Source-led vs. emergent news in quantum tech

Including 22 news stories that went beyond company-led announcements in 2025

I was catching up on the quantum news over the break and at some stage noticed “this is mostly all press releases and research papers”.

I found that curious because it was in contrast with the more general news I read, which reports on stuff that was observed to have happened in the world, not announced in a press releases.

So then I tried to remember if we’d had any of that kind of reporting in quantum tech and could only come up with a couple of examples of stories from the last year.

I posted about it on LinkedIn to see if anyone had any more stories to add. No one added any, but Hilary Kaye helped me refine the distinction I was trying to make (which went beyond press-releases). She phrased it as:

. . .the difference between news that comes from a company (regardless of how it reached the journalist) and news that happens on its own, i.e., either an enterprising journalist pursues a story on their own or something that is intrinsically newsworthy and generates coverage without a company suggesting it.

I’ll refer to these two kinds of news as source-led vs. emergent news:

• source-led news: coverage whose initial push comes from a company or organization, e.g., via press releases, blog posts, or direct pitching to journalists

• emergent news: coverage initiated through independent journalistic judgement, either by an enterprising journalist pursuing a story on their own or by events that are intrinsically newsworthy and generate attention

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with source-led news. It’s an important way to get news to the media (although, things can get iffy when that kind of push leads to too much hype). But emergent news is important too. And the presence or lack of it should in itself tell us something.

Now, we do have quite a few quantum-focused publications in the ecosystem: Quantum Pirates, Deep Policy, The Quantum Foundry, Quantum’s Business, The Quantum Stack, The Quantum Dragon, Sutor Group, The Quantum Leap. But these mostly focus on thought leadership, analysis, expert commentary, etc. Also very important, but not what I’m getting at here.

In professional news outlets, on the other hand, we’ve seen an increase in general quantum computing coverage over the last couple of years, but these are often context-setting pieces like this one (aka: quantum computing exists and this is why you should care about it), rather than event-driven news.

So is there really no emergent, event-driven news coverage in quantum tech?

To answer that question, I decided to do a bit of digging, and found these 22 pieces.