that allowed me to have a useful conversation with somebody at a company of interest got my attention over others.

(Free advice to companies looking to get time with journalists at large conferences like Black Hat, CES or MWC: Most of us aren’t parachuting in for a single day of coverage, and you will vastly improve your odds of us going to your event if you don’t schedule it on the same peak evening as everybody else.)

But no matter how well PR types optimize their meeting pitches, there’s no escaping one crazy-making aspect of this quest for journalists’ attention: how the volume of these requests keeps suggesting a far higher value for our time than our compensation indicates.

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