Local newsrooms keep shrinking, journalism schools keep closing their doors, and the reporters who remain are stretched thinner than ever. For organizational communicators, that shift changes the math on media relations. It’s no longer enough to know how to write a pitch. You need to understand who’s left to receive it, what standards still govern their work, and how to build the kind of relationship that gets your story told well instead of not at all.

Circle of Fellows #131 features four IABC Fellows with deep backgrounds in journalism and media relations. Moderated by Shel Holtz, SCMP, the panel discussed what’s changed in the newsroom, what hasn’t, and what it means for the way communicators do their jobs.

The panel dug into what that means day to day for communicators, including:

• Thinking local and strategic. Where does your story actually need to go, and which relationships and networks get it there?
• Knowing journalistic standards and principles (JSPs). Understanding what reporters can and can’t do — and where the real limits are — makes for smarter pitches and fewer frustrated calls.
• Respecting deadlines and information needs. How communicators and journalists can work together, rather than at cross purposes, to produce the stories both sides actually want.
• Getting to know the people in your “journalism ‘hood.” In a shrunken media landscape, personal relationships with the reporters who remain matter more than ever.

About the panel:

Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design.

Edward “Ned” Lundquist is a retired U.S. Navy captain with 43 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. His company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to government and commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington, director of U.S. District 3, and chair of the International Accreditation Council. He was named an IABC Fellow in 2016. Captain Lundquist received the Surface Navy Association’s Special Recognition Award in January of this year, for his service on SNA’s executive committee and chair of the SNA communications committee. He writes for numerous naval, maritime, and defense publications and chairs and presents at communications, naval, and maritime security conferences around the world.

Martha Muzychka, ABC, MC, speaks, writes, listens, and helps others do the same to make change happen. Martha is a strategic, creative problem solver seeking challenging communications environments where we can make a difference. She helps her clients navigate competing priorities and embrace communication challenges. Martha offers strategic planning, facilitation, consultation services, writing and editing, qualitative research, and policy analysis. Her work has been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally with multiple awards.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and is passionate about the strategic use of storytelling to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills on the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada.

Raw Transcript

 Uh, hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 131 of Circle of Fellows. Uh, this is the monthly panel discussion featuring usually four fellows of the International Association of Business Communicators talking about topics of interest to communicators, especially those pursuing certification or looking to, uh, further themselves along their career paths. And we have a topic that should resonate with a lot of communicators today, especially those engaged in media relations, uh, and that is the shifting landscape of media, uh, and media relations, and have four great panelists to discuss this. Before, uh, we get to their introductions, I’ll let you know who I am. Hi, I’m Kjell Holst. I am senior director of communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor headquartered in San Francisco and operating throughout California. Uh, I’m also the vice chair of the Global Communication Certification Council, which explains that little SCMP that you see after my name. And, uh, if you are watching live, I hope that you will participate in the conversation. The best way to do that through YouTube is just to, uh, use that live commenting feature. I’ll see it here, and I will be able to share that on the screen, and always nice to be able to digress, uh, to answer a question from somebody who’s watching in real time. Uh, and with that, let’s meet the panel, starting with Diana. Hi. Hi, Kjell. Thanks for having me today. Thrilled to be here with my illustrious, uh, group of, uh, other people, f- other fellows. So I am an IABC fellow. I am a, a IABC Canada Master Communicator. I’m based in Guelph, Ontario, um, just an hour west of Toronto. I am the founder of Diana Deegan & Associates, and I am also a professor at Conestoga College, teaching, um, a number of different, um, communications and, um, public relations and marketing courses. Great. And a special welcome to you, Diana. You are a member of the 2026 class of fellows. I am. I am. Thank you very much. So exciting. So exciting. Martha, you’re up. Hi there. Thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure. I’m actually the, in the far east of Canada, in Newfoundland and Labrador. I run my own consultancy in strategic communi- communications and policy research, and I also teach communications and writing skills with the local business center at the university, Memorial University of Newfoundland Thanks, Martha. Ned? Uh, good day, everybody. Uh, I’m Ned Lundquist. Uh, I’m an accredited business communicator and an IBC fellow. I’m a retired naval officer, and my wife likes to tell me that I’m retired, period, at this point. Uh, I still have, uh, a few clients. I still do some writing. Uh, just attended a conference on maritime security and safety in, of all places, St. John’s. And, uh, Martha and her husband, John, scooped me up and, uh, I got a whirlwind tour of, uh, the far eastern segment of Atlantic Canada. It was fascinating. So, uh, Kjell and I and, uh, Jennifer go way back. Diana, uh, is, uh, a new colleague that I haven’t connected with, but, uh, as a fellow fellow, I’m sure we will going forward. So Kjell, thanks for doing this, and thanks for having me. Well, thanks for being here, Ned. And Jennifer? Hi. I’m in North Vancouver, Canada, and I’m pleased to be here today on a warm summer day. Um- Mm … I’m also an SCMP. Uh, I’m proud of that certification, and, um, really happy to have some listeners here who are pursuing certification. Uh, I specialize in strategic storytelling as a consultant, and, um, like, like many of you, also teach at the Sauder School of Business, uh, business communications to, uh, to business school students. I love that intersection of business and communications, which is, of course, something we’ve all, we’ve, we’ve all been working toward and uplifting for a long time. Looking forward to today’s discussion. It’ll be a great discussion, Jennifer. Thanks. And, you know, um, in, in my early days doing media relations, uh, whether it was for an employer or after I moved into consulting, uh, for a client, it was pretty routine to hear somebody say, “I want the front page of The Wall Street Journal,” or- “I, I wanna be here,” or, “I wanna be there.” And that was the remit, right? That was what you set out to do, at least to get them good coverage that could show them that they moved the needle. And you had built relationships with reporters at the various, uh, mainstream media publications and trade publications and the like. Uh, and you knew how to pitch, you knew how to do a targeted press release distribution, and you got that coverage. Not so easy today with these media outlets constricting, uh, considerably and, and many of them vanishing. Although it was interesting, I just read that I think it’s The New York Times is opening a local newspaper in Minneapolis, so we may see a new model emerging here- Wow if there’s revenue, uh, that they can derive from that. But, uh, for now, uh, it’s a challenge to earn that third media coverage. Third media or, you know, uh, earned media coverage is, is critical, uh, if we’re going to show up in AI search results, the, the overviews and the research results and the like, uh, because, uh, I’ve seen data that says 85% of what, uh, the AEO and GEO engines are producing come from earned media, only about 12 or 13% from a, a, a, a brand website. So we have challenges in front of us. So let me, let me start by asking you, you know, what’s changed most fundamentally? When we, when we say that media relations has changed, which change matters most? Is it, is it the loss of journalism, journalists? Uh, is it the collapse of, of newsroom business models? The, the fragmentation of audiences? Something else? What are you seeing out there? Well, I’ll jump in. Uh, my, my feeling is that, uh, we’re, we’ve lost a whole segment of, I’ll call it local media. Uh, small town papers, small town dailies and weeklies, uh, sec- sec- uh, supplements, uh, with local news in the large papers. Uh, so I’m not exactly sure where people go for that news. I know there are online sites that provide local news, but I, I just think we’ve lost a whole tier of connectivity to connect citizens with, with government, with business, uh, uh, with things to do. I, I don’t think that people are going to the web to fi- uh, to these new, uh, sites. They’re, they’re just browsing and, and finding what they can anywhere, kinda hit or miss. I agree, Ned. It’s been a huge loss to see the decrease in the small town papers, because one of the best things I found with my media relations work was connecting those editors with local people on the issues that I was trying to promote. And being able to provide local content, local contacts, um, and that local context was really critical, uh, to the success, because you don’t want to always just having, coming from head office or the principal city, because, uh, sometimes there are resentments that all the news gets funneled one way. And, uh, it also meant that people could see in different areas how the story could play out depending on that regional context Yeah, I would, I would agree. Um On the, on the community news reporting, uh, element of things, uh, we had a tragic event here just in, in my community, which is not a small town, uh, this week, and what I noticed was that in the absence of, um, hyper-local reporting, so in other words, metro-wide reporting was existing, that nuances around the community that I live in were… went missing. So, you know, the name of the shopping center where the, where the tragedy happened, um, the, uh, you know, even the way that streets were referenced and businesses were referenced. Those kinds of things became slight inaccuracies that added up to a broader sense of, you know, if you’re in that community, kind of go, “Okay, well this doesn’t feel… This doesn’t pass the sniff test.” Um, right through to, uh, you know, important things like traffic reports and, um, and, and those kinds of things. We, a local, I’m sure as in, as in many markets, uh, we had the news a couple of weeks ago of, um, several local radio stations shutting down that are all serving local, local markets. And, um, so that amalgamation and consolidation continues to really shape the way our communities and, and the way our communities show up and the way we show up with each other. I was gonna bring up that point, Jennifer, and um, and it was all the r- it was five Rogers stations across Canada were shut down, and at one of them was the Kitchener station, which is right next door to where I live and, and has a huge impact on this entire area because it was a major radio station, and the outcry locally was huge. So many of the community members were so upset that this station had closed down because it had been around for a very long time and had a very, um, long history in the area, and everybody was outraged. And this goes to how the business model has changed for so many of these, uh, for the media, um, and how that, uh, corporately is changing journalism, right? And that the reason these, I mean, it was so coincidental that this happened the day after Rogers announced that they were buying back a lot of the stock and taking over the Rogers entertainment and sports, uh, franchises. And so, well, look at that. They do this one day, and the next day all of these stations are being closed. And you can’t look at that and go, “These, this is not an isolated situation. These are tied together.” And so there was a lot of outcry going on because of the effect that it has on the daily lives of a lot of these people because of the communication, because of what is, um, the role that these network, uh, networks, that the papers, that the radio stations all play for the communities that they’re in. My community, Guelph, does not have a, a printed daily paper anymore, and we’re not a small community. What had d- has cropped up in the meantime are two online newspapers. Um, what is interesting is that this week, um, because I’ve got my eyes open because we were talking about doing this podcast today, Village Media, which is based, uh, out of, uh, northern Ontario, um, announced that they’re launching 15 local newspapers in the United States along with the Knight Foundation. So they’re taking this model of being online, and they’re now taking it into the United States because it has done so well here in Ontario. So that was really interesting because it is a not-for-profit organization, a charitable organiz- that is providing the funding, and they’re going into, I think it’s three states, uh, Wisconsin being one of them, in, in the US. Um, because they’re recognizing that a lot of these smaller communities don’t have anything anymore. The media are being pulled from these communities. Uh, so it is, there’s a lot of changes that are happening that are robbing the communities of the information that they have traditionally had. I’d like to just add to that when we’re talking about radio stations, and I think it’s true for TV and, and, uh, and print, but particularly with radio, there are companies that are buying up. There’s no restriction, uh, for how many, uh, media outlets you can own anymore in the United States. So we have companies that are just buying up all the licenses, uh, and they may be converting them all to, uh, the same format such as the K-LOVE format, which is now virtually in every market. And, uh, this has really had an impact on local jour- journalism and local programming i- uh, for, for, uh, radio, TV and, and print. Yeah, yeah. When the funding for public radio, public media was, was cut by Congress in the US, it didn’t put an end to NPR and PBS. What it did was it shut down, uh, small local, uh, stations, and a lot of those were in news deserts. It was the only access to local news that people had. And we have a comment from Brian Kilgore, uh, and, and he makes the point that wh- when, when you look at what space is available in the publications, a lot of it’s being fill- filled with what he says is, is repetitive politics. Uh, I, I subscribe to our local newspaper, the East Bay Times, uh, here in the San Francisco East Bay, and as I flip through it, it’s AP and it’s Reuters and it’s other wire copy. Uh, it’s from their affiliate partners with the, the New York Times and, and the Washington Post, which means that we’re not learning about what happened at the zoning commission. We’re not learning what happened at the school board, and I think that stuff is important. I don’t know how important it is from a media relations or a corporate communications standpoint, but, uh, yeah, I think from a democracy standpoint, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s absolutely critical. Um, I’ll tell you what I’m doing is I have, uh, s- set up, uh, a, a skill in Claude, the AI large language model, that scours all of the local government websites for both upcoming meetings and what they’re going to be talking about in the minutes of past meetings, and it builds me a little newspaper, uh, that I can read every day. It also covers things like where there’s gonna be street closures around me. Uh, it does a little police blotter. Um, I’m- I keep tweaking it, and one of these days I’m just gonna set it up so it automatically publishes to the web, not just to, uh, my Claude implementation where, where I can see it, uh, so that there is a local newspaper here that, that does cover that stuff. Um, just, you know, because I can. But y- it, with, with this introduction of, we’ve now heard of two, uh, Diana, what you mentioned and what I heard about The New York Times doing, it’s, it sounds like there’s a bit of a resurgence underway. Are, are there parts of the media ecosystem that are still healthy or, or at least healthier than, than people assume? You know, Shel, just to build on what you’re talking about, I do think this, uh, perhaps, um, uh, responsive rise in citizen, citizen journalism, uh, is probably the wrong terminology in this particular case, but what you’re describing. I mean, uh, like many of you, um, I’ve switched to following a lot of independent journalists. Um, and while that’s in response to shifts in the media, the media landscape to do with what you were talking about, Ned, that kind of broader ownership issue and the influences and independent thought, et cetera. I like the varied and diverse tone that that brings to my understanding of issues in a way that, um, in a way that is, uh, perhaps more insightful than I might have had previously. Now, is that sustainable? I have no idea, honestly, how some of these, in some cases, very well-respected, um, high-profile individuals are funding their independent ventures. But, um, but I do think it’s, uh, it’s not an unhealthy shift in terms of, again, that, uh, diversity of, of, um, presentation of thought. Uh, Shel, I just wanna add something to what Brian said. Thanks for listening, Brian. I know you’re our, our, our, our best patron. Uh, y- an, uh, a news hole abhors a vacuum, and so they’re gonna fill it with something. Uh, that’s why I’ve always said, uh, give ’em something, uh, ’cause sometimes they, they just need to plug a hole. But, uh, you’re, we’re all right. Th- there, there’s no longer the local, uh, budget, uh, going around for, for covering things like the school board and the city council and those types of things that… And, uh, that, that was a, a mission for local, uh, journalism for decades You know, and I’m saying, and h- that was always the reason for, um, local media, right? Like it was, they were always the reason th- why we had the local reporters and the local papers, was to make sure that they were there to cover off what was happening locally for politics, locally for, um, what was going on in your city so that you knew what was happening. My 85-year-old mother constantly talks about the fact that she is not computer literate, and quite frankly, I don’t want her on a computer because she’s been the victim of fraud several times now. Um, and I just know if she was on the computer it would be so much worse. Um, and sh- but she’s constantly saying, “I don’t have access to the news. I, I am not, I don’t know what is going on.” So she’s getting it through me, um, because there is no other way for her to get any information, um, because we don’t have a, a local newspaper anymore. And, um, because of that she’s not getting the information that is coming out about what’s going on in our city. Um, and there are a lot of other, um, vulnerable people in our society who are not getting the information ’cause they don’t have access to getting anything online because they don’t have, um, internet or, or what have you. And, you know, and that is a sign of democracy within, uh, a community and within our countries. Um, and if you don’t have that, how are you getting that information, right, about what is going on in your city? And nowadays it is so important to be making sure that you are getting true information, truthful information, and not misinformation. Um, and when you’re not getting that provided, how are you ensuring that what you are getting is proper information? Um, now the other side of that as well is that, um, there… When I’ve been doing media relations over the last couple years, one of the big changes that I have found is that publications that were always, um, you were able to talk to to get, uh, information to work with with your clients now all of a sudden are wanting money. You know? They are wanting advertising. You can only get a story if you are going to b- be buying advertising, and that has been the other change that I have found that, uh, shocking in some ways, um, because that was not what was happening prior. Um, and so that has been another business model shift that I have found that has happened. And Dia- Diana, you’re 100% right about that because, a- and, and when you have a publication that goes to pay to play, uh, I personally- Uh, view it as just a big, uh, publication of press releases, and I think a lot of other people do. So I think the journalism still has a place for professional journalists And, and it was not even, um… And it’s not because that’s not what they look like. If you’re reading it as a consumer, you would not know. I mean, there’s certain publications you look at and you go, “Okay, they’ve paid for that spot.” These are not publications that when you look at, and traditionally they were never that way, and when you’re looking at these publications, you’re not looking at it going, “Oh, they’ve paid for that, that placement.” Right? Uh, and it’s so disheartening to see that that is now what is happening. Um, and interesting enough as well, I was, um, scrolling through my Instagram, uh, on the weekend and came across, uh, She Would Be a Beauty Editor, and she had put a post up about how often now she is running into, um, PR people, um, from product companies saying, “Where’s my coverage? I sent you product. Where’s the coverage for the product I sent you?” And she’s going, “Hey, hey, wait a second here. You don’t automatically get coverage because I sent you… Because you sent me product. That’s not the way it, it works.” But this is a change with these expectations now because of social media. So, uh, it’s interesting, uh, th- how social media and influencers and have changed this dialogue as well. I, uh, I thought that was a r- really interesting comment to come from an editor, uh, at a, um, a beauty magazine as well with these expectations too. I would, I would say to them, “You gotta, you gotta give me more than just product. You gotta give me a real story with, you know, has news value.” Well, and it was interesting ’cause she actually said, “You don’t just get by sending me product. There actually has to be a reason. There has to be, you know, I actually have to try it. I actually have to like it. Um, you don’t just get.” Like, it, it was… Uh, and I actually responded to her, um, and said, “Yeah, there has just been this change.” Um, and these, these like, you know, and, and, and it’s one of these things like, okay, I, I remember the… Like, I feel like, you know, my grandmother now. Like, “I remember the days of, you know, when we walked in snow and it was 15 feet high.” You know, it, it, it, you know, it’s like I’m now, I’m now of that era, right? But because, uh, it, th- just the way the expectations have changed because of social media and influencers, and you give me something, I’m gonna say something, right? And it’s gonna be nice, right? Well, yeah, yeah, there’s also the expectation that you’re gonna pay for play, uh, not, uh, uh, in a more traditional context. I’ll give you an example. About a week ago I got a call from a production company. They’re under contract to CBS News. So I mean, CBS News is embroiled in its own stuff right now. Uh, but it’s still one of the major news outlets, uh, am- among the broadcasters. And they’re doing 35 segments around the America 250 theme. Uh, and each segment’s about four minutes, and they wanna do one on construction. They wanna come out and highlight our company. I’m on the phone 20, 25 minutes with this guy, talking about, you know, what we could talk about and what we’re doing in, in sustainability and, and things like this that would be of interest to an audience. And the producer is, is getting very excited and, and we’re starting to make arrangements and, and then, and this is, this is a, a classic example of bearing the lead. He says, “By the way, there is a $60,000 buy-in.” Uh, yeah. It’s like, “I thought you were under contract to CBS?” Well, yes, they’re under contract to produce the items, but they have to raise the money to handle the costs of production on their own. So you’re seeing more and more pay to play like this in order to play in traditional mainstream and, and, and trade media I’ve been approached by two different publications since I’ve become a fellow Um, for, you know, the story. Um, and my qu- you know, and it’s like I’m now asking the question of, “And is there a cost to be involved?” Because I’ve- Yeah … you know, we’d like to- You gotta- … feature you. Yeah. Right? And it’s like- Gotta, gotta start with that. Well, exactly. Yeah. Right? I clicked in pretty quickly. Um, and it’s like, lovely opportunity, what’s the cost? Right. Right? Um, which is unfortunate. I think a really big question here is we need a broader conversation about ethics when it comes to media coverage, when it comes to communicators. Um, our association, we have a code of ethics. Um, there are a number of news agencies. CBC, for example, has the JSP, which is standards and principles, journalism. And, you know, a number of news organizations and practicing journalists, for example, have been working with, uh, mental health agencies on how they can, uh, cover appropriately, uh, news stories in which, uh, individuals have died by suicide and what can be done. And often now you see at the end of these stories, um, a link to mental health resources. So there’s a, a conversation happening around how we can approach conversations ethically. And the other side for me about, um, the changes we’ve seen in, uh, media ownership and how stuff is covered, um, the flip side of shrinking organizations means that you have a loss of triangulation. So as a social policy researcher, I try to collect information in different ways. What are the studies that have been done? Can we do a survey? How about testing some of those results in a focus group? What about consulting and holding public meetings with key informants? So that you can test what you find. And the loss of multiple media services means that ourselves as consumers of media, we don’t have the ability anymore to test what we learn against other sources. And when you have media influencers, when you have, um… And I’m not talking about the journalists who are doing really interesting work on their own and publishing that through Substack or other means. But when you have people who say, “Oh, I’m gonna whip out a phone and cover this and tell you the real truth,” to provide the hot take on issues, that’s not necessarily grounded in knowledge or evidence-based, uh, information and research. Um, w- we have a deficit of critical thinking and analyzing because we also lack all those sources in which to, um, assess. And so in my work with media relations is I try to connect people with different kinds of sources, so at least within a piece that results- Um, there can be multiple sources of information about the issues from reliable, trustworthy contacts. And I think that’s part of the bigger conversation when we encounter pay-to-play, because then we’re only getting single source, uh, information I, uh, I’d like to add something to what you said, Martha. I’m so glad you brought up the IBC Code of Ethics, because it really does underpin everything we do. Uh, and, and that is, uh, when we’re dealing with the media, whether we’re an editor dealing with, uh, one of our journalists, uh, or a source, or we’re a journalist dealing with, uh, uh, sources or readers, uh, it all comes down to trust, and trust has to be truth-based. Uh, when, when we, uh, are writing or we’re reporting, uh, we’re consuming information and sharing it, it all has to be based on the truth. And that’s where a, a, a lot of media have, uh, gotten away from fact-checking and gotten away from, uh, uh, ensuring sources are legitimate. Uh, but, but as a communicator, uh, dealing with our bosses a- and, and dealing with our, uh, consumers, our readers, writers, uh, viewers, uh, uh, listeners, it’s, uh, it’s gotta be truth-based and we, we gotta build trust with our, with our, uh, constituents, and we, uh, you have to keep earning it all the time. If you lose it, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s something that’s extremely hard to, to restore. Right. And when we put that, our own professional communications code of ethics, when we use that as our, um, as our, as our filter, as our, our compass, et cetera, in these discussions about, um, the media landscape and, um, the value of ethical communications and, and journalism as it relates to that, uh, really that can, that can help guide us in a kind of a, a, a, a more meaningful way than even some of the tactical, uh, examples some of us are discussing, right? So pay-to-play, for example. Um, uh, you know, I think our code of ethics gives us some guidance about that. And, uh, and that will be, you know, you’ll need to… Will each of us need to figure out how to apply that within our organizations, uh, uh, whether they be educational, um, corporate, not-for-profit, uh, et cetera. Um, so yeah, I think we, we have that guidance within us. And Martha, as you say, and I’m sure all of us speak to students about this, you know, I say like fi- if whatever community you find, whatever path you choose, there will be a code of ethics. So it’s not just ours, it’s, it’s, um, it’s the journalistic code of ethics. It’s all of those things that, that keep us true to the truth. Yeah. Uh, um, Jennifer, you and Martha both raised something I want to talk about for a minute, and then we have a comment from a listener. Uh, but, uh, you, you, you both talked about what journalists are doing, uh, if they don’t want to be associated or affiliated with a mainstream publication anymore, or if they have been let go. A lot of them are starting their own media companies, uh, or they’re just starting to crank out a Substack. Uh, they’re continuing to employ the practices and principles of effective journalism. They’re just doing it, uh, through a different channel. And I, I haven’t checked, but I don’t think that Cision and the other PR services companies that are configured to help you reach journalists are making this transition and identifying all of those newsletters on Substack and Ghost and all of the other platforms that are available for this, uh, all of the YouTube channels that are being set up a- a- as media outlets for some of these journalists creating their own media outlets. Uh, and it, it, it seems to me that it would be a lot of work, uh, to identify those. Um, you know, where I work, uh, we are trying to shift, uh, the perception in the marketplace of the kind of markets where we are active, because that has pivoted. Uh, so that wasn’t that difficult, you know, 10, 15 years ago. It’s a nightmare now. How do you find those? And how effective is it if you pitch one journalist with their Substack newsletter as opposed to the journalist who’s in the publication that’s being read by for- far more people And that is why we do a lot of work. That’s the relationship building part of what we do, right? Um, and that is, that’s what we do. That is, that is what media relations, um, that’s our job if we’re doing it well, is to stay connected and to find out, uh, who is doing what and where people are, and to, to build those relationships, and to understand the areas that we are working in and who is doing what in any given, you know, at any given time. It has always been part of our job to understand who is where, because they were always moving around, always changing, um, and they were. Um, people within the media, uh, were moving from beat to beat to beat within, um, you know, newspaper or TV or whatever at any given time, and it has just become, m- you know, more complex and more compounded and more fragmented than ever before. But as you are doing, you know, building those relationships, and that is, that is what we have to do today. We have to maintain those relationships, and we have to stay on top of that, and we have to, um, understand who is where so that we can, um, be the type of person, um, um, who makes the journalist’s job easier. Um, so that we can have those relationships, foster those relationships so that we can do our jobs. And one of the things I used to do, Diana, when I handled media and communications for a public health organization here in the province, is I tracked the issues that might, uh, attract attention. And so one day I, I… well, I’ll sign up for different Google alerts for different topics to see, A, what’s being said and how they’re writing about it, or how it’s being covered, or what are the kinds of things that people are latching onto. And, you know, came across my, my email that there were, uh, there was a report from out west in Canada of a type of a vaccine that they were experiencing some shortages with, and it was a vaccine that’s used often in the schedule for children, uh, aged one to five. And so I thought, “Oh, this is interesting.” Um- I’ll go and talk with the medical officer of health. And so I went and I said, “Hey, um, you know, this came across my desk. Are we having any issues?” And he said, “Where’d you hear that?” And I said, “Well, it was a reliable report from CBC up in the western part of Canada.” And he said, “As a matter of fact, we just got an update, um, about the shipment of vaccines and how it’s gonna be rolled out because of the supply chain issues.” So I said, “Oh, well, very good. You’re on top of it. No worries.” Anyway, two hours later, I get a call from a local reporter who does this exact same thing, but from a different perspective as a journalist, to call me up and say, “Hey, Martha, I read this story on our sister website. Um, are we having any issues here in this province?” So there are ways that you can use, and, and this is one of the things that I think is positive, um, about search engines and subscribing to updates, is that it can do the work for you of trawling a number of sources so that you can then take time to evaluate and say, “Okay, I regularly want to receive information from this person because I’ve reviewed their content and they’re a reliable source.” And so there are tools that we can use. Um, and as Diana said, one of the things I would always do is also get to know the people in your neighborhood, and sometimes move out of the neighborhood, and sometimes new people move in. So you have to cultivate those relationships and see what their understanding is. And I’ve never had an issue cultivating a particular reporter with an aspect of a story, because different reporters are intrigued, attracted, uh, drawn into a story for different reasons. And so being able to provide multiple angles that might serve my multiple journalistic audiences, uh, was always a helpful approach, because people like something that’s different. They don’t want to be sharing the same information, uh, as their competitor. And, uh, it’s an advantage for you, and it’s also a plus for them. Martha, you raise such a great point about that reporter who called you. Uh, he called you because he trusted you. Uh, and also, and ’cause you already had a trust- a trusted relationship. Yeah. But also, uh, if you hadn’t heard that, that could’ve been the first, uh, information you had received about this, and you could have gone to your boss, who may not have heard about it as well, and become the bearer of this information that came from someone who’s connected with the issues, uh, and, and contacted you as a reporter because he or she trusted you. Um, Kjell, I wanted to just quickly come back to your initial question around, um, you know, where do we as communication professionals focus our time in this, in this new landscape with a lot of independent and, um, perhaps sing- more singularly focused, uh, journalists? Um, do, do you, do you nurture the relationship with someone in their Substack audience or do you look to more mass-market, uh, media choices? And like everything we do, I would say that needs to be audience-driven. So it’s about finding where our audiences are for our particular message, in your case, construction. Um, I used to do a lot of work in healthcare media relations and, um, nurtured some long-term relationships with reporters who were looking for very specific health research stories that I, you know, over a period of time, uh, they would, they would learn to come to me and say, “Okay, it’s, um, heart, a heart month. Um, you know, what have you got?” Or I would have come to them kind of thing. Um, but it is a, it is building, building the trust and also from an organizational perspective, knowing how, what the best channel to my audience is. Yeah, as some of you may know that I am a podcaster and have been for a long, long time. Uh, and I probably get six or seven pitches a day for guests to appear on my podcast. Uh, generally they’re at least somewhat on topic, sometimes completely off topic. Uh, every now and then we’ll actually respond to one that looks good. Uh, I would say probably one out of 50, uh, we’ll, we’ll respond to. Uh, are you- pitching podcasts? Uh, have, have you heard of other communicators doing it? Because I’m doing it now. I’m trying to get our subject matter experts and our thought leaders onto the appropriate podcast. One of the, uh, markets that we’re active in is aviation. We do a lot of work at airports, uh, building terminals and things like that, and, uh, we want to have the, the people who understand what it’s like to be doing construction airside with the security and the safety issues there. Uh, we wanna get them in front of the people who are making the decisions about who are we going to invite to bid on this project. Uh, and, you know, trying to find the aviation podcasts that they might listen to is a bit of a challenge. Uh, AI is, it has been helpful. Uh, but I’m out there actively pitching, uh, podcasts. Is, is that something you’re hearing about? I’ve been building some media lists, um, and I’ve actually been sort, trying to find some podcasts as well, uh, some very specific podcasts. It is on my radar because, um, the, you know, some of the podcasts may be small, um, but they are the target audience that I’m trying to reach very specifically. So again, I think it’s, we’re trying to h- I think when you’re doing, um, the job of media relations, um, that we want to do, uh, you’re trying to get to your audience, right? And I think podcasts are one very specific way to do that Um, and I think, you know, it, it getting to, um, I was looking at Cision’s State of the Media report that was done this year. Um, and it’s interesting the point that you just made, Shell, about, um, whether or not the pitches that you’re getting are the right pitches. Um, and in the, in the report, it said most journalists say that less than 25% of the pitches that they’re getting are actually relevant to them, and so that’s really key. Um- Yes … right? So, uh, and n- not that that has changed, ’cause I think that, that is what most journalists have said for many, many, many years. I think that’s one of their pet, pet peeves. Um, and so we always have to keep that in mind. And I, I just wanted also to point out that, um, 80- in the same survey, that 84% of the journalists actually said that they wanted, um, media communicators to reach out to them via an email and introduce themselves before they ever pitched them, and, um, start a relationship with them ahead of time- Yeah before they actually ever started pitching them. Um, and to start that relationship, introduce themselves, um, and to put some context around why they might be reaching out to them. Um, and so it’s all part of that relationship building ahead of time. So yeah, you know, identifying who you could be reaching out to, you know, and if that’s ca- uh, that podcast is the right source for you to be, um, connecting with the end audience, then that’s the right way to go It’s, uh, a- as, as a writer, I, I write for a lot of trade professional journals, and, uh, if you have a relationship with an editor, they, that they know that you’re gonna write something and send it in that’s gonna be, uh, pretty good and pretty close to on time, uh, th- then they, they don’t say, “What is it? Just send it along. I, I got a space for it.” Uh, but if you don’t know that editor, uh, it’s very hard to crack, uh, crack the nut. You, you really have to send all kinds of clips and, uh, examples of, of things that you’ve done and, uh, answer a lot of questions about what you’re gonna write. Uh, so, so b- getting that relationship, once you’re there, uh, it makes all the difference in the world. I think that’s the absolute key to having a, a successful media relations, uh, component to your communications practice. It’s connecting with the people and understanding what their needs are. They get hundreds of emails, and lots of them get funneled into the spam folder. Um, they don’t have time to read, uh, a pitch from someone who’s just sent out 1,000 emails hoping something will stick or catch somebody’s eye. And- Pray and pray … respecting their time is critical, and also understanding how they want to receive information. I once got a comment from a journalist who said, “You know, I can’t actually do anything with your news release.” And I said, “Oh dear, you know, what did I do wrong?” And he said, “No, this is exactly how I would write it as a story, but I can’t just run it 100% as is.” And I was thinking, “Well, okay, that’s pretty cool. I haven’t lost my journalism training,” ’cause that’s, I did go on to do a journalism degree after my undergrad. But, um, being able to present the information in the way that they can use, and so I do a lot of work supporting people who want to write op-ed pieces. Um, and space is a consideration, and word count is a consideration, and being tight and concise and focused is huge. And sometimes people call me up, and they’ve got 1,500 to 2,000 words, and I said, “Guys, no one’s gonna publish that,” right? Even though there is a market for long-form journalism, and there’s been some really incredible work done, but when it comes to an editorial piece or a commentary, you need to be really tight. And so being able to work with people who know that the stuff I’m going to send them is going to meet their specifications is already a step ahead in, in being able to achieve that coverage. ‘Cause then if it attracts the attention of the op editor, then they can move into, “Oh, well, maybe we should pursue this in the news section.” Um, and sometimes I’ve done that, and I’ve pitched that and say, “Hey, you know, this person has written this piece. It’s being published on Wednesday. But there are other nuances or aspects to the story that you might wanna consider as a separate standalone news piece.” So being able to cultivate those relationships, to have the trust, but also to respect their time and what their needs are is, is super important. Just to go back to the podcast thing, Shel, for a second, um, I will say that, uh, at least in my observation of the next generation of, of business leaders, communication professionals, and, and our audience frankly, in other words, the, the students I’m seeing in the classroom, when I ask them about channels, you know, “How would you get… If you were, if you were in, imagine you were working for an organization, how would you get your message out?” I would say podcasting would, would be, the vast majority of them would, it would be in their top two or three, if not their number one, in part because that’s their, they have a more intimate relationship with podcasts and podcasters than perhaps previous generations have had. And so in fact, there’s this, um, there’s this, uh, new form of, of connection and trust that is built between liter- listeners and audiences and, and podcasters, uh, that I think needs to be taken into account in the ways that we show up as communication professionals. I’d like to add to that, Jennifer. You know, we, we’re Luddites, right? Uh, if you’ve been around long enough to be considered to be a fellow, you’re, you’re, you’re entrenched in, in the old ways. Uh, except for Shel. Oh, come on, Dan. Speak for yourself. He’s always… So I, next, I’m sat next to this w- young lady on a plane. She was an influencer. She had millions of followers on Instagram and, uh, and Facebook, and I’m watching her and she’s going like crazy with her thumbs. And I, I said, “How do you do that?” She said, “What do you mean?” I said, “You go so fast with your thumbs.” And she goes, “Well, how else do you do it?” And I said, “Like this.” And she gives me the, she gives me the, “Okay, Boomer” look, you know? Right. Yep. Uh, yeah, the other thing to think about with podcasts is, is that they do end up getting quoted now in the mainstream media. It’s, it’s, uh, sort of the, the new man on the street. Uh, you, you end up seeing so-and-so said on a podcast. Uh, in fact, I’ve started listening to some podcasts because they get referenced, “Oh, you need to listen to this interview with this guy on this podcast,” said Paul Roetzer on his podcast, right? So, uh, I, I think there’s a, a way to get amplified if, if you’re on a podcast. Uh, I do wanna share a couple of the comments that we got, starting with, uh, Mirko Pecevic, uh, who says, uh, yeah, basically kudos to me for my little local online initiative. Uh, he does say that it doesn’t fill the gap of critical reporting, and, uh, it, it absolutely does not. Uh, it’s, it’s just finding facts and, and publishing them. Uh, what practices can comms pros adopt to support local reporting? And I’ll, I’ll turn that over to all of you in a sec, but I, I do wanna direct people to Alabama News Center at alabamanewscenter.com. It was started by Alabama Power, uh, because they saw a vacuum in local reporting where they could get their own stuff out. So you’ll see a lot of Alabama Power coverage in here, but you’ll see coverage of other things. Business, community, innovation, food and drink, and weather, uh, are the categories they have. There’s no politics addressed here, but, you know, if there’s a, a parade, I, I’m looking at a, a story here that, uh, you know, Run for the Wall motorcyclists stopped in Tuscaloosa, Alabama to honor veterans. Uh, those types of stories. So, you know, this is, is one model is if you’ve lost the local media outlet that you relied on to get information to your stakeholders, start your own Uh, all news is local, and if you can find a way to find someone in your organization who’s, who’s, uh, achieving something, accomplished something, uh, has an interesting story to tell, uh, that localizes your, uh, main messages a- and, and gets you some opportunities in, in more local media. Uh, some of, uh, in, in an earlier lifetime, uh, in the Navy, I was responsible for the fleet hometown news center, and we sent 1.13 million individualized press releases a year to local media, to, uh, radio, local, local newspapers, high s- uh, college alumni associations, uh, about the accomplishments of someone localized or, uh, someone who went to that school, who lived in that town. Uh, these are their parents, uh, and this is the accomplishment. They, they won an award, uh, they graduated from a special course, a- and this was local news. And the vast majority of our newspapers, our editors, uh, used it because it was local, and people will look for something that they can connect with locally The problem becomes now that the end source to be able to put that into something is now gone, right? So- Yeah … right? ‘Cause I, I know exactly what you’re talking about, and now those papers or those places are no longer existing. So where do you send something like that, right? Um, and they’re just not there. They’re just not there anymore. Um, it’s funny ’cause Martha was just talking about, um, uh, news releases that, you know, they can’t run them anymore. Now, I, I actually wrote a news release for becoming a fellow, um, and I actually sent it to the local, um, online newspaper, and they actually ran it word for word. Um, so y- you lo- you gotta love it, right? It’s always, it’s… Y- you love it when they actually run the, the news release you wrote word for word. Um, and they actually ran it in the online, um, local newspaper that I had become a fellow. Um, and so it is that same kind of local story. Um, and they, you know, so them doing something like that, but there’s a lot of places that just don’t have, um, the capacity to actually be able to do that anymore. Um, I have seen a number of, uh, as a judge for the Gold Quills or, uh, an evaluator, I have seen a number of, of submissions come through where corporations or companies are actually including in their, um, corporate newsletters, uh, places where they’re talking about what is going on in their local cities. Um, and so there are companies that are, are taking up that gauntlet and including information about what is going on within their company newsletter, so that’s always nice to see. Um, um, doing something like that. It’s a good way to humanize your organization. Yeah. People like to be seen. People like to be recognized, and organizations that have, uh, departments or divisions or teams, um, in different parts of the country or, or their provinces or states, um, do well to include those perspectives rather than always seeing it come from head office. Um, it’s a challenge in Canada where a lot of the media outlets in terms of national coverage are concentrated in central Canada. Um, it means that the local voice gets lost, and it’s a bigger challenge if you want to, um, really get some national coverage. And I work with a, a company in Ottawa, and one of the things that we have found is that the, uh, what media wants is something that will connect the issue to the people in the area that they are servicing, um, in terms of news, however it is, in terms of the web or an actual publication, a radio broadcast or a podcast. And sometimes you’re finding crossover where some former newspaper outlets are now including, uh, video coverage in their stories so that they can show the progress of a news conference. Um, so being adaptable and responsive, I think, um, is challenging when that funneling thing is happening with centralization of news sources. But if you can connect people to other people in their different regions, then it, from an internal communications perspective, it really does build solidarity, uh, and humanizes, as Ned said, the, the workplace because people see that their employer recognizes that unique aspect of them in terms of if you’re in the south or the north or the west or wherever. Let me, uh, get this last comment in from Brian Kilgore, and h- this is fascinating, and I, I don’t disagree with this at all. Uh, this is looking at this from the other angle. Sources at the decision-making level won’t talk to reporters or appear on camera, and instead only issue statements. I remember a few years ago, I, I read a, a piece, uh, I think it might have been in, uh, the Columbia Journalism Review or, uh, the, the Nieman Labs or, you know, one of the journalism reporting outlets, uh, that said that, uh, The Washington Post had approached a big company, I think it was Clorox, about participating in a, a report that they were doing, and the response from Clorox was, “No, thanks, we don’t need you,” to The Washington Post. Uh, if coverage is important, how do we convince our, our, our leadership that we need to be doing this even as, as, as we see the erosion of the, the media landscape? Well, I think, uh, it’s funny, I had, uh, I had coffee with a journalist friend yesterday morning and, um, she was talking about an article she was working on for The Economist, so, you know, pretty high-profile piece. Um, and she approached a, um, a federal cabinet minister whose, whose, um, purview it was, it is to, to, um, uh, who is a subject matter expert and, um, and his office, uh, said, “We’ll provide a statement.” And she said, “This is The Economist.” Um, “I think I can … I th- I, you know, I think an interview is warranted.” Um, to which they agreed, uh, but it sort of took that ri- reminder. But what I, something related to this, Shell, that I wanted to mention is the, is this kind of, um, dissemination of responsibility for sharing the news, which we’ve been talking about in a, in a variety of ways, that comes to us as organizational communicators, but it also ne- it also takes into account the weaving, the new, the new look of the, of the media landscape. Um, the, uh, the same journalist friend is, runs a major journalism program here in, in British Columbia. It’s a recognized program across Canada, and they’ve stopped intake of their journalism program and are reevaluating its, um, its role, its relevance, its purpose, et cetera. However, one of the really interesting things she’s been talking to us about is the, is the distribution, the desire to ensure that the distribution of those skills continues at the s- at the school. So in other words, um, they still want, uh, uh, to ensure that students have good writing skills, uh, critical thinking skills, all of those things. So where this comes back to your question about the executive level presence is the, is the reminder that we are, uh, like with many roles, we’re wearing many hats, uh, and executives need to see themselves that way, um, need to see themselves as part of, um, not just a contributor to or an observer of or a bystander of the news cycle, but an actual participant in the news cycle, which we as communication professionals are in a new way as well. We’re partners with journalists. Many journalists are working in communications. Um, and, and so I think we can bring a re- a refreshed understanding of the way that landscape works in a way that means we build trust and community within each other to get those important messages out. Uh, uh, no, no other thoughts on Brian’s point? Well, I think we’re seeing more of it. Sometimes it’s because people have less time and it’s easier. They feel that way they can control the message because it’s the statement, so the statement gets quoted. Um, and I think it’s interesting what Jennifer said because there is still a lot of fear in terms of how you might get treated by the media and how your words may get used. And so I think people see it as the easy way out to say, “Okay, we have, um, a statement. Um, they have a photo of the person who’s speaking. They can run with that.” And so I work with media relations coaching and performance presentation, and getting people over that fear, uh, is one of the things that comes up every single time. And I had to throw up on the screen a comment that we got from Diane Chase saying, “Yes, Jennifer.” So. Thanks, Diane. We are about out of time. Uh, less than 90 seconds left. Uh, so I do want to let everybody know what’s coming up in August on Circle of Fellows. Episode number 132 will take place at 6:00 PM East Coast time. Uh, the time shifts based on who’s on the panel, and this time on the panel, uh, we have Adrian Cropley, uh, from Australia, so the time has shifted to accommodate his participation. I still think it’s gonna be a, a, a very early hour for Adrian. But, uh, we will be talking about artificial intelligence issues in communication, notably pivotable, pivotal points for the profession. Um, and I’m, I’m not gonna guess what we’re gonna be talking about in a month because the whole landscape could change again, uh, in, in, in 30 days. I mean, you look at the news just recently and it’s all about open weight models from China. Um, reading Chris Penn saying, you know, y- y- you can’t block them because they’re the only ones that people can use to develop their own models, uh, even if it’s a US, uh, research company. Uh, so I mean, all kinds of interesting things that, that we can talk about. That panel, in addition to Adrian, uh, will include Bonnie Caver, uh, Pia-Mary Caramanis, and Mike Klein. So it should be a great panel. And to Diana, uh, Martha, Jennifer, and Ned, thank you so much for your participation today. I think this has been a great discussion. Uh, just a, a, I, I think a sign of what a really good conversation does. I didn’t get off question one on my list of- … of questions. It just kind of snowballed from there, and we had a, we had a great conversation. Uh, so, uh, until next month. See you all later, everyone. Thanks, Sal. Always a pleasure.

The post Circle of Fellows #131: The Evolving Media Landscape and What It Means for Media Relations appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Podcasting 2.0 is the open-source movement launched by Adam Curry and Dave Jones to preserve and extend podcasting’s open, RSS-based ecosystem. In this episode, Shel and Neville explore the initiative’s core features — including the Podcast Index, enhanced RSS metadata, transcripts, chapters, podrolls, live notifications, and listener-supported “Value for Value” payments — while weighing its potential to reduce dependence on dominant platforms such as Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and YouTube. The discussion also addresses obstacles to adoption, including limited awareness, uneven support across hosting providers and apps, added complexity, and the need to demonstrate clear benefits to listeners. For communicators, the larger implications involve channel ownership, accessibility, content reuse, AI discoverability, resilience, and the risk of building audiences entirely on rented platforms.

Links from this episode:

• Podcasting 2.0 — Making Podcasts Better for Everyone
• What Is Podcasting 2.0? And Why Should I Care?
• Podcasting 2.0
• What Is Podcasting 2.0?
• What You Need to Know About Podcasting 2.0

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Neville Hobson: Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 522. I’m Neville Hobson

Shel Holtz: I’m Shel Holtz, and Neville, we’ve been doing this show for more than 21 years. When we started, there were maybe 400 podcasts. There was no Apple Podcasts to help people find and subscribe to shows, and every podcaster was what today they seem to be calling an indie podcaster. What’s not an indie podcaster? That would be Joe Rogan, for example, on Spotify collecting money. He’s not an indie, he’s mainstream media. So I try to follow the podcast industry. I subscribe to some newsletters. I read some people who talk about it. But somehow I only recently encountered Podcasting 2.0. This thing has been around since 2020. Despite the name, it’s not a new audio format. It’s not a new app or a replacement for RSS. It’s an open source movement launched by, guess who? Adam Curry, the podcasting pioneer, along with a developer named Dave Jones. God, there’s a lot of Dave Joneses out there. Its mission is to preserve, protect, and extend the open podcasting ecosystem. Now, that word open matters. Traditional podcasting works because creators like us publish an RSS feed that many different apps can read. Nobody has to upload a separate master copy to each player. But over time, discovery and listening have become concentrated in large corporate directories and platforms like Apple, increasingly Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube, but there are others. These companies set their own rules for their own services. Spotify’s rules explicitly say that it can remove content and suspend or terminate accounts. You can call that moderation, deplatforming, censorship. There’s no denying the underlying power these services have. Spotify can remove a podcast from its service. If the creator independently controls the RSS feed and hosting, Spotify can’t erase the podcast from the entire internet. The danger comes when creators and audiences become so dependent on one proprietary platform that removal there is effectively removal from public view. Podcasting 2.0 was designed to reduce that gatekeeper risk. Its answer isn’t that every app has to carry every show, it’s that no single app or company should be able to make a show disappear everywhere. Now, the initiative has several major pieces. The Podcast Index is an open directory that apps can use instead of depending on one company’s catalog. I checked, and FIR is listed, as are our other active shows on the FIR Podcast Network. The podcast namespace adds new backward-compatible tags to RSS feeds. Those tags can provide creator-controlled transcripts, richer chapters, information about hosts and guests, live stream notifications, alternate audio and video versions, licensing information, and a podroll of shows creators recommend. Remember blog rolls? This is podrolls. There’s also PodPing which alerts apps quickly when a feed changes, and there’s a really much-discussed thing called Value for Value. It’s a model that lets listeners support creators directly, often through tiny Bitcoin payments called sats, S-A-T-S, and attach messages known as boosts or boostagrams. And, yeah, I was listening to the Podcasting 2.0 show with Curry and Jones, and they were shouting out everybody who gave them a boost the Bitcoin element gets disproportionate attention, but it’s optional. Podcasting 2.0 is much broader than cryptocurrency. And by the way, there’s a vertical market application of Podcasting 2.0 called Godcaster. That’s a defined community of religious podcasters who have embraced Podcasting 2.0. The question is whether this model could work for, say, corporate ecosystems, universities, trade groups, nonprofits, and the like. And that explains why communicators should care or at least know about all this, because this really is a conversation about channel ownership, interoperability, accessibility, and resilience. Accurate transcripts improve access and make our content easier to search and reuse. Chapters and person tags make expertise more discoverable. Podrolls let organizations recommend trusted voices without surrendering discovery to Spotify or YouTube and their algorithms. And open distribution reduces the risk of building an audience on rented space. Now, there are caveats. Support remains uneven. I didn’t even learn about it until a couple weeks ago. Hosts like Libsyn, which hosts FIR, and podcasting apps implement different subsets of the standards. Open infrastructure doesn’t eliminate legal obligations. It doesn’t change hosting company policies. There are other choke points. And decentralization doesn’t automatically make the content accurate, ethical, or responsible. But the core idea is important, and that’s that podcasting began as an open medium, not a collection of corporate content silos. Podcasting 2.0 is an effort to modernize that open model without giving up what made podcasting distinctive in the first place. For communicators, the lesson extends well beyond audio. Distribute widely, but retain control of the source, the identity, and the relationship with the audience

Neville Hobson: Yeah, it’s quite a story, Shel, I think. Like you, I hadn’t really heard of this other than the fact I did come across Podcasting 2.0 website when Adam Curry launched it back in, what was it, 2021, 20- 2020. But since then, no, haven’t heard anything about this at all really other than some kind of, aside comments here and there on on a couple of tech podcasts. And I’m thinking what you’ve outlined or makes complete sense to me. So why hasn’t this been thought about before even? I think it has in part. I’ve read people talking about this online, particularly on making content more easily consumable as they see it and there we’re talking about an idea that’s not new. Apple’s been offering this for a while, which is chapters, splitting up your content into chapters. But that’s only Apple. It doesn’t transport, and therein lies one of the issues with this, I think. How could you put it? There are some concerns I can see. I’ll come onto the pros in a minute. But I think is this not fragmentation of something that’s going to require quite a bit of a learning curve to figure out what to do with this? I’m also thinking that, is this going to open another standards race? Open standards only work if enough people adopt them, otherwise there is becoming another well-intentioned technical layer that only enthusiasts use. We’ve seen that. But, A broader, top-level question is, are we looking at the next stage in podcasting’s evolution, or are these features primarily serving podcast creators rather than podcast listeners? In other words, who’s getting the greatest benefit? That’s what I’m wondering. And I think it, it does… The fragmentation issue I think creates complexity. Features, bolting on new features more metadata doesn’t compensate for weak storytelling, and you have to have that sorted out. And I think there’s a risk of enthusiasts becoming excited by all this, while listeners simply want worthwhile content. The interesting thing, though, a-and you pointed this out in your intro, that the where we’re at now with podcasting is the marketplace is largely controlled or dominated by big platforms. You mentioned Spotify, you mentioned Apple. If we go to look at the analytics on Libsyn as to where, how people get our content, there’s a long list of 20-plus podcast platforms. Some of them, some of them never even heard of, yet there’s, you can imagine an episode has got, six downloads on that platform and 200-and-something on another platform. So it’s like we like to say, “Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts.” So how do we introduce this into that landscape in a way that literally isn’t complexity from the fragmentation? Because it will be fragmentation. And not– And who’s not– who’s to say that Spotify and the others aren’t going to respond not in a positive way to this, ’cause this is their control slipping away. So this is what I spot as some of the issues. I think the… Another standards race is maybe- more concern one of podcasting’s great strengths has always been its relative simplicity. Wasn’t like that when we started, mind you, but that’s how it is today. This introduces another layer of standard, certification, and implementation. We’ve seen this before. Social media standards, RSS extensions, schema markup, countless proprietary platform features. So it’s not a pretty looking landscape, I would say. Plus as we are talk– We’ve talked about this ourselves, but others are talking about this. This is podcasting’s time. It’s going to play a bigger role in organizational communication, particularly as podcasts play a growing role in organizational and employee communication. So how does this all work, where you’ve suddenly got these things that sound appealing to very appealing to creators? I think probably not so much from listeners whose sense complexity is what they’d be looking at. So you’ve have to make it very easy and simple. That said, I think there are some big advantages from it. You’ve mentioned some. One that strikes me immediately, richer, more accessible content. It turns an audio file into a more complete communications asset, it seems to me. So transcripts, chapters, structured metadata makes a podcast easier, and this is a big appeal, Shel I would say. Easier to search, easier to quote, easier to repurpose, easier to reference internally, and make accessible to people who cannot or don’t want to listen to something. So you make it broader. So you could also say, many organizations already struggle to maximize the value of long-form content. These features make it much easier to reuse a single conversation across newsletters, blogs, social posts, knowledge bases, internal communication. We’re always talking about content reuse as communicators. Podcasting 2.0 makes that much easier because the structure is built into the episode itself. There’s tons more we could talk about in this vein, but I think that’s enough for now. I think there are some major cons that would worry me if I were thinking about, let’s see how we can take advantage of this. It’s got a homebrew feel about it, which isn’t a criticism by any means. That’s how podcasting started. The landscape’s way different now. I could see a big role for AI in constructing the landscape, if you like, constructing it and helping you bring this into your plans. But this again it’s big work to get this done, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz: yeah, I think the biggest challenge that Curry and Jones face with this is building awareness and support. If I’m a podcaster for 21 years and hadn’t heard of it, you heard about it when it launched and heard nothing since then there’s a serious awareness problem here. And that’s what’s going to keep this from adoption. I’m not worried about fragmentation. Podcasting started with the RSS feed. This is something that Dave Winer came up with working in hand-in-hand with Adam Curry, who developed the podcatcher that would recognize that extension that Winer created. This did not render those RSS feeds useless to the RSS newsreaders that were out there. They still got them. They just ignored that extension because they didn’t have any way of playing a media file. So they still saw it. I have to believe that an RSS feed with all the new stuff in it is still going to be an effective RSS feed. The problem is that you have the hosting services, as I mentioned, we have been hosted with Libsyn, not since the very beginning, but pretty darn close

Neville Hobson: Yeah

Shel Holtz: Right. Let me start that thought again. The problem is convenience. If you make Spotify the place you go for podcasts and they’re listening to FIR and we say something offensive and they decide to take us off they’re not going to go look for us elsewhere. They’re just going to find other podcasts because they use Spotify. If you do a deal with Spotify, and you have to be pretty good, pretty famous guarantee a lot of downloads. But if you do a deal with Spotify, that’s the only place people are going to find that podcast. And again, you do something that violates the terms of service or their standards and they take you off, then you’re off. You’re gone everywhere. So I like the idea of this standard. I would just like to see some agreement across all of the hosting platforms and the discovery platforms that we will enable all of these on our platform so that listeners get the benefit. And you articulated some of those benefits to the listener. They don’t have to know that’s courtesy of Podcasting 2.0 any more than they need to understand that there’s an extension in the RSS feed in Podcasting 1.0. They just know that this is what they get when they subscribe to a podcast. But I love the idea of they’re not having to go to the show notes on our website to get the transcript. And frankly, I like the idea of people who love the show being able to support it with a micropayment that sends a message to us. I think that enhances the listener-podcaster relationship more than just commenting on a LinkedIn post or on our website or whatever. So yeah, I think there’s a lot to, to recommend this, but I think there are lots of obstacles in the way. And as you mentioned, there are also issues that don’t get resolved because of this Yeah, and Dave Jones is a developer, so I’m sure he’s working on all of this and probably has answers to some of those questions. I think it’s largely in his and Adam Curry’s hands to get the word out about this. If I were them or if I were counseling them, I would suggest that the audience that you need to be aiming at is podcasters the creators. And the message is tell your hosting service that you want these features implemented. The more they hear this and the more they see their customers changing hosting platforms to one that does embrace all of this, the faster they’re going to adopt the standard, and this will work for everybody. But I don’t see that effort underway, and I would advise listeners if you’re curious about this, visit their Podcasting 2.0 website, but also give a listen to the Podcasting 2.0 podcast. It’s typical Adam Curry. There’s a lot of digression and a lot of talk about completely off-topic subjects. But when they do zero in on Podcasting 2.0 it’s really interesting to hear them talk about this and where it is and where it’s going.

Neville Hobson: I would say Libsyn, we’ll be in touch

Shel Holtz: You can count on it. And that’ll be a wrap for this episode of For Immediate Release

The post FIR #522: Is Podcasting 2.0 The Future of Podcasting? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Your brand is no longer defined solely by what you say about yourself. Increasingly, it is defined by the answers AI gives when someone asks about you.

That simple but profound shift lies at the heart of The Answer Economy, the forthcoming book by Pete Blackshaw, entrepreneur, founder of BrandRank.ai, and former Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé.

As AI assistants and agents become increasingly influential in how people discover information, evaluate products and make decisions, organisations face a new communications challenge. It’s no longer enough to tell your story well. Your organisation also needs to be accurately understood by the AI systems that increasingly act as intermediaries between brands and the people they serve.

In this FIR Interview, Pete joins Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz to discuss why AI should be viewed less as another marketing channel and more as an auditor of organisational credibility. Together, they explore why trust, transparency and evidence are becoming more important than marketing claims, how different AI models develop different perspectives on brands, why communicators need to think beyond traditional search optimisation, and what organisations can do today to prepare for an increasingly agent-driven future.

For communicators, the implications are profound. Success in the answer economy won’t depend on producing more content. It will depend on whether an organisation has earned the evidence, transparency and trust that AI systems increasingly use to evaluate every claim it makes.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• Why Pete believes AI is becoming an auditor of organisational credibility rather than simply another information retrieval tool.
• What he means by the idea that “your brand is as strong as its answers.”
• Why evidence increasingly matters more than messaging in an AI-driven world.
• The concept of a “book of truth” and why organisations need to make trusted information easier for AI systems to understand.
• How and why ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and other AI models can develop different perspectives on the same brand.
• Whether communicators need to understand AI “worldviews” as well as human audiences.
• Why corporate communications could become one of the most strategically important functions in the age of AI.
• How organisations should prepare for AI-generated reputation challenges and new governance responsibilities.
• What AI agents could mean for marketing, purchasing decisions and brand influence.
• Pete’s advice for communication professionals on becoming “answer ready.”

About Pete Blackshaw

Pete Blackshaw is founder and CEO of BrandRank.ai, an AI visibility and brand intelligence platform that helps organisations understand how AI answer engines evaluate brands.

A two-time technology entrepreneur, Pete previously founded PlanetFeedback, one of the earliest consumer feedback platforms, which was acquired by Nielsen, where he later served as a senior executive. He also established Procter & Gamble’s first interactive marketing team before spending nine years as Global Head of Digital and Social Media at Nestlé, leading the company’s worldwide digital transformation initiatives.

Throughout his career, Pete has focused on the intersection of consumer trust, digital communication and brand reputation. His forthcoming book, *The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future*, published in September 2026, draws together more than two decades of experience helping organisations navigate the evolving relationship between consumers, brands and digital technology.

Resources

• Pete Blackshaw on LinkedIn
• BrandRank.ai
• The book: The Answer Economy: How AI Agents Will Decide Your Brand’s Future
• Pete’s The Answer Economy newsletter
• Search previous FIR interviews with Pete Blackshaw (2005, 2007 and 2009) on the FIR archive site.

Transcript

A transcript of this conversation follows, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Shel Holtz (00:04)
Hi everybody and welcome to a For Immediate Release interview. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson (00:09)
And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz (00:11)
And we are thrilled to have Pete Blackshaw back with us. Pete, this is your fourth appearance, I believe, on FIR. And it’s been a while. I think is what? It was 2009, I think, was the last time. But it’s great to have you back. I’ve been following you ever since then. Certainly read your content on LinkedIn and subscribe to your newsletter. So very happy.

Pete Blackshaw (00:21)
It has been a while.

Yeah.

Shel Holtz (00:38)
Anxious to have this conversation and the reason we reached out to bring you back on FIR interviews is because of some research that you have been doing for a couple of years that has resulted in quite a LinkedIn post and a new book coming out in September. tell us about all this and yourself.

Pete Blackshaw (00:57)
Yeah, sure. Well, I’m a native Californian who’s here in kind of adopted Cincinnati as my is my home. I have kind of had a mix of is my s you know, two time startup founder, first one I sold to Nielsen, which was in that space that you and I were talking about, you know, viral complaints and early social media. And and I’ve always been, you know, if there’s any through line across my career, I’d say it’s

The consumer meets trust meets digital. And both of the books that I’ve written kind of cover that. But in addition to being a startup founder, I’ve also worked in a large lot of the large, you know, multinational corporations, you know, many of whom I’m, you know, the types of companies I’m selling to. So I co founded P and G’s first interactive marketing team. Remember when we called it that back then? I

was a senior executive at Nielsen after I we sold my first startup to them. And then most significantly I spent nine years at in Switzerland as the global head of digital for Nestle. And ironically that kind of came in the wake of a a bit of a crisis that we all remember, you know, with Greenpeace, where they kind of recruited me in to kind of help to address all of that. And then I did a five year stint

Neville Hobson (02:18)
Ha ha.

Pete Blackshaw (02:22)
after Switzerland was recruited by P and G and Kroger and some of the Cincinnati companies to launch a startup accelerator and did a little bit of work in venture capital. But I’ve loved being back in the startup world and yeah, looking forward to the conversation.

Neville Hobson (02:39)
Terrific. So we should to kind of warm us up. I’ve got a question to start with that is a very, very simple one, actually, Pete. when I was looking into the the book that you’re publishing and looking at the content, what you’re covering and all that stuff, I saw I saw some huge kind of resonance with what we talk about in FIR. And there’s a lot of overlap, which I which I found really, really exciting because that that’ll fuel some of what we’re gonna talk about today, I think. But

Pete Blackshaw (02:45)
Yeah.

Neville Hobson (03:09)
First question, which is kind of a framing question. You’ve been talking about consumer trust and digital influence since the early social media era, if not earlier than that even. So this question this is my question. What feels genuinely different about this AI moment compared with previous platform shifts?

Pete Blackshaw (03:29)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what’s fundamentally different this time is

Is accountability. You know, I often say that, you know, the big aha for me when I quit my last job to launch brand rank, my current startup, is that I was shortly after Chat GBT came out, kids were asleep, we were skiing, and I was just doing what I typically do, what I’m sure you guys do all the time, just exercising my curiosity. And then typing in things into ChatGBT like, can Nestle be trusted? Are Pampers diapers really sustainable?

And it dawned on me within seconds that this medium that is evolving is the world’s greatest BS detector. And and we started to see some of the platforms are really on the extreme side of that, like anthropic cloud, where you just can’t throw spinner slogans at them. They just kind of cut through it. And that was like the big unlock for me. It’s like, my gosh, this is not only gonna become a new purchase funnel.

This is going to become really tricky terrain for marketers that are used to controlling the message, managing the spin, maybe getting away with overflated claims. And and I was like, my gosh, I gotta measure this. Someone’s gonna have to create like a Nielsen ratings of what these answer engines say. And I really wanted to focus. I know there’s a lot of players that are out there doing.

you know, AEO or GEO, but I really wanted to focus on the hard issues, like, my gosh, are brands going to be held more accountable for sustainability? Are these very sophisticated LLMs going to just digest an entire supply chain and either say thumbs up or thumbs down? Are, you know, and and maybe and and maybe, just maybe, will brands finally be forced to do some of the things that you all three of us have been talking about across the four sessions.

Which is, are they finally gonna kind of start responding to feedback? Are they gonna start inviting questions? Are they gonna start acting more with empathy? Because remember, digital started there. Digital started, we called it interactive. And the whole promise was like, we’re gonna be able to answer questions for consumers. They’re gonna come to us. And I remember when I started interactive marketing at PNG, that was like the North Star. And then we kind of moved into targeted advertising at scale.

We got very programmatic, we got digital, we kind of forgot about the consumer in control. And now I think that’s really waking up. However, one of the things I say in my book is

Listen, we totally messed up search two point And I’ve talked to the folks that wrote books about that, like John Battel, or like, my gosh, that quickly became a tragedy of the commons. Nobody could tell the difference between organic and paid and and even when it moved to mobile. And we as an industry are gonna have to decide like, do we want to preserve this incredible gift to consumers? And the things that are good for consumers are also really good for business, where they’re getting, you know.

reliable, trusted, you know, answers that are just solving like everything for them. Or do we want to pollute the commons by moving too aggressively the paid advertising? Do we want to dance in the gray zone? And so the book is kind of a the answer economy is this true shift and we have got to get in front of it.

To make sure that it is nurtured in the right way. And the timing couldn’t have been better because just last week, you know, all the folks from OpenAI are running all over cons trying to grab ad dollars. And that’s that’s good. You need, you know, you need an advertising model, but marketers have a historic tendency of dancing in the gray zone. And I just think we need to really get in front of it. And that’s like the heart and soul of the answer economy. We are in a world where the brands that actually answer the questions win. It’s such a basic

pre-digital concept that now is kind of getting extra life. Brands that tell the truth win. Why? Because the answer engines kind of call your BS. you know, so so that’s kind of the heart of what I’m getting into. And I just think it’s a really important conversation. And I’m hoping that it dusts off some of these conversations that we had in the past that maybe just were too damn early.

Shel Holtz (08:06)
Yeah, I remember those days, what, around 2004, when everybody was talking about how we were now going to have brands and consumers engaged in conversation and this was going to change everything and really didn’t. But Pete, you outlined this prescription of making everything sourced, timestamped, structured, LLM findable. that’s good hygiene for sure. but you’re describing how to feed the model, the inputs it

reward. So if a brand does this well enough, hasn’t it just learned to pass Claude rather than actually be trustworthy? I mean, how how would how would Claude or or you tell the difference between a brand with real substance and a brand with just a really great brand book of truth?

Pete Blackshaw (08:50)
Yeah, well, I think a lot of that goes hand in hand if you do it right. And again, you know, there’s a difference between a verified, trustworthy book of truth and marketing. I mean, they’re not the same thing. And so what I’ve learned, you know, I’ve I’ve been at this for two years, have worked with about 80 of the world’s top brands, big brands that you know that really, you know, have really challenging issues.

In fact, the whole business model started on sustainability, you know, Nestle Canada. And I they kind of invited me in for Earth Day. And we really took a hard look at, okay, will Nestle be rewarded or punished? And the good news is that they were severely rewarded. But there are ways where you need to market. I and maybe not the word market is the wrong term. You need to make your the good work that you’re doing.

Discoverable. So for example, I have found that a lot of the companies that I’ve worked with are getting lower sustainability scores than they deserve. You know, if you look at their science and their commitments, it’s actually pretty damn good. However, they’re so backwards on digital strategy that they put all of their science in PDFs, which LLMs can’t read. And we call that content liquidity. So there’s it’s not about manipulation. It’s a lot of it is like about getting the credit that you’re due. Now, I say that.

I don’t want to sound naive with that because I realize there’s a whole industry that’s mushrooming around me that’s all about manipulation and gaming and whatever it takes to kind of get credit you probably don’t deserve. I’m not playing that game. I think there is so much upside for companies that are actually already doing good things, have products that actually work, have credible supply chains, treat their employees well, that aren’t getting the credit they deserve. And I like those.

Challenges and we’ve been able to significantly move the needle with a lot of big companies just by making sure that they load up their FAQs with their sustainability commitments that are already verified by third parties or by these LLMs are very biased towards trust signals. And so we’ve always known that quality seals, BBB, you know, fair trade,

Good housekeeping, those have always mattered, but they’re really important to the LLMs. Because if you think about what’s happening right now,

They’re in a arms race to be the single source of truth. And so they are very, very biased towards trust signals. There’s a lot of misinformation out in the marketplace that everybody goes to Reddit first. That’s not true at all. They go to the brand websites first because they know those are places where content is typically vetted, reviewed by lawyers. Brands kind of are close to their stuff and they look at that. And then if they don’t have what they want, then they’ll go to other sources.

So what marketers do, what we do is we focus on three simple metrics. And I try to, yeah, I think a lot of us in the industry are just throwing too much vernacular, too many metrics. And I try to keep it really simple. Visibility. Are you visible? So what’s the best podcast show that has to do with, you know, you know, public relations or crisis? I suspect you would probably show up. If not, then I may become your digital coach to make sure you do.

Neville Hobson (12:14)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (12:15)
You know, vulnerability is the second one, which is how do you show up? And it’s different than sentiment because I often say the visibility gets you seen, vulnerability gets you remembered. And I think companies underestimate the degree to which you can be visible, but in a very negative context. And a good pre-AI example is that when I was running digital at Nestle, Wikipedia was a big pain in the butt because you type in

Nestle into Wikipedia and like 40% of the entry had to do with the company’s history with activist. And so it was like the gift that kept on punishing all the time. And so you know, A and and AI kind of compounds that it’s almost like you can’t. so that gets into misinformation, hallucination, and then what I call brand alignment, which is do the LLMs fundamentally agree with the promise that you’re putting out there on your website, your Amazon page, your TV ads?

And this is very, very humbling. Sometimes executives throw chairs at me, but that’s where the big unlock takes place. And the third area is readiness. Do you head out and market to algorithms? and then we focus on three buckets. You know, availability, do you even have available content that algorithms can read? clarity, do you speak in a consumer language? And right now, at least, they’re very biased towards conversational vernacular, which I think is good. And then the third one is depth, where

You have to have substance, the third party seals, the the validation. And so I think right now the criteria they’re using is good for the consumer, because I think it means a consumer’s more likely to get a good and a trusted response. And I think for the good actors out there that actually really that don’t BS and actually live up to their claims, I think they’re benefiting as well. but it’s gonna be very tricky environment where you’re gonna have lot of bad actors that don’t deserve to be at the top. They’re gonna

fight the bloody hell to get to the top. And there’s going to be a million vendors out there kind of say, we will get you to the top. And so it’ll be interesting. But that’s why I think we have to really think about like what this is our this is our moment right now. Like what type of digital space do we want? We messed up the previous ones. We’re 25 years into us. We still are like deluged with spam. My entire phone is loaded with artificial voices pitching me on stuff. None of them are real. And

So now we’ve got this chance to like really nurture something special. Can we do it? I don’t know.

Neville Hobson (14:42)
It’s good one. It’s a good one. Pete, one thing that really struck me is how you describe AI as an auditor rather than simply an information retrieval system. So you say, for instance, AI answer engines are now the auditors of brand credibility. We’ve talked a lot on FIR about organizations needing a human in the loop for AI. But and indeed, there are examples that are large, highly visible, very prominent of organizations who’ve really screwed up on that area.

by not having a human in the loop. But what you’re suggesting, I think, is almost the reverse. AI is now putting organizations themselves in the loop, constantly evaluating whether their behavior matches their claims. Is that how you see it?

Pete Blackshaw (15:28)
Yeah, no, it no exactly. I think the and I think there’s a number of different yeah, so what we’ll do, it’s it’s my favorite part of the model. It’s a little bit evil, but but it really is crazy insightful to clients. So we’ll take your brand promise, and every company has one, and then we’ll take like the top 10 comp claims. Oftentimes the things that you you’re sending out to the marketplace or the analyst, and we will kind of have each of the LLMs interrogate.

those claims. And then we’ll come up with scores one to ten. And it’s absolutely fascinating. And this is the ultimate unlock in understanding how the algorithm thinks. Like, you know, and and again in the book I get into all these different segments, like how does Claude think? How does Grot think? I mean, you know, right now at least, Claude is like the student radical who just is like doesn’t believe the man is like

y they’re just not gonna believe marketing whatsoever. And so I did a brand alignment test on our dashboard with Amazon. I’ve got a dashboard with Amazon. I can send it to you afterwards where I had Amazon has this statement like Earth’s most consumer centric company and then you know blah blah blah. And then I had the LLMs interrogate it and you know who gave it the lowest score? It was Claude. Claude gave it like a four out of ten.

Shel Holtz (16:47)
Claude?

Pete Blackshaw (16:51)
And then they got into all these specifics about why they simply don’t measure up. Now, the irony and the beauty of that is that, you know, Amazon is a huge partner with Claude. In fact, Claude is what undergirds Rufus or Alexa for shopping. I think Amazon’s even put some money into Claude. But, you know, this is like the beautiful irony of these, of these crazy systems. They’re kind of holding everyone accountable. And I’m like,

And what I’ve been telling brands lately is that, you know, you got to be really careful before you spend a ton of money on paid advertising, where, you know, people are just one question away from calling your BS. and then the other thing that I think is getting really tricky, and you’ll love this. One of the things that I’ve been doing lately is really telling.

Corporate communications teams, CEOs, boardrooms design for Clyde, because this is one platform that continues to grow and influence.

They act like a college radical and they are absolutely loved for better or worse by journalists, NGOs, determined detractors, yeah, financial analysts. And so I always say, like, if you can pass the Claude test, you’re probably in a good place. And I’ve actually done briefings with clients before earnings calls where I’ve literally looked at the data from like Claude, where they’re just like, no, we don’t believe it. We don’t believe it.

And they’ve almost become practice fodder to kind of figure out how do you really but the point is that yeah, we’re in this tricky environment where you got to be really accountable for what you say because these very, very smart algorithms are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t necessarily agree with you. And marketers have never lived with that type of accountability. I mean, it’s like Spin City, and I’m I’ve been part of that. And so I do think, yeah, the marketers that really have superior products can back their claims.

But they’re also gonna have to think about all these other areas that are gonna creep into the algorithmic judgment. Like I do think you talked about human in a loop, and you had a lot of CEOs. You know, you have Mark Pritchard was talking about that at Khan. I mean, I think everyone’s gonna be talking that, but these algorithms will kind of know whether you’ve completely sold everybody out to AI or whether you’ve kind of kept a blend. And I think some purchase behavior is gonna be based on that.

I mean, I could I could see I could see frustrated teenagers that are like already skeptical about AI creating shopping tools that say, I’m only gonna buy from companies that don’t go go too far on AI. It’s not difficult to hack, you know, on on one of the vibe coding tools.

Shel Holtz (19:32)
Pete, you out you outlined the the concept of a brand book of truth, mentioned that a few minutes ago, and I’d I’d I’d like you to sort of articulate what that is. But if every brand builds one and f and floods the zone with sourced timestamped LLM findable proof, does does Claude’s discernment survive that or do you end up in an arms race where the brands with the biggest content budgets win again? And

Pete Blackshaw (19:56)
I did.

Shel Holtz (20:01)
That’s the dynamic that that you’re saying is dead.

Pete Blackshaw (20:05)
Yeah, I do. I think a lot of the listen, I think some of the LLMs will submit to the chaos that you described. But I do think yeah, I think I think these, you know, it’s interesting because Claude is not as dependent on a paid ad model or getting all their money from subscriptions. So I think the ones that’ll get really trickier are are open AI and some of the other, you know, Google’s already a little bit fuzzy.

but they’re still, you know, wowing consumers with, you know, you know, AI overviews. But yeah, they’re just gonna have to be really careful about how they they blend. But I think it’s, you know, it’s a fair point. But I do think that you know, when I talk about book of truth, it’s not just the marketing slogans, it’s like how the product’s made. It is literally, is it truly superior and can you verify that?

You know, yeah, how do you stack up versus competition? Who are the people behind the brand? What’s the supply chain behind the brand? They’re kind of looking for all those different ingredients, even even for the purpose of like Amazon. I mean, this stuff is so real. I just put out a note to my clients this morning. I put a little blurb on LinkedIn as well, but

Amazon Prime Day was really insightful. I didn’t go, I couldn’t, I didn’t go to con last year, but I did stay glued for four days straight on Prime Day. And it was probably the biggest conversational boost we’ve seen in the history of commerce. Almost every single, you know, now it’s like every product you look at is surrounded by questions. I mean, what the hell’s going on? And then a lot of the you know, I’ve saw a lot of advertising trying to work into that. But on that platform, you can go in there and say, is this product sustainable or should I buy sustainable products?

Or should I I mean in and it’ll really give you very, very deep perspective before they start shoving products your way. And that is an absolute game changer. And so and I do think like the smart retailers will want to make sure that that the consumer kind of gets what they need. So so I may be, you know, long way of saying I’m optimistic. Where where it can get scary, you know, is if where everything got out of whack.

before was it Google was a monopoly and they had like 90% market share screw they can do whatever they want. I do think because you’ve got genuine competition, there is this real effort to like provide maximum value to the consumer. And that’s why I say we’re in a moment. You know, the answer economy is a moment. Either we’re gonna screw it up like we did before, or we’re gonna kind of turn it into a true win-win for consumers and business alike. But it’ll take some work to do that right.

Neville Hobson (22:53)
Interesting that is. I’ve been thinking when I listen to what you’re saying, Pete, a question I need to I I’m really curious about this because it I’ve been asking myself this question as I try to figure out where we’re at with all of this. What do you think? Could two different AI models, whether it’s Claude and ChatGPT or any any two, develop materially different views of the same company, the same brand?

What will that look like, do you think?

Pete Blackshaw (23:23)
it I I do this every day for clients. I we literally kind of give them we filter them through all the major LLMs, you know, from ChatGBT to Deep Seat to Perplexity and Grok. They all have different personalities. It’s no different than going after influencers, right? And influencers kind of, you know, they beat to different drummers. And so and and again, I would say Claude is the extreme librarian. They just don’t like marketing BS. They kind of just focus on the facts.

The credentialing, the science. you know, Grok is almost like hard to predict. And they do lean on a lot of the former tweets that kind of fall into it. but they are a little bit, they’re definitely they almost like personify not the politics of Elon Musk, but definitely like the almost like the unpredictable side of him and what you see. It’s like a different personality.

Gemini still, you know, you know, it’s it’s you know, the the it depends on if you’re looking at Gemini AI overviews. I mean, they all have different thinking processes in terms of the way they synthesize data, but absolutely, and I would say the new, you know, just in the same way that like a PR term might you might say we gotta we’ve gotta figure out how to break through the New York Times, the Financial Times.

And so and so you gotta think the same way. It’s like they they they think differently, they source differently. And so this is I spent the whole weekend doing this fascinating source analysis where I looked at, you know, tens of thousands of prompts and then I analyzed the sources and they have different favorites. And just recently the New York Times is finally starting to to creep into open AI, which does start to impact the character of their output.

You know, Claude tends to look a little bit more seriously at consumer reports than Joe’s review site. And so you have to know this. I mean, this is like the new PR. This is like the new influencer management. If you do not know how these LLMs think, if you don’t know what their brand archetype is, if you don’t know what they eat for breakfast from a content perspective, you’re not on top of what your client needs, in my view.

Shel Holtz (25:42)
I have a follow up to that question. Does does does this mean a brand needs to have a message strategy for every LLM or is there a through line that satisfies them all?

Pete Blackshaw (25:44)
Yeah.

Know if they have to have different messages, but they need to be very attentive to how they are filtered. I do think all the LLMs, like for example, in my analysis this weekend, they all pay a lot of attention to your brand website. Far more than I think the media has let on. And I know because I’ve just run like a million audits and I see this all the time. And so

Brands have a lot of leverage in influencing the story, especially when there’s bad information out there and the brand website or the own media is in a position to kind of correct the record. And we’ve done some really interesting work around crisis or recalls where some brands have been able to actually train the LLMs within 12, 24 hours based on getting that right information in there. But but yeah, I mean you’ve got

So I don’t think brands need to overcustomized. I think they need to be very, you know. I mean, if I were, you know, if I were heading corporate communications today, I would probably say, yeah, there’s some that I would focus on the ones that are most critical. You know, and the the ones that are most critical often have also tend to be the most loved by other influencers.

that we care about, like journalists and NGOs and the like. And so, so that’s where I would kind of put the focus on in that. Now, now that said, they’re all going to be introducing, with the exception of Claude, advertising models. And so those will be micro opportunities to influence. And we saw, you know, a lot of that, you know, OpenAI is already doing a lot of that. And there’s gonna be, you’re gonna have they’re gonna have to study like, you know,

Is it appropriate to advertise? I do have a strong point of view there that if you have high vulnerability, you shouldn’t advertise. If you have low vulnerability but low visibility, I’d say, yeah, spend all the money you want on advertising. But brands are gonna have to be really sensitive about they’re gonna have to learn the art of not making things worse. And I don’t think brands, I mean, again, going back to the conversations that we’ve had for 20 years, brands don’t know how to manage conversations. I mean, they’re like, I mean, they’re like.

Most brands are maybe are barely there on like the first question. But in the answer economy, I have this term that I use in the book called ask through, not click-through. Click through is like if I can just get that one click. You and I know we’re we’re using these tools all the time. It’s a sequence of questions. You go in there with a health query, and it’s like multiple. And every single additional question that’s satisfied that gets you further down the sail.

Or further down the path of happiness. And like brands don’t know how to do that at all. and so, but the the second you submit to these ad models where you’re sitting right in the middle of the prompt, you almost have to figure that you always have to know that stuff. So this is gonna be really tricky. It’s not gonna be one of those push a button kind of get media. You know, there’s gonna be a whole accountability that comes with it when you’re kind of in the answer stream.

Neville Hobson (29:05)
Hmm. Let’s I let me talk go back to I I guess something we discussed just a short while ago. In fact, Shel’s question about should brands ever tailor themselves differently for different models, which I if I understood you right, Pete, you basically say that’s ultimately a dead end, not really what what what they should be doing. So I’m thinking you mentioned Claude hates marketing BS or corporate spin or whatever whatever it might be.

and you describe the models like Claude or like Grok, etc., almost as having editorial personalities or or value systems. But that’s fascinating, I think, because I’ve sometimes questioned that myself, because organizations, brand managers have spent years trying to create one consistent narrative about their brand or or their organization. So I think

The question I had originally was worded are we, in other words of question. I think it’s more like we are as opposed to are we, which is entering a world where communicators have to understand not just audiences, but different AI worldviews. And I think it’s it it is interesting. my experience in this is not deliberate trying to get an answer to this, but I use myself usually a mixture between Claude and Chat GPT. So I I alternate between the two.

Claude is more rounded and rich because I fed it with so much information about who I am, a lot more than ChatGPT has. That I I I’m okay with I’m literally asking vague questions a lot of the time, and it never disappoints my experience so far. Chat GPT needs a little bit more nurturing in that regard, although it does surprise me at times with the depth of answers I get to some things when I’m doing research. So I guess I I

confuse myself even because I have no idea what the answer to this is. But I think it is something communicators should think about. Those who haven’t settled on one, you know, notwithstanding the topic Shawn and I’ve talked about recently where, you know, shadow AI is is growing like crazy in companies as people use their own thing, ignore what the what the company says. So it what what would you what would your advice be to communicators in this earth? Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (31:25)
No, it this is the new this is the new you’re knowing it. I mean, this is the new influencer

marketing, right? That’s always been at the core of like issues management and communication and and you know, you have to know your influencer, you have to know their hot buttons, you have to know their biases, you gotta know you know, how they evolve and there is a lot of evolution and and again this is where I think we may find a year from now that hey, you know.

They’re patty cakes with brands because they want the ad dollars. Who knows? I don’t know. But but yeah, and so and brands need to think this through. And I didn’t want you to think you made the comment about dead end. I I obsess with the nuances of the platforms, but I’m not convinced brands need to over tailor the message to different…

I again I think there’s a few where they gotta be really careful about the BS factor, like anthropic, where it’s just they just gotta make sure that their claims can hold water with these judges and these filters that are processing their their information. And I think I really think brands are just they’re not ready. In fact, what I’ve concluded is that across all the major, you know, Fortune 1000 companies, they’re only like 20% AI ready.

I mean, the most obvious thing is, you know, and sometimes companies get, you know, annoyed with me. And I have been doing this all the way back from my plan of feedback days, but like most companies cannot answer questions. I mean, you can go go to your after this podcast, go to your favorite brands and like type in a really basic question, like, how do I use the product? What’s in the product? Is it sustainable? But 90% of the time they’re gonna slap you in the face with a pop-up ad. They’re not gonna, they’re either gonna fire a blank.

Or they’re gonna answer something completely differently. Like brands don’t know how to do this. In the last 25 years of digital, the most basic human need of interactivity, I want to question brands can’t do it, including the big ones. They get all the awards and spend all the money. It’s crazy. And there’s a lot of people on the inside that are like, hey, that doesn’t matter, that doesn’t pay out. Or consumer services was always considered a non-strategic call cost center.

But again, I’m sort of saying the answer economy, that’s the new purchase funnel. Like this is the new skill that we need to learn. So it’s not only how to influence the algorithms, it’s almost like how do we fundamentally change our mindset where we’re more receivers of intent. And then we have to use that as the new engagement. You know, to some extent, when someone casts Amazon’s CEO had a great quote that everybody in marketing should put on their forehead, where he basically said it was so beautifully simple.

Neville Hobson (33:59)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Blackshaw (34:12)
He was doing an earnings call and he’s talking about the progress of Amazon Rufus, which I think at that time was already generating like $10 billion in incremental sales. And he said, Hey, it’s pretty simple. Every consumer that asks one question is 60% more likely to buy. And this is almost like the North Star that brands have always been looking for in terms of engagement, right? A click half the time you’re trying to get rid of the brand, right? So get out of my face. A question is like a big lean in.

Where if you can’t convert that. And so I think brands need to understand that, like, you know, inviting the consumer to ask a question, making the website more receptive to questions, not only wins with the consumer, but it builds your database to feed LLMs. You know, because where brands are underrepresented in all the LLMs, if they that book of truth is partly an inventory issue. It’s like you have to have enough.

Scenarios, you know, how to use the product, what’s it made of, blah, blah, blah, to even start to market the algorithms. And brands don’t do that. They you’re lucky if you see maybe 20 FAQs. And of course, brands could be problem solvers for like a million things if you do it right. Tech companies are very good. So I’m I I want to be careful here. Tech companies, I think, are very good. Apple has a fantastic and have for many years, pre-AI, have just

Bent over backwards to make content available when you have a challenge. And that’s why almost every app Apple question you ask through an LLM is like pretty much right. Same thing with Microsoft. I think tech companies have always been good at having a lot of FAQs and knowledge. Bigger brands that spend the big bucks on the Super Bowl are really, really, I gotta be careful what I say, have opportunities.

Shel Holtz (36:08)
Yeah.

Pete, in in chapter nine, see, I I actually went through the book, y you argue that the next big comms crisis isn’t going to be a social media firestorm, but an AI generated answer, a brand can’t correct. because the infrastructure for rebuttal was never built. This is really interesting. I was just on a panel in Covington, Kentucky, by the way. If I’d known you were in Cincinnati, I’d have given you a call. where

Pete Blackshaw (36:33)
no way.

Shel Holtz (36:37)
We talked about pre bunking as a way to address crises, that you’ve all got all this content out there already. but y you’re saying the crisis is going to come because they haven’t done this. The con the content isn’t there to rebut what the the LLM is is saying. Can you walk me through what that crisis actually looks like and why the old crisis playbook is not gonna be effective in these circumstances?

Pete Blackshaw (36:55)
Yeah.

One of the big issues that I’ve had with a lot of our top clients is about kind of crisis and governance, which is that

You know, winning with answers is a governance issue. And it’s a big reason why I’m been really hesitant to

you know, suggests that this is all about SEO 2.0 or this is something that the search manager deals with. I mean, and you know, if your brand is as strong as your answers, a lot of people are implicated. And I think where companies really struggle in crisis is figuring out who owns it and who’s accountable.

And I do think, you know, I do make a pretty strong pitch in the book that brands have really got need to get in front of this. And, you know, there is a there’s an accountability. Like the they’re they’re bullshit detectors, who’s accountable? they’re kind of saying your products aren’t made the way you claim. Who’s accountable? there’s there’s all sorts of legal liability issues, and I think we are just in the very early stages. At some point you’ll need to interview my

My co-founder Hank Hudipol, who’s doing some really breakthrough breakthrough work around hallucination and accuracy. But you’ve got states that are now filing laws that if if the answer comes out wrong, even through an LLM, you are liable. Think about that in the health zone, right? And so so who so who is responsible? Is that the marketing team? Is that so there’s a you know, I think brands need to start thinking now, and I’m having a lot of leadership meetings and summits on this topic, they’ve really got to figure out the governance area here. And, you know, and it’s one reason why we’re trying to keep the metrics relatively simple so they really have a clear eye into what’s going on. It’s a big reason why we put almost I’d say vulnerabilities is kind of at the top of the list. But let me tell you what you get if you have governance. So without naming names, yeah, we work with some brands that have had

Very, very severe crisis issues where misinformation is even from the government is kind of stirring up the pot in terms of, you know, how the answer engines. And you’ve just you’ve got to get RD to the table, you gotta get legal compliance, marketing, even the CEO, you know, they need to kind of play a critical role. And the good news is there is I’ve done a lot of boardroom discussions and

There’s a lot of heightened sensitivity when a CEO says, My daughter just typed in this and they say we’re this. And they’re like, Why the hell is that? And who’s responsible? So But yeah, these these issues are really, really tricky, and a lot of stakeholders need to come together. And and that is and I think it’ll probably be a little bit blurry in terms of who owns it. Like right now, brands have these AI

Heads of AI. I don’t know if those jobs will last very long. Sometimes you know are they gatekeepers, are they enablers? Are they just, you know, I mean AI is now kind of part of everything. So I think who owns what will be a bit fluid for the coming years.

Neville Hobson (40:17)
Yeah, that’s that’s really good. I think it is. Yep. So it actually interesting Pete what you’re saying, listening listening to how you describe it it amazes me how some companies just are so off the trail with with a lot of what they need not to be in that position. They need to to truly pay attention to where this is all going. And we’ve mentioned this in a number of episodes where we could

Pete Blackshaw (40:24)
That helpful?

Neville Hobson (40:51)
you know, share many examples of where we see instances where that is simply not happening. so let’s talk about AI agents. Yeah. Mm.

Pete Blackshaw (40:58)
But but in fair but in fairness, in fairness.

Let’s just put this in perspective. We’re still only what a little over three years into this. I mean, we’re up to like five billion prompts a day, and this stuff started three years ago. So yeah, companies are always gonna be slow. But the good news with this, I do feel like

There’s a feeling of a sense of urgency. Like there it’s it’s a bit of an shit moment. Like we’ve got to figure this out. And so and then, you know, how do you, you know, how do you really capitalize on this? And even it’s funny, like launching a startup, the one thing you dread is like, my gosh, it’s gonna take forever to get to get a vendor number. And we’ve had some companies that typically take like three years to get a little small startup in Cincinnati a vendor number to literally three weeks. So I do think there’s

There’s a memo, there’s a bell that’s ringing inside the organization. It’s like, shit, the purchase funnel has changed. we are really accountable. Every stock analyst is now digging up dirt on us. Or good news, through these tools, we’ve got to act. Then they’re like, Well, who owns this? Is it wait? It’s digital, right? No, well, wait, maybe it’s RD because they’ve got the most substance, you know, to kind of put to the table, but we don’t really think about them as marketing.

Neville Hobson (41:55)
Mm mm.

Pete Blackshaw (42:22)
Or may is it sales? You know, it’s just like it’s a bit of a cluster right now, but it’s a good conversation. Companies really haven’t had this discussion in earnest for a long time. I think digital is a little is like conveniently tucked into marketing. And now you’ve got a whole different world order that companies need to think through. And it’s gonna be a really big test for like CEOs out there. Who gets it? Who you know, CEOs are gonna play a critical role in orchestrating this stuff. And

And, you know, we’ve been working with a few companies that I won’t name where the CEOs have made a massive difference and in kind of leading, you know, organizations where nobody’s really accountable for doing it to like getting organized around it.

Neville Hobson (43:08)
Yeah. I’d love to hear more stories of people, you know, organizations who really are on the ball with all this because I’m getting tired of hearing all the stories about these companies who are not. They’ve the not that they’ve dropped the ball, they haven’t even grasped the ball yet. In fact, Shel and I’ve talked on a couple of episodes, two conflicting surveys. One about how CEOs are are really coming to the fore and taking control of developing AI rollouts in their in their companies.

and are providing leadership and are doing all these things. Then another survey has completely conflicting information to them. So I mean you just gotta go visit LinkedIn and you’ll see conflicts all over the place, including everyone’s got an e book they want to sell you. That’s that’s the kind of magic, magic bullet handbook.

Pete Blackshaw (43:52)
It depends on how you

classify it. Yeah, I’ve I’ve read all those studies too and you know, and and my view is like a lot of this is it’s is it an AI strategy or it’s something you should have been doing a while ago? So I posted something last week, you know, and you know, almost as a little bit of a counterpoint to the con lions, because I was kind of like, why don’t they ever give love or rewards or recognition to brands that just answer the boring question?

Neville Hobson (44:05)
Right, right.

Pete Blackshaw (44:22)
Right. At some point we’re just gonna say, God, that brand really went out of went out of their way. We should have a recognition. So I just created what I called, you know, the answer cans. And so and I started like and and I and I cited some of the companies that I wrote about in the book that and I don’t even think they use the word AI. Like, yeah, w what do you think is one of the most the best index companies on the web right now in in AI that just shows up consistently.

Neville Hobson (44:34)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (44:49)
Well, I’ll give you a little hint. So if you ask anything related to like sustainability, like what company shows up first?

It’s like Patagonia. They’re everywhere. They’re everywhere. Now, I don’t, I doubt they even use the word AI there. You know, but they have been absolutely committed to driving radical transparency in their products, flooding their content with meaningful content. and they have been training the LLMs for years. Sephora, a brand in beauty that’s always been very

Neville Hobson (44:59)
Okay.

Pete Blackshaw (45:26)
Come to the calendar and I will answer you questions. I think that that model lives in the way they approach digital as well. They are severely rewarded by the LLMs. I mentioned a few of the the the I mentioned a few of the tech companies that do that particularly well. A lot of young companies that don’t have big bucks for advertising, they are very intuitive about.

Everybody that goes on my website could be my last customer. So let’s just give them the love of knowledge, of guidance, whatever they want. They are being disproportionately benefited. In fact, one of the things that I have found is that and I work with a lot of big companies that own massive budget. I’ve consistently found that, you know, for big companies, market share under indexes, over, you know, over indexes answer share.

Which means that the younger companies are actually they’re kind of winning on answer share, partly just because they’re it’s not like that they’re trying to spike the system. They’re just wired to answering questions. And so this is where the the the thesis of the book is really simple. I’m almost trying to say this without all the buzzwords and the tech gobbledygook. It’s sort of like if you treat the consumer, you know, if you kind of

Create a bit of a Wikipedia to kind of help the consumer answer every question, you will win big time in the AI world. I have seen that correlation left and right. Instead, most brands make it really complicated. We need an AI strategy. We need an AI strategy for the AI strategy we need. They create all these damn layers. And then you go to their website and they still can’t answer a question. And so this is why it’s almost like forcing the question. It’s like, you know.

The answer economy, not the AI world, the answer economy. And so we’ll see if I’m successful or not.

Shel Holtz (47:24)
All of this when I picture somebody actually doing the things that you talk about, not not from the brand perspective, but from the consumers perspective, I see them going to a chatbot and and entering a question. Sam Altman has been laser focused on the transition from conversational assistance, the chat bots, toward autonomous workflow executing agents. and he says this is a shift you’re going to see.

in the front end of Chat GPT. God knows I spend as much time in Claude Cowork as I as I spend in Claude. what is this shift toward agents, assuming all of the LLMs move in this direction, what does that do to this whole concept?

Pete Blackshaw (48:12)
Yeah, listen, I mean, I write about it a lot in the book and you know, the the tet the subtitle is, you know, how AI agents will decide your brand’s future. yeah, so a lot’s gonna be delegated, but I don’t think it’s gonna I I think there’s a little bit of overhyping that consumers are gonna completely like delegate everything to agencies. I’m not. And and I frankly, I enjoy, you know, the ask through of asking health questions. It’s sort of like, you know, and so I don’t, you know, there are gonna be certain areas where we’re gonna be totally comfortable with like

Delegating the agents, or there are other areas where we’re just gonna wanna be more in control of it. And so, but I don’t think what I’ve said earlier.

impacts any of that. I would say that i in an agentic world, brands still need to catalog their truth and make it marketable and make it visible. And and and you could almost argue that it’s going to be more important to get your act together on marketing the algorithms. Cause here’s one of the things that’s going to be really, really tricky for brands, especially in like these industries that I’ve worked in, like consumer goods and

Food is the algorithms have a very strong bias towards store brands and private label. Now it’s not because they’re tilting the scale in their favor. It’s just that in an agentic world, think about what consumers are going to do. They’re almost going to be brand agnostic. And they say, give me good product at a good price for my family of four, right?

And they’re they might even set a spec, like it’s gotta have X percent product performance. And then the algorithms are gonna do their homework and they’re come back and they say Kirkland. And then they’re gonna be saying Kirkland, Walmart equate. Because you’re gonna find that these store brands where where the and retailers are getting really good at volunteering what their products do, even their green scores, where you know, if you if we overdelegate to agents, I do think brands are in for a really rude awakening that a lot of the

Neville Hobson (49:54)
Mm-hmm.

Pete Blackshaw (50:13)
Grocery lists are full of private label. you know, where it may be the Kirkland product may be 90% of the product superiority of the comparable brand, but at like half the price. And so this is where, you know, so brands, so what brands are gonna have to do, whether they’re preparing for tough questions from consumers like us, or preparing for these agents that are gonna go looking for relevant data to kind of render a judgment, they’re still gonna have to train them.

They’re gonna have to really think about, you know, how to do that the right way. Now we may see different things evolve. Like I’ve talked a lot about the word rep website. I’m probably gonna write a column that suggests that maybe we need a new name called, you know, like a an inventory locker that’s kind of like very, very agent, agent, agent friendly. But but yeah, I think I think brands, yeah, everybody’s waxing poet have got agents, but I keep reminding brands like careful what you ask for on this one.

because you are not prepared and you are going to be really, really surprised at what these agents are recommending. And you’re going to probably lose even more control. So brands are going to have to really think about that one carefully.

Neville Hobson (51:24)
So to that point then, if AI agents increasingly recommend products, services, suppliers, even employers, companies to work for, for instance, what happens to traditional brand marketing?

Pete Blackshaw (51:38)
Well, think it’s gonna have to wrap around a lot of that. I mean these some of you know, listen, I mean branding has always been in the you know, content marketing’s been a big thing well before AI, but they will have to, you know, keep doing some of that, but they may need to dial down the BS factor, they may need to dial down the hyperbole, they may have to dial down the exaggeration.

I mean, here’s one of the things that’s happening. You’ve got two very interesting trends going on. You’ve got the answer economy, you got the creator economy. Everybody at con was gaga about the creator economy. And there’s no question the creator economy is creating massive reach. But hey, one of the interesting things about the creator economy, they do not index in answer engines. Maybe a little bit meta because they’ve got tick to they’ve got, you know, Instagram and but generally, you know, the creators are not getting the love from the answer engines. And why is that?

I think they’re very hesitant. There tends to be a lot of hyperbole and a exaggeration among the crater economy about what the products do. And I think and and sometimes they’re paid, but they’re not disclosed. And so it’s just it’s just it’s a it’s a less it’s a complicated area for the algorithms to kind of take seriously. And so I just think, you know, all these things are gonna have to be really, really carefully thought, you know, thought through, you know, as pr as brands try to

Neville Hobson (52:35)
Hm.

Pete Blackshaw (53:00)
You know, you know, I th I I probably haven’t used the word trust enough. I think what’s gonna be more important than ever goes back to our very, very conver very first conversation when we’re talking about the the rise of blogs. But yeah, brand trust will be critical. And I do think the brands that really think hard about what that means are gonna win. And I know brand trust tends to be a little fluffy. Every I’ve even had investors like, what the hell? How the hell the hell does trust sell cases? But we all know that.

Trust is the currency of advertising in all relationships. And I think AI is just gonna magnify that in a big way. So brands are probably gonna have to really double down in that particular area.

Shel Holtz (53:43)
What about B to B? is is it the same situation? do they need to think differently? No different.

Pete Blackshaw (53:47)
No different.

No different. I mean, every B2B supplier is using Chat GBT to vet other suppliers to vet. If anything, I think B2B is gonna get a massive turbocharge. I do think AI systems are, you know, you know, I I have to worry about that too. It’s like I got RFPs with other, you know, big companies, and you know, they’re kind of using AI to basically kind of, you know, do their research on us versus competition, but

No, I think it’s it’s kinda shy. I mean, I and I’ve done scorecards. I’ve done I have all sorts of indexes that I’ve created, including a B to B one on what are the best vendors across all these different areas, who shows up, who doesn’t. And now there may be certain my guess isn’t on the B to B side, Claude will again probably be the one that is most most focused on. Actually I th I think copilot isn’t bad either, but

But yeah, there probably will be some favorites that the procurement officers use as they’re trying to figure out who’s the right vendor that’s that’s that’s out there. But zero difference in my view.

Neville Hobson (54:55)
Hm. Okay. So what would you advise communication professionals to start doing differently tomorrow morning?

Pete Blackshaw (55:03)
Well, I think they need to look in the mirror, which is, you know, an AI is a mirror and they should, you know, really get their organization internalizing this new reality that your brand is as strong as its answers and these new influencers are shaping their answers. And so I would number two, I would tell every communications professional that they have more leverage than they realize. That brand website, especially the corporate website, which I think generally are more optimized for curiosity than brand sites. Brand sites are very optimized for conversion.

If you go to a corporate site, you know, Nestle.com, I think they’ve done a really, really good job. They even have a section called Ask Nestle, which I love, and have encouraged them to kind of take to the next level. But all that probably is more valuable than it was a year ago. And I would I wouldn’t, you know, and I think some of those things are underfunded. some of them are afterthoughts. Some of those are like, that’s the brochure, but that is really.

powerful. And I also think corporate communications in particular has a lot of leverage to lead because it’s really hard to get like fifty brands within the franchise to kind of like get their act together. And I do think the book of truth may be best developed at the corporate level. But then again, it has to be tomorrow’s definition of corporate communications. I think if you ask brands, they’d say corporate communications is is backwards. They slow things down.

They’re naysayers. They’re not a progressive force in the organization. They’re overly conservative. And if I were heading corporate communications, I would be, no, no, no, no, no. We can actually, we are the lever to win in the answer economy. We have always been sensitive about substance, you know, you know, doing what we say, checking off the compliance boxes. Those, those are all the things that really matter to the LLMs. So yeah, if I were giving that that.

Neville Hobson (56:44)
Mm.

Pete Blackshaw (57:10)
that college football speech to, you know, corporate communications, I would be saying, My friends, this is your day. And let’s look in the mirror and let’s go. And let’s make our CEO a hero because, you know, the the the stakes are going to go up. We’re not going to get the credit we deserve unless we’re more proactive. But we can. Something like that.

Shel Holtz (57:30)
Yeah, remember Richard Edelman saying that about social media and it just didn’t happen. Pete, you probably remember from your previous appearances that we always end with the same question, and that is what didn’t we ask that we probably should have, or that you were expecting us to?

Neville Hobson (57:31)
Yeah.

Pete Blackshaw (57:48)
gosh, what didn’t you ask?

I don’t know. Fair You you do I was surprised you didn’t ask, so Pete did you use AI to help write your book? You know.

Shel Holtz (58:02)
Yeah.

Neville Hobson (58:04)
But

but but you did. In fact, you got a really good page in the in the galleys that I saw explain yeah. Yeah, i that is super what you wrote, really, really and truly. It a it adds

Pete Blackshaw (58:08)
Did you like that? I love that page. I love that.

I love that. And I

did well the funny thing is like I’ve been listening, I mean, you know, sometimes I’ll take a chapter, throw it in a clod and say, Tell I’m fully shit. You know, it’s like but it was all me, but it did help me navigate. And I have this term that I use called dog walk journalism. I’ll take my dog on a walk and I’ll bark out my random thoughts. And AI is wonderful at connecting the first thought with the last thought and kind of giving you a starting point. But but I did have this really intense editor, her name was Angela Morrison.

And she was actually the editor, the partner to William Sapphire, who wrote the column on language. So she was really good. She had this really intense long island draw. And she’s Pete, don’t take it personally, but I am totally blunt. But my gosh, she like took me to town on indefinite pronouns. I thought I felt like I had never learned writing, but that was like the great, it was like a great human in the loop epiphany because she was hitting things that even the LLMs

Neville Hobson (58:59)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (59:04)
Ha ha ha.

Pete Blackshaw (59:12)
Could not catch. And I I was reading the book. I was like, my God, I’m so blessed to have had a really good editors. So

Shel Holtz (59:19)
If I ever work with her, I’ll

Neville Hobson (59:20)
Brilliant.

Shel Holtz (59:21)
be sure to have my copies strunken white by my side.

Pete Blackshaw (59:24)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And if you know of any, you know, you guys bump into all sorts of folks and cor my one of my goals, I really want to wake up a lot of corporate communications departments. That’s that’s my sweet spot. I’ve always loved the balance of brand defense and offense. But the offense, the defense side is I I think more urgent and more challenging. So yeah, as you know, you know, I’m doing a lot of I’ll be doing a lot of wake up calls, speeches and workshops. But yeah, if you know folks that need the help, let me know.

Shel Holtz (59:53)
And how can people get in touch with you?

Pete Blackshaw (59:56)
just Pete at brandrank.ai or the answer economy dot com. or they just type my name into an answer engine and you know they can they can they can vet me first and but yeah, it’s in in I’ll I’ll give it to you as well when you advertise the the the the the podcast. But yeah, it was great talking to you guys. I miss I miss our conversations.

Neville Hobson (1:00:16)
Guys.

Yeah, likewise. That was good. Appreciate it.

Shel Holtz (1:00:22)
Yeah, thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Blackshaw (1:00:23)
You bet. Always.

The post AI, trust and the answer economy – Pete Blackshaw on the future of brand credibility appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Everyone from CEOs to politicians has been talking about the likelihood of AI-related job loss, and several companies have already let people go in anticipation that AI can do their work. Ford Motor Company is the latest to rehire those workers when AI proved inadequate for the job. Elsewhere, many of the managers who have let people go regret their decisions, and some companies are revising their hiring plans. To remedy the chaos, Neville and Shel discuss the importance of strategy and knowledge management systems, among other things.

Links from this episode:

• ‘Talent refresh’ | Ford rehires human staff after AI quality-check tools fail to deliver
• Ford rehires human engineers after AI fails to match quality checks
• Return of the ‘greybeards’: AI backfired – so Ford had to rehire humans
• Ford Has Been Rehiring Quality Inspectors After AI Fell Short
• Ford rehires ‘greybeards’ after AI tech fails to deliver

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz
Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 521 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz

Neville Hobson
And I’m Neville Hobson. Here’s a story that should make every one of us pause before we get too comfortable handing things over to AI. Ford, the automaker, has just rehired somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and fifty veteran engineers. Note the word rehired. The company had let them go in recent years as it leaned into AI-driven quality checks. Ford calls them greybeard engineers. That’s not a throwaway nickname. It’s the whole point of the story. These are the people with decades of experience across multiple product cycles, and Ford let a lot of them go only to discover it needed them back because the AI wasn’t working the way Ford expected. We’ll look into what happened right after this  Charles Poon, Ford’s vice president of vehicle hardware engineering, put it plainly on a call with reporters. Here’s what he said: “Mistakenly, we thought that by just introducing artificial intelligence and ingesting the design requirements that we had, that would produce a high-quality product.” Think about that for a moment. Ford didn’t skip a step. They fed the AI everything that was written down, every design requirement, every documented specification. It still wasn’t enough. And it wasn’t just one system. Ford had installed around nine hundred AI-assisted cameras on the production line specifically to catch quality issues. Nine hundred cameras, and still they couldn’t replace the trained eye of an experienced technician who knows what a problem looks like before it becomes a visible defect. Ford’s chief operating officer, Kumar Galhotra, added more context. He said the company had been leaning more and more on automated quality systems, and the results were disappointing. Teams across software, hardware, manufacturing, and supply chain had also been working in isolation from each other, which meant defects were being caught late and fixed under pressure rather than prevented early. Galhotra described this as a find and fix mentality that Ford is now trying to move away from towards genuinely preventing problems before they start. The returning engineers sit right at the center of that shift. They now run mandatory weekly quality and design reviews, hunting for failure points before a single part reaches the factory floor And here’s the part I think matters most for us. A lot of the people who held that hard-won judgment had already walked out the door to suppliers, to retirement before anyone at Ford thought to capture what was in their heads. Poon admitted as much. “Over prior years, we didn’t pay as much attention as we should have to the experience of our most knowledgeable engineers who have been with us through many product cycles,” he said. So Ford had to buy that expertise back three years into this process at real cost. Was it worth it? By Ford’s own numbers, yes. The company has just topped the J.D. Power Initial Quality Survey for mainstream brands for the first time since twenty-ten. That’s sixteen years. CEO Jim Farley says the rehired engineers are already contributing what he called literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, largely through reduced warranty and recall costs. Ford’s even projecting around a billion dollars in cost reduction this year on the back of this quality push. Now, here’s a tension worth sitting with. This is the same Jim Farley who said publicly on other occasions that AI is gonna replace rough-roughly half of all white-collar jobs. And yet here’s his own vice president standing in front of journalists explaining that Ford’s entire quality turnaround depended on bringing back the very human expertise the company thought it could do without. To be clear, this isn’t really a story about AI failing and humans winning. Ford isn’t walking away from AI. Those returning engineers aren’t just doing inspections. They’re training junior staff, and they’re reprogramming the AI tools themselves, feeding them the judgment that design requirements alone couldn’t capture. It’s a hybrid fix, not a retreat. But for anyone in our line of work, comms, knowledge management, anyone thinking about where AI fits into institutional expertise, there’s a sharp lesson underneath all of this. Documentation isn’t the same as judgment, and once the people carrying that judgment are gone, you don’t get it back for free or quickly or easily. I think there’s a bigger question here, too, about how organizations are handling this handover between human expertise and automation, and whether Ford’s experience is a one-off or a warning sign for a lot more companies than just car manufacturers. Shel

Shel Holtz
Yeah, I think it is a warning sign. But I, I don’t think it’s a trend necessarily, the idea that AI AI layoffs are being reversed everywhere. Yeah I’d just be careful about overstating that. There’s really only a handful of well-documented company examples of this. I think it’s easier to say that the way many organizations overestimated how quickly AI could substitute for the experienced judgment of their staff, I think that’s a reasonable way to look at it. Increasing number are recalibrating toward AI human collaboration rather than there are examples though. IBM has reversed course. They didn’t rehire the same people, but they’ve really reversed course on this whole replacement idea. An AI system deployed to take over HR work handled about 94% of incoming requests, but the 6% it couldn’t resolve including situations in- involving ethical judgment, really revealed the limits of all of this into the hands of a large language model. And then the company announced that it planned to triple its US entry-level hiring this year. That’s a pretty significant reversal. Klarna’s the one that … that’s the poster child for all of this. They were one of the first to announce that they were going to replace their customer service with AI. A year later their CEO publicly reversed course, admitting that customer experience had gone down the tank, quality had fallen the company had over-prioritized cost savings which most companies seem to be doing. They’re looking at cost savings and not other ways AI could really improve things or even help the organization grow and that human customer service remained essential. So they went back to hiring customer service representatives, and they expanded their human support. They la- even reassigned engineers and marketers into customer support roles while they were busy rebuilding the support organization that they had decimated. CEO, I think it was he who was quoted saying, “Cost, unfortunately, seems to have been too predominant evaluation factor.” that said I think it is worth noting that according to one research organization, I hadn’t heard of them before, but OrgView, 39% of business leaders made employees redundant due to AI deployment, and among that number, 55% admit that wrong decisions about those redundancies made, 32% of US hiring managers said they eliminated a role primarily due to AI later rehired for the same or similar positions, that according to Robert Half. This is definitely something we need to be looking at. I think what Ford has done is, as you say a warning sign, but I don’t think there’s a clear trend yet that people who off in order to accommodate AI are suddenly reversing and rehiring yet

Neville Hobson
No, I agree. That doesn’t seem to be a trend. What is a trend is the laying off element of it as opposed to rehiring. So the… I think there, there’s a good question for our audience in all of this. How many organizations right now are automating roles without first extracting what the people they’re letting go know, their knowledge? Ford’s mistake wasn’t using AI, I mentioned earlier. It was letting the knowledge holders leave before capturing anything from them. That’s a sequencing failure, not a technology failure. So is knowledge capture before AI rollout ever ac-actually built into transformation plans, I wonder? Or is it always an afterthought that only gets addressed once something breaks?

Shel Holtz
It’s an interesting question.

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
when we first started this show 21 years ago, knowledge management was a big issue, and we talked about knowledge management and knowledge management systems, and they have fallen by the wayside even though there are still efforts to build them out. I think the need for clean, consistent data in order to run AI inside your organization is bringing the idea back, although not with the kind of notoriety that it had. There were books being written about knowledge management back 20, 20 years ago. But knowledge capture is an interesting thing because, there’s so much ta- tacit knowledge walks out the door and goes home every night. It’s not implicit knowledge that you can store in a database, and this was the problem with knowledge management systems, right? Is you’re trying to capture tacit knowledge, and it had to be tagged, which meant the people looking for it had to know which tag was used in order to retrieve it. That knowledge could be sitting there, but if you’re searching with the wrong tag, you’ll never find it. So it, it remains a challenge how to do this. I remember one effort at knowledge capture. Was it Intel? I’m gonna struggle to remember, but it was an early wiki where people would just leave their knowledge that occurred to them. “Oh, this is how you do this,” and they were trying to capture it that way. I don’t know if that’s still around. I never hear about it anymore. I- like I expect, I can’t even remember for sure what company it was, but have been efforts at this.

Neville Hobson
Yeah

Shel Holtz
and with the AI situation and companies like Ford finding the knowledge isn’t there once the people leave and the AI isn’t equipped to handle everything just based on was in the databases that it had been fed, I think we’re gonna have to revisit this whole idea of knowledge management and get it right this time because it’s still far from perfect

Neville Hobson
Yeah. Thinking about Jim Farley and what he said that AI will replace half of white-collar work, while his own VP describes a turnaround built on rehiring the humans they’d let go. I-is this Ford being inconsistent, or is it actually a realistic picture, AI displacing some roles while creating new dependency on a smaller pool of s- pool of senior experts? I wonder if that’s it. There’s also a related point to that. Could this be a warning? You, y-you mentioned– You used that word a minute ago in this case about h-hollowing out effect. If companies keep pushing out mid-career and senior staff in favor of AI, who trains the next generation of greybeards when today’s greybeards retire for good? ‘Cause that will happen sooner or later.

Shel Holtz
There’s also this idea of institutional knowledge that is not necessarily captured in any systems. It’s because they have been there, as was pointed out in this article, through multiple product cycles. There are things that they learned that are not a specific quality measure or whatever it is that they’re using in their work that now is gonna be done by the AI. They bring that institutional knowledge to the job, and y- you may not need as many of them as you had before if the AI can legitimately do some of this work. But some of those people who have been there through those product cycles and have acquired that institutional knowledge, they’re still gonna need to be there. I don’t know how you capture institutional knowledge. I have seen this in an organization that shall remain unnamed, but that you and I are b- both very familiar with, that, that hollowed out staff and let its institutional knowledge go, and is paying a dear price for that

Neville Hobson
Yeah. It got me thinking a bit about I guess drawing upon some science fiction movies that I’ve seen over the years but also now looking at where we are with technology tools that make it very easy for people to literally dump their knowledge about something into a device or a system that records that saves it. Could we be seeing a, the beginnings of something or the idea certainly that may catch on with people that this needs to be built into behaviors in an organization that depending on your role, and I can’t say it could be everyone, but maybe it should be, that you’ve got some means that you work on a project and part of your in a sense, your the kind of conditions of your employment, let’s say, is that on completing a project or planning a project and then com- wha- whatever it might be, you’ve gotta record your thoughts on the planning and execution of that project how you did this or that. And that’s then saved. Okay. I haven’t– I’m not even getting into privacy i-issues or data protection or none of that. That may well be the case. I’m thinking of one science fiction film I saw where, a few, some years ago now, where people had, It reminds me of Plaud, actually, a little credit card sized tool.

Shel Holtz
say

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
that. Yep

Neville Hobson
That they spoke into, recorded something. It then saved it to their account, let’s say, on their employer’s website or someplace or whatever it might be, that then broke it down into all the constituent elements that the company needed to have in order to retrieve that information on demand or make use of it in some other way. So some of the tech exists to do that, but certainly not on an organized scale such as what we’re discussing that might be. But how long might it be before that happens?

Shel Holtz
Aside from the privacy concerns, wearing a device that captures everything you say, having all of that from all employees fed to an AI that’s able to sort it out and put it in the appropriate place so that now that becomes part of its knowledge base, I can see that. I just can’t see employees tolerating it very well. I certainly wouldn’t want to have every word I’m saying during the day recorded and saved by the organization, and I’m a senior executive. That’s just ethically wrong I think. But technically I think we’re not that far away from

Neville Hobson
No, we’re not. We’re not.

Shel Holtz
do that now

Neville Hobson
You raise a good point but I would counter that in a sense arguing that it’s gonna be if you don’t do it, someone else is gonna do it, and you’re out of a job if you don’t do that. I’m thinking of some of the things that you see around you nowadays as a matter of course, ranging from things like police, ambulance workers fire department people wearing video camera, body cams that record everything. I have a friend of mine who’s just bought one that he feels safe wearing this on his commute to work on the train. He goes to London and then on the underground train. I can, I can–

Shel Holtz
use case. These are, these f- yeah I think,

Neville Hobson
it’s not. It’s not. It’s rec- it records the picture of him. That could be– The purposes might be very different, but the tech would be the same.

Shel Holtz
Oh, the text’s the same. The

Neville Hobson
Yeah.

Shel Holtz
is

Neville Hobson
Yeah. For now it is. Yeah, it is. But this could become a matter of course. I’ve considered that too. If I were still actively working in a traditional job, getting in a commute to London or whatever it might be, I would probably get a body cam

Shel Holtz
Yeah, the okay, the use case there is voluntary, right? You choose

Neville Hobson
I do have that choice

Shel Holtz
Think of Meta, which was capturing the keystrokes of every employee in order to train its models, and the opposis- opposition to that grew so loud that they recently said, “Okay, this is now a voluntary program. Only employees who opt in will have their keystrokes recorded.” And it– now you’re talking about every

Neville Hobson
Yeah, I know, but,

Shel Holtz
the workplace?

Neville Hobson
sure.

Shel Holtz
gonna happen. Yeah.

Neville Hobson
so this is– enters that bigger debate precisely on is it gonna happen or is it not? So in the case of Meta, what they did, I’m thinking back now to the Cambridge Analytica scandal of twenty eighteen, they did this ov- covertly without telling people, and then they lied about it all. So why the hell would you work for a company like that in the first place? That, crosses, crosses my mind. But

Shel Holtz
Yeah

Neville Hobson
I think the one other point occurs to me that the in the case of Ford, that has got me thinking. The fix they had, i.e., rehiring the people they, they got rid of, works because those engineers were still available to rehire, right? So what happens to the next company that has the same realization five or ten years from now when the generation with that tacit knowledge has genuinely retired and isn’t coming back? That’s arguably the real warning sign, not this instance, but the next one

Shel Holtz
Oh, absolutely. They’re gonna have to go for the next best thing, which is hiring humans that can handle the more complex problems that arise, but they don’t have the institutional knowledge. They haven’t been through any product life cycles. Maybe they hire away from competitors. Maybe they hire their old engineers back by offering them more money than they ever dreamed of, but yeah, that sort of defeats the purpose too, doesn’t it? No, I think what has to happen is that the companies that are considering replacing people with AI don’t just count the number of who are doing the job and how much an AI can conceivably do, and then get rid of the equivalent number of staffers. You’ve gotta be really strategic about this. I think you need to inventory all of the tasks that you’re talking about performing and identify which of those are better done by AI. Heaven knows there are things that AI is not good at,

Neville Hobson
Yeah

Shel Holtz
pretty widely recognized sets of activities. So looking at what you’re gonna need people for and then determining, okay, if we’re gonna let people go how many we still need in order to avoid the kind of outcome that Ford experienced? And I think if they’re strategic, if they apply some formulas to this again, inventorying absolutely every task you’re gonna be looking at replacing and figuring out which of those are going to work with AI you’re probably gonna end up making better decisions and not have to do what Ford did. The other thing that I would look at though is how does all of this align with your values? Because no matter what you do, it is in conflict with your stated corporate values, which are hanging on the wall in the conference rooms and, employees have copies of them, and in my company, they’re on every truck that’s out there you’re gonna end up with a very disengaged cynical workforce

Neville Hobson
Yeah. The cynical part of me suggests that’s actually happening a lot already. G-question mark, do they really believe those values on the side of the trucks down the road, all that kind of stuff? So it’s a kind of fluid environment we seem to be in. And I’m wondering w- as well, will we begin to see, I don’t know on your CV or your resume on LinkedIn one of your major selling points is gonna be the fact that you have deep institutional knowledge. You probably wouldn’t wanna say about your employer, but what you really want to be saying is about the industry or about something that sa- that kinda says, “I’m very portable from the get-go.” So maybe we’re gonna see that

Shel Holtz
Oh, could be. It would certainly be better than open to work as a little arc on the pr-profile photo on LinkedIn. And that’ll be a 30 for this episode of “For Immediate Release.”

 

The post FIR #521: AI Layoffs Are Here. Wait. Strike That. Reverse It. appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Local newsrooms keep shrinking, journalism schools keep closing their doors, and the reporters who remain are stretched thinner than ever. For organizational communicators, that shift changes the math on media relations. It’s no longer enough to know how to write a pitch. You need to understand who’s left to receive it, what standards still govern their work, and how to build the kind of relationship that gets your story told well instead of not at all.

Circle of Fellows #131 will feature four IABC Fellows with deep backgrounds in journalism and media relations. Moderated by Shel Holtz, SCMP, the panel will discuss what’s changed in the newsroom, what hasn’t, and what it means for the way communicators do their jobs.

The panel will dig into what that means day to day for communicators, including:

• Thinking local and strategic. Where does your story actually need to go, and which relationships and networks get it there?
• Knowing journalistic standards and principles (JSPs). Understanding what reporters can and can’t do — and where the real limits are — makes for smarter pitches and fewer frustrated calls.
• Respecting deadlines and information needs. How communicators and journalists can work together, rather than at cross purposes, to produce the stories both sides actually want.
• Getting to know the people in your “journalism ‘hood.” In a shrunken media landscape, personal relationships with the reporters who remain matter more than ever.

Join us for this hour-long conversation, live on Thursday, July 23, at noon ET. You’ll be able to ask questions and share your own experiences with the panel in real time. Can’t make it live? The video replay and audio podcast will be available afterward.

About the panel:

Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design.

Edward “Ned” Lundquist is a retired U.S. Navy captain with 43 years of professional public affairs and strategic communications experience. His company, Echo Bridge LLC, which provides outreach and advocacy support to government and commercial clients. He served on active duty for 24 years in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer and public affairs specialist. Captain Lundquist was a Pentagon spokesman with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, Director of the Fleet Home Town News Center, and director of public affairs and corporate communications for the Navy Exchange Service Command. His last tour of duty was commanding the 450 men and women of the Naval Media Center. He is an accredited business communicator and award-winning communicator who served as president of IABC/Hampton Roads and IABC/Washington, director of U.S. District 3, and chair of the International Accreditation Council. He was named an IABC Fellow in 2016. Captain Lundquist received the Surface Navy Association’s Special Recognition Award in January of this year, for his service on SNA’s executive committee and chair of the SNA communications committee. He writes for numerous naval, maritime, and defense publications and chairs and presents at communications, naval, and maritime security conferences around the world.

Martha Muzychka, ABC, MC, speaks, writes, listens, and helps others do the same to make change happen. Martha is a strategic, creative problem solver seeking challenging communications environments where we can make a difference. She helps her clients navigate competing priorities and embrace communication challenges. Martha offers strategic planning, facilitation, consultation services, writing and editing, qualitative research, and policy analysis. Her work has been recognized locally, nationally, and internationally with multiple awards.

Jennifer Wah, MC, ABC, has worked with clients to deliver ideas, plans, words and results since she founded her storytelling and communications firm, Forwords Communication Inc., in 1997. With more than two dozen awards for strategic communications, writing, and consulting, Jennifer is recognized as a storyteller and strategist. She has worked in industries from healthcare and academia to financial services and the resource sector, and is passionate about the strategic use of storytelling to support business outcomes. Although she has delivered workshops and training throughout her career, Jennifer formally added teaching to her experience in 2013, first with Royal Roads University and more recently as an adjunct professor of business communications with the UBC Sauder School of Business, where she now works part-time to impart crucial communication skills on the next generation of business leaders. When she is not working, Jennifer spends her time cooking, walking her dog, Orion, or discussing food, hockey, or music with her husband and two young adult children in North Vancouver, Canada.

The post Coming Up on Circle of Fellows: The Evolving Media Landscape and the Value of Ethical Journalism appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Circle of Fellows departed from the discussion of communication issues, as we do once each year, to introduce IABC’s newest Fellows. Five new communicators join the Fellows community in 2026, spanning the globe from Canada (from which three of our Fellows hail) to South Africa and Australia.

Part 1

Part 2

Meet the Fellows

Diana Degan, IABC Fellow, ABC, CAAP, BAAJ, is the founder of Diana Degan & Associates. Diana is an award-winning communication leader, educator, and strategic advisor whose 35-year career has strengthened communication practice, elevated professional standards, and advanced human-centered communication across Canada and beyond. She has led work spanning the full spectrum of the profession, from strategic planning, brand development, and integrated marketing communications to crisis communications, stakeholder engagement, internal communications, and accessibility-focused communication design.

Founder and Principal of Fluency Leadership, Catherine Ducharme, IABC Fellow, PCC, CLC,is a career communicator, certified coach, and facilitator with more than 35 years of experience in communication and leadership. She has held senior roles across public relations, corporate, internal, and marketing communication in industries, including high-tech and health sciences, grounding her work in deep, real-world expertise. Building on that foundation, Catherine now focuses on developing communication and marketing professionals to be exceptional leaders.

Cyrus Mavalwala, IABC Fellow, ABC, MC, is a sought-after communication strategist who leads a team of trusted advisors that senior executives rely on to capture, own, and sustain mindshare with the people that matter most. After senior roles at global PR agencies, Cyrus founded Advantis Communications in 2002. Advantis’ proprietary frameworks operationalize AI, elevate social media, and deploy video as core drivers of thought leadership and influence, strengthening visibility and relevance.

André Oberholzer, SCMP, FCSCE, is group head for corporate affairs at Sappi Limited, a global pulp and paper company with operations across South Africa, North America, and Europe. He is a member of the Group Management Committee. He chairs the company Brand Council, ensuring close alignment between corporate, service, and product branding. He also serves on the Sappi SA Social Impact committee and the Group Sustainability and Risk Councils.

Sia Papageorgiou, IABC Fellow, FRSA, FCSCE, SCMP, is one of the world’s most awarded communication strategists, with more than 60 accolades for excellence in strategic communication and leadership. Over three decades, she has worked across journalism, public relations, corporate communication, and strategic advisory roles in government, business, and the not-for-profit sector. She is the co-founder of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence (CSCE), a global professional development and insights organization trusted by leading organizations worldwide.

The post Circle of Fellows #129 and #130: Meet The 2026 Class of IABC Fellows appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most agency owners will tell you accountability is something they value, but fewer will realize they’re often the biggest obstacle to it. In this episode, Chip and Gini offer suggestions for how to stop being the bottleneck at your agency.

Chip tells of his own recent experience where he missed putting out a newsletter after an emergency root canal. Even with Jen repeatedly pinging him, the decision of whether to get something done rested with him. Most employees won’t push back hard because they know who signs the paychecks. The exceptions are rare, and you can’t build your accountability system around them.

Gini’s structural fix has been making “less founder dependence” an explicit OKR, tracked at every leadership meeting. When the goal shows up red on a dashboard, the visibility creates its own pressure. Chip thinks it’s less about any specific single system. AI has helped him stop some procrastination, but it’s also added new projects he’d never have attempted before. His takeaway is that you need to figure out what works for your specific wiring, and not rely on someone else’s approach.

For external accountability, peers, coaches, and organizations like YPO or Vistage can help, particularly for big-picture questions you wouldn’t bring to your team. But formal advisory boards are another story. Both Chip and Gini are skeptical, since even paid corporate directors with legal obligations frequently fail at the oversight function. For owner-led agencies, the complexity almost never justifies the benefit. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 311: How can agency owners hold themselves accountable? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

In the long-form FIR episode for June, Neville and Shel consider the causes and implications of surging anti-AI sentiment in the US (which is also growing in other developed countries), as well as the increasing use of “shadow AI” in organizations. Other reports include studies documenting the continued erosion of trust in mainstream news media, the growth of personal branding among communication professionals, a shocking self-inflicted reputation crisis for a UK business, and evidence that employees aren’t reading your internal communications (unless maybe they are). Dan York shares information on Collections in the Mastodon 4.6 release and the W Social situation in his Tech Report.

Links from this episode:

• ‘Shadow AI becomes a massive enterprise liability’: New study claims most of us are now using unauthorized AI tools at work
• FIR #510: Should Companies Embrace Shadow AI?
• FIR #419: Is Shadow AI an Evil Lurking in the Heart of Your Company?
• The Rise of Shadow AI is a Double-Edged Sword for Corporate Innovation
• Americans Have Turned Against AI in Incredible Numbers
• AI’s Public Relations Emergency
• AI Data Centers and the Public Relations Challenge for Business Owners
• Wowcher apologises after email appears to reference crocodile attack on toddler
• Digital News Report 2026
• From Invisible To Influential: The Personal Branding Shift In Corporate Communications
• Wowcher apologises for email referencing toddler crocodile attack
• Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
• Wowcher apologises over email that referenced crocodile attack on boy
• LinkedIn post (Queen of CRM): “I’ve had 16 messages about this email…”
• LinkedIn post (Flo Powell): Wowcher ‘extremely sorry’ for crocodile attack email
• The Attention Recession: Why Your Employees Aren’t Reading What You Send
• State of Workplace Communication 2026: Why 44% of Employees Tune Out

Links from Dan York’s Report

• Designing Collections
• Mastodon 4.6
• The Untold Story About W Social: Unconventional Beginnings, Strategic Pitches and Conflicting Signals
• W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty
• W Social, Fictional Metrics and the Beauty of Open Data

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript:

Shel Holtz: Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 520 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California.

Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson in Somerset in the UK.

Shel Holtz: And it’s good to be back with you for our long-form episode. We really enjoy doing our short midweek episodes, but these are an opportunity to dig into some meaty topics. And we have six for you this week. Obviously, we’re going to be talking about some artificial intelligence, but not exclusively. So we have some other communication-focused topics to share with you, and some comments from listeners from the last month’s worth of episodes. And to get to those, Neville, how about a recap of what we’ve talked about in the last month?

Neville Hobson: In the long-form episode 515 for May, on the 25th of May, we led with the rise of AI agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. We also talked about AI copyright lawsuits, Google’s search overhaul, what’s becoming standard media relations practice on podcasts, the question of whether the time is coming for value to be at the forefront of client billing, and the rise of short-form video clippers. A lot of content in that bumper issue. Hefty but good, as we like to say. And then The Economist is building two versions of its web presence: one for human readers, one structured for AI agents. In FIR 516 on the first of June, we discussed what this means for communicators and raised an important counterpoint. Websites aren’t going away. We said the answer is to do both, not abandon one for the other. And we have at least one comment on this one, don’t we, Shel?

Shel Holtz: We have several comments on this one, starting with Sylvia Cambié, who says: “A really interesting episode. Your point about the need to be deliberate when we write copy for websites and think about what an agent would extract is fascinating. Here’s a task that communicators can do well. Great to see new tasks like this emerging for comms. It is funny to hear that AI likes Q&As. When I was a journalist, this was considered a real no-no, a sign of lazy journalism. How times change.” By the way, The Economist has published a great article by Harvard Kennedy School fellow Shui Fang about the world entering the age of machine audiences and agents. And Neville, you replied that her point about Q&As is spot on, and you hadn’t thought about it from a journalism angle before. It’s a good example of how context changes everything. What signals laziness in one setting becomes good or best practice in another. And yes, communicators are well placed to take this on. Structuring content with clarity and precision is what good communicators do. The agent readability requirement just makes the skill more explicit and more consequential. Then we have a comment from Sally Getch, rhymes with “sketch.” She says: “I started this comment on the website, but realized I needed to revise it. My first thought is, WTF is wrong with The Economist’s regular website that it’s unintelligible to AI agents? In my experience, AI does a pretty good job of reading and understanding websites, and it seems to be able to find and do things that the search engines we have all spent decades trying to appeal to could not, like transcribing PDFs and audio files. We use them for those purposes ourselves. Likewise, images with good alt text improve the understanding of both bots and humans. It felt like a flashback to the days of ‘we need to make a separate mobile website.’ I don’t think you need a separate site, but you might need a better one. I asked Stefan about this” — that’s her husband and a software developer — “and he said that the reason for the markdown is because it’s fewer tokens for the agent to consume and therefore costs less. There are some new and therefore not widely tested WordPress plugins that can convert your pages to Markdown and index them to LLMS.txt. If you edit a page or a post, they generate a new .md file. Another thought I had was that one thing that might interfere with agents ingesting content on media sites is ads. They sure do that for humans.” And then Vincent Bruneau left a short comment saying: “Parallel content architectures for human readers and AI agents is the clearest signal yet that the two audiences have genuinely diverged. And if The Economist is doing it, the question for every communications team is not whether to think about this, but how far behind they really are.”

Neville Hobson: Good comments. I think Sally’s in particular had me thinking. And I think all I’d say to Sally’s really good, insightful opinion there is, I recommend you read The Economist article explaining in considerable detail why they’re doing this. I think we link to that. The trouble is it’s behind a paywall, but there are ways around that kind of thing. Anyway, thanks to those commenters. So then in episode 517 on the ninth of June, we looked at what communicators should do when leadership makes a loud public bet that doesn’t pay off. Yes, it’s AI we’re talking about. And what happens when the bills start piling up and companies realize the cost isn’t tenable? Can communications repair the resulting damage from such a management failure that wasn’t a technology one? Partially, we said, but only if leaders are willing to be honest about what happened and why. And there are comments.

Shel Holtz: One comment, and this is also from Vincent Bruneau, who has also left a comment on 518, and I just want to tell Vincent, thank you for being such an interactive participant in our episodes. It’s great to see you here. Vincent writes: “The gap between the loud public bet and the quiet walk-back is where employee trust goes to die, and communications can only repair it if leadership is willing to be honest about what actually happened. Partially is the right answer, and probably more than most organizations will achieve.”

Neville Hobson: Terrific. So next: PR misread social media in 2007, and the internet in 1995, and desktop publishing before that. The disciplines that grew from these were largely built by people outside the profession. Are we about to do it again with AI? In episode 518 on the 15th of June, we explored why PR agencies still seem unable to figure out billing models to replace the now-useless hourly rate, we would argue — and we did — and what they should be doing, noting that time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with. That’s a very concise summary of that episode, but we talked about a lot in that episode. And we have comments, right?

Shel Holtz: Again from Vincent Bruneau. He says: “‘Time freed up by AI only has value if organizations know what to replace it with’ is the line that exposes most current AI strategy in PR. Efficiency without redirection just produces idle capacity, not transformation. The return to relational, face-to-face work as the actual opportunity is the most hopeful and least obvious takeaway.”

Neville Hobson: Now, we have known about the media bias effect for decades — the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. In FIR 519 on the 22nd of June, we looked at what this hostile misinformation effect means for organizational communicators, discussing what strategies might look like, including pre-bunking and the value of calm, rapid response. If you look up pre-bunking, by the way, you’ll get an answer on Google. So now you’re up to date on FIR episodes.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and by the way, I was on a panel at the PRSA Public Affairs and Government Section Summit in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. We had the panel on Friday, just yesterday. Good God, I was in Kentucky yesterday. And pre-bunking came up there as a way to address misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. It’s really just the notion that you can anticipate what people are going to attack you on. And if you already have the content that addresses that, it becomes very easy to point to it. And you don’t look reactive when you’re pointing to content that’s already there. You’re not inventing new stuff to address it. So that’s, I think, an important practice for communicators to consider given the state of the media environment these days. Circle of Fellows is going to be posted very, very soon. We did record it. It was two episodes on the same day. Brad Whitworth hosted the first one, I hosted the second one. And the reason for this was that this is the episode where we introduce our new fellows, and there are five of them, and they are across time zones. And the only way we could make this work for people who are in Australia and all over the world was to break this into two. So those will be posted soon, and you’ll have the opportunity to meet our five new fellows. The next episode of Circle of Fellows — episode 131, and we do this once a month, so 131 of these is, I think, noteworthy — that will be on Thursday, July 23rd, at noon Eastern time. The topic is the evolving media landscape and the value of ethical journalism. I’ll be moderating that one with Diana Degan, who is one of our 2026 class of fellows, Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Waugh. So if you would like to participate in that in real time, mark that on your calendars. That covers our pre-topic discussion. We’ll start the conversation around our six topics right after this.

Neville Hobson: Shadow AI is a topic we’ve returned to more than once on For Immediate Release, and with good reason, because the story keeps developing and the numbers keep getting harder to ignore. Shadow AI is the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence tools, applications, or models by employees without the formal approval, monitoring, or oversight of an organization’s IT or security teams. It typically happens when workers use public, consumer-grade tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or third-party browser extensions instead of tools approved by the employer — Copilot, for instance, a common one — to speed up tasks, brainstorm, or analyze data. Cast your mind back to July 2024, when in FIR 419 we asked whether shadow AI was an evil lurking in the heart of your company. At the time, a Cyberhaven report had found that 27.4% of the content employees were feeding into AI tools was sensitive: customer data, source code, confidential HR records. It was a striking figure, and it pointed to a tension that was already building between what employees wanted to do and what their employers were prepared to sanction. By February 2025, in FIR 449, we were reporting that employee use of shadow AI was surging — half of all employees, some studies were suggesting. The appetite was clearly there. The question was whether organizations were keeping pace, and by most accounts they weren’t. Then in April this year, in FIR 510, we put a sharper question on the table: should companies simply embrace shadow AI? Not fight it, not just manage it, but lean into it? Because by that point it was becoming clear that the crackdowns weren’t working, and the productivity gains employees were quietly achieving were real. Now we have new data. And it moves the needle again. A June 2026 survey carried out by Wakefield Research for PagerDuty — a digital operations platform that automates incident management, alerting, and on-call scheduling for IT and DevOps teams — reported that two-thirds of US workers, that’s two in every three, are now using AI tools at work that their company hasn’t approved, in spite of knowing the rules. More than half received informal warnings to stop. Nearly half faced formal consequences — official warnings, disciplinary action — and they carried on regardless. Perhaps the most telling finding is this: 88% of those workers have shared work-related information with public AI systems. We’re not talking about using a tool to draft a meeting agenda. People are uploading emails, sharing meeting notes, entering customer information, and in nearly a third of cases, inputting sensitive business documents, financial data included. There’s also a striking confidence gap emerging. Nearly three-quarters of workers and 77% of senior leaders believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. Whether or not that’s true, it tells you something important about the dynamic inside organizations right now. This isn’t a case of employees feeling lost and reaching for unauthorized tools out of confusion. They’re reaching for them out of conviction. And this is worth noting: one reason employees may feel less obligated to follow AI rules is the perception that company policies are inconsistently applied. According to PagerDuty’s report, while 86% believe their company has formal AI policies in place, more than four-fifths — 81% — believe those rules are applied differently to leadership than to the rest of the workforce. So here’s the question I want to ask. If two-thirds of your workforce is already doing this, if warnings, policies, and even disciplinary action haven’t slowed it down, is the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use effectively over? Is the current wave of anti-AI sentiment sweeping the US playing a role here? Shel, we’ll be talking about that in a bit. If the era of the company controlling its employees’ AI use is over, what does responsible AI governance actually look like now?

Shel Holtz: AI governance is just in complete disarray, I believe, right now. I’m sure there are some companies that have their AI governance in good shape, but I think overall — and the research seems to bear this out — it’s chaos out there. I think you probably have a variety of different situations from organization to organization. You have governance that people look at and say, “This is ridiculous.” You have governance that employees are not aware of, or that has not been well communicated. I think there’s a variety of reasons that we’re seeing this — governance that even leaders are not adhering to, and you alluded to this, and that’s very visible. You hear stories of employees being told, “You have to use Copilot because we’re an Office 365 shop and we get Copilot with it, and it’s been extended to all of your Office 365 tools, your Outlook email, your Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and Excel — all of these things are now AI-enabled, so use Copilot.” And then you hear that the executive vice president for operations is happily using Claude all the time, while you also have somebody in HR who’s using ChatGPT, and employees roll their eyes and say, “Well, if they’re going to do it, I’m going to do it. I’m just not going to tell anyone.” They’re using their own accounts or billing it through their expense system for twenty bucks a month, and nobody’s even noticing, because who’s paying attention to a twenty-dollar-a-month charge? It’s terrible. And I think there’s a lot that has to happen, and it should happen, and it must happen, in order for organizations to get their arms around this. The first is more communication from leaders about their expectations. We just had a town hall where our CEO told employees explicitly, “We want you to use this.” He talked about caution about exposing client information or anything else that’s proprietary. He talked about the fact that our Copilot account allows us to keep all of this data in the company. It doesn’t get exposed to the models for training purposes and the like. And that’s one of the reasons we want employees to use that. And that was the caution he gave: if you’re using the others, you’ve got to be really, really careful about that. But I also think that employees need to have a voice in this. If they’re going to embrace it, they need to feel like they own it. And again, I’ll talk about where I work. And I’d love to take credit for this, but this was not my doing — there is an AI committee. And this is not IT people and leaders and the like. We have project engineers and project managers, frontline people on this, including one or two who were skeptical at the outset. And it’s a very enthusiastic group, and we’re planning a company-wide activity because we want employees to have that voice in this. We want them to feel like they’re part of what the direction is with AI — what tools we adopt, what policies we adopt. It’s like anything else in the organization. I mean, think about value statements, for example. If employees feel like they had a say in determining what the company’s values are, they’re going to embrace them. If it’s leadership coming out saying, “Here are our values, live these,” and employees go, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t see that in practice in the organization, and they don’t align with my values,” then you’ve got trouble. It’s the same thing here. So if this is foisted on employees who are already figuring out other ways to do this that are better for them, you end up with all kinds of problems. One, for example, is you’ll find that there are employees who have solved big problems in their jobs and made themselves more efficient and more productive, or have been able to grow something beyond where it was using AI, and they don’t share it, because they don’t want to admit that they used some tool that isn’t authorized in the organization. So you have fifty other employees doing the same job the old way and not benefiting from what this first employee learned. That’s terrible. We need to get our arms around this. And I think communicators have a huge role to play here, because let’s face it, this is not about policy. This is not about technology. This is entirely about communication.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. And I think the policy hypocrisy point, if I can call it that, needs pushing on directly. According to the survey, if 81% of workers believe AI rules are applied differently to leadership than to everyone else, that’s not a compliance problem. It’s a legitimacy problem, surely. No AI governance framework can work if employees don’t believe it applies equally to the people setting the rules. So that makes total sense to me — it won’t work. Do you think, if this is widespread — and there’s the worry, it seems to me, if it’s widespread — do you think any organization can recover trust on this without visible, demonstrable accountability at the top? Where does the buck stop in that case?

Shel Holtz: Absolutely there needs to be visible accountability at the top. But if there is, yes, you can recover trust. You lose trust a lot faster than you can rebuild it. So rebuilding it is going to take time, it’s going to take a plan, but it absolutely can be rebuilt. And again, I think this is where communicators come in, to say, “Okay, let’s develop a plan and a strategy around this.” Does your company have a committee that engages the front line in the discussion that is leading to this? If not, consider that. Does your company communicate the policies well? Does it share success stories with employees? There needs to be a strategy for this. You can’t just throw it out there like, you know, a new HRIS — we’ve adopted Workday, you let everybody know once, and they start recording their time there and requesting their PTO there, and everybody figures it out, and it’s no big deal. This is not that. We need to have a long-term strategy that we can adapt as things change, because as you know, in the AI world things change a lot, quickly. I don’t know if you read that Sam Altman has announced that there are going to be massive changes to the ChatGPT interface. He said the chatbot is over — this is an agentic thing now — and what you’re going to see on ChatGPT will reflect that. So people who think of AI as a place where you go type a query into a box — I’m sure there’s going to still be a way to ask a question and get an answer, but that’s not the focus anymore. What does that do to employees who are going to a tool and seeing these changes? We need to be able to pivot pretty quickly. But we need a plan that will accommodate that kind of change, but also move us forward in getting the benefit from AI and also rebuilding that trust. And by the way, one of the things I think employees would love to hear — and I don’t remember where I read this, it was just in one of the newsletters I got, it may have been Shelly Palmer — is that we’re not talking enough about using AI to grow the organization. We talk about being more efficient and saving money and saving time, which is all great. But AI can actually help your organization grow. And we’re not talking about that. We’re not talking about how to do that. We’re not talking about the role employees could play. And if employees knew that that’s what they were contributing to, I think there might be a bit more enthusiasm around it.

Neville Hobson: Let’s take a look at this confidence gap a bit. This is where nearly three-quarters of workers believe they understand AI better than their own tech teams. This strikes me as genuinely new territory. Shadow IT was about convenience, right? This feels more like a values clash — employees who believe they are the more capable party, acting accordingly. Is this the moment, do you think, where the traditional model of IT as gatekeeper finally breaks down for good?

Shel Holtz: Yes and no. I think those employees are right to a great extent. They know how to use this tool for their job better than IT ever could, because this is not Excel, right? It certainly isn’t something like an enterprise resource planning system or a customer relationship management system, where IT is clearly going to be an effective gatekeeper. This is where every employee is going to use it differently based on their job, based on their role, their department, their function — and they know best. And I think where IT still needs to be the gatekeeper is on things like cost. If employees are out there creating agents that are just continually looping 24 hours a day, you’re going to burn through a lot of tokens, and the company’s going to have a pretty considerable impact on their bottom line. So there’s absolutely a role for IT to play, but it’s on the technical side, not the application side. How it’s used — I don’t think IT can help you much there at all. They’re not experts at prompt building. They’re not experts at skill or agent building. That’s really not their job. They’re looking at the nuts and bolts of it. So I think there’s still a role there, as a gatekeeper on that side of it. I think policies about how much you use agents and how often you run them and how many tokens you burn through, and education around that — that’s probably an IT thing. And communicators should be working with their IT teams to convey that information. But in terms of how I’m going to use this — man, IT can’t tell me how to use this as a communicator, and I don’t think they have any interest in doing that either.

Neville Hobson: That’s good. Although I would argue that there’s probably a learning experience ahead for IT in that regard, because IT has had a history, I suppose, of dabbling in stuff that is not their domain at all. They see everything as an IT project. So some behavior change is due, I think.

Shel Holtz: Heck, yeah. I remember in the early days of email, there was a company I was doing consulting for that had a CIO who had to approve every email that went to all employees. And I didn’t work there very long, because I looked the CIO right in the eye and I said, “Really? Does your printer approve everything that goes out in print?” Because that’s essentially what it was, right? But no, I think there are more IT departments these days that recognize, especially with AI, that their role is not to tell engineers how to use this or accountants how to use this. Certainly our IT department is very supportive of having employees figure out what the use cases are. They’re not even dabbling in that. Well, let’s stick with this topic of AI, because AI has lost the public. We’re not talking about some public skepticism. This is a flat-out rejection by the vast majority of the American public. And Neville, when we talk about this, we’ll also talk about the UK and Europe. But how vast is vast? There’s a new Pew survey out this month that found that just 16% of Americans believe AI will have a positive impact on society. Sit with that for a minute. 16%. Forty percent expect the impact on society to be negative, and about a third think it will personally harm them. Right? Got that? A third think that AI is going to be harmful to them. The people most hostile to AI are the young. Among Gen Z adults, nearly half think AI will be bad for society. And yet that same group uses it more than anyone else — two-thirds of them. Alex Kantrowitz at Big Technology makes the point that this is the real emergency, because the attitudes people form in their late teens and early 20s are the ones that stick for life. Advertisers have always known this. And right now, an entire generation is forming an anti-AI view at exactly the age where those views get locked in. And this isn’t just polling either. It’s gone public and physical. We’ve had graduates booing AI at commencement ceremonies across the country this spring, at one point literally drowning out former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as he tried to tell them to go shape the technology’s future. And then there are the data centers, which is where all this abstract unease turns into a concrete fight. Seven out of ten Americans now oppose having an AI data center built in their area. And that reminds me — I saw in The New York Times just this morning an article that said this community actually wants an AI data center. Like that’s a newsworthy thing now. Community opposition has blocked or delayed something like $64 billion in projects. This is showing up as a talking point in the 2026 midterm elections. And in a handful of disturbing cases, it has tipped over into threats and even violence, with workers on the construction sites of these data centers being assaulted by members of the community. And the resistance isn’t just coming from outsiders. It includes the very employees we’re trying to get to adopt AI inside our organizations — which goes back to our preliminary conversation, Neville. Think about it. If only 16% of the public thinks AI is a net positive, it’s likely that that many, maybe even more, among your employees feel that way. Pew shows usage and approval moving in opposite directions. Half of adults now use these tools, up from a third just two years ago, and a lot of them are using it because their boss told them to use it, while at the same time they distrust it and maybe even despise it. And that’s the gap we have to manage internally. We can talk about the PR challenge AI companies are facing, but let’s talk first about what communicators actually can do about this internally. You have to acknowledge the fear instead of dismissing it. The job-loss anxiety is rational, and pretending otherwise just torches your credibility. We need to separate adoption from advocacy. People can use the tools well without having to love them. We’ve seen this with other tools. I remember — I can’t remember what the tool was that I was using for charts and graphs, this goes way, way back into like the 1990s — but I wanted to use Harvard Graphics, and I was told, “No, our IT department doesn’t support Harvard Graphics.” So we really have to help people understand: look, this is the tool we’re using in the job. You don’t have to love it, you just have to use it. We have to give employees a voice in the rollout rather than just a mandate, because forced use with no input is exactly what breeds resentment. As I mentioned before, I’m on the AI committee where I work, with other frontline employees and non-IT managers and people who are being asked to use it. And we need to lean on trusted peers to carry the message, not executive proclamations, because executive enthusiasm is part of what employees are skeptical about in the first place. As for the AI companies themselves, they’re in damage control right now. They’ve lost the chance to set the agenda. The most striking sign of that is this latest techlash. Tech still polled better than politicians. Today AI polls below every major political candidate, which means the political cost of cracking down on it has basically evaporated. They had a window to set expectations early, honestly, with community buy-in. They missed it. And now they’re negotiating from a deficit. And from where I sit, that’s an argument for startups to embrace PR and communications, because I don’t think any of them really did. If they did, they would have had a PR person telling them that going out there and saying, “This is going to cause massive job loss,” is a really stupid approach to building support for what you’re doing. And yet that’s what they did.

Neville Hobson: It certainly is a muddy picture, it seems to me. I was looking at the Pew report whilst you were talking, and this is a hefty piece of research, I have to say, but a lot of striking contradictions appear to me in trying to understand why this is happening. I mentioned when we were chatting earlier that I don’t see news headlines in the mainstream media in the UK about groundswells of anti-AI sentiment in this country. Not to say there isn’t any, but it’s certainly not driving the news agenda in any way that I could tell. But I found it most interesting — just to break out some snippets from Pew’s research — they say the share of Americans who say they use ChatGPT, which they say is the dominant one of all the chatbots, the one preferred by most people, that usage by Americans has more than doubled since 2023, which is when it became part of public consciousness. Interesting, I think. They report using ChatGPT far more than other chatbots. They say the second most-used platform is Gemini, followed by Copilot and Meta AI. I was surprised at that, because I’ve started using Claude, and that’s way, way down their list, according to Pew. They also talk about — I found this interesting in the context of something else that I mentioned — that Americans are more likely to say, according to Pew, that chatbots help rather than hurt their productivity, knowledge, and creativity. That would explain why more people are using it. But what about the folks who — what about all this anti-AI sentiment that’s emerging? Are they not using this? Are they part of the other percentage that doesn’t? An interesting side explainer, I suppose, to understanding the wider picture about smartwatches, smart home devices, and other things like smart speakers, where you can also use AI. The thing is, though — and clearly I’m not the demographic here, Shel, so this comment is anecdotal —

Shel Holtz: They are using it. Yeah, I’m sure they are.

Neville Hobson: You end up using AI and not realizing you’re using AI. So I’ve taken to using Google’s little widget that they run, the AI mode. 99% of everything I search uses that, unless I’m asking just for a phone number, which is not the kind of thing I normally ask, actually — I don’t phone anyone these days. I often ask questions like, “How many miles is it from A to B?” I often ask that kind of question. And if I use Google’s AI mode, it will ask me, like, “What do you want — kilometers or miles? Direct line, as the bird flies, or roundabout?” I don’t want those questions, right?

Shel Holtz: Yeah. “Freeways, no freeways,” yeah.

Neville Hobson: Exactly. So that’s interesting, all that stuff. A majority of Americans — 60%, so that is a majority — say they read AI summaries at the top of search results. I would imagine that that is growing. Another 10% aren’t sure if they do that or not. Interesting. So Americans predict AI’s impact on society and on them will be more negative than positive. So notwithstanding the majority of people using it, which has doubled since 2023 on ChatGPT, most say the impact on society and them will be more negative than positive. So is that what’s driving the anti-AI sentiment? Younger adults are more wary of the potential impact on society and on them than older groups, yet the younger groups are the ones using it most. So there’s, to me, a paradox there. Roughly two-thirds of Americans say AI is advancing too quickly. So you can now see that you can actually grab some metrics that are the “yes, but” to the “I use it, I’m getting benefit.” Yes, but — so maybe this is about balance. So another metric: most think AI will make their personal information less secure. And there’s that kind of niggle in the back of your mind. Then there’s some political stuff they go into in some detail here. But it got me thinking: maybe you can have this. “This is beneficial, I get what I want out of it, but I hate it.” Maybe that’s what’s going on here. But nevertheless, either way, this is not a good landscape to be gazing at in the context of where AI companies are developing their products. As I mentioned, I’ll be using Claude a lot in my migration experiment. I use Claude and ChatGPT interchangeably. I’ve got too much invested in ChatGPT just to give it up. And in fact, some of the stuff I ask ChatGPT to do, particularly if it’s summarizing something, I quite like what it provides — sometimes better than Claude. Sometimes I do both: give me this, and I give the same prompt to the other one. Projects and those kinds of things in Claude I’m not using as much as I thought I would. So the point, though, is that maybe there is, Shel — you can embrace two different perspectives at the same time. “I get benefit from this, it helps me do what I’m doing. I don’t trust it. I hate what it’s doing to society, and so I’m anti-AI, but I find it useful.” Is that what’s happening?

Shel Holtz: I think so. I think there are a lot of employees who recognize that if they want to be employed in five years, they’re going to have to know how to use this. And they’ve —

Neville Hobson: Yeah, but this is not just about employees. This is people generally in society.

Shel Holtz: Sure. Yeah. I think there are people who are getting benefit from it, better than they can from other tools, and they recognize that, and they still distrust it. They still don’t want the data center in their backyard. I know people who don’t use it at all. And one of the reasons among some of those people is that they think the whole thing is based on theft. I even saw this as a post on LinkedIn — some discussion of AI, and one person left a one-line response saying, “All AI is theft.” I was very tempted to leave a comment saying, “You’re talking about generative AI, there are other kinds of AI.” But the notion that it’s all based on scooping up everything that’s on the internet that people created, and they weren’t asked and they weren’t compensated — you know, Bernie Sanders, I think, has a proposal that there be a sovereign wealth fund where some of the profits from AI go into that fund and are used to benefit people, because it’s their content, it’s their intellectual property that is fueling all of this generative AI.

Neville Hobson: But it seems to me, though, that those kinds of big-picture statements don’t have any impact on people. I hear that argument a lot. “AI is theft, it scrapes content” — which it does, hence all the talk, particularly here in Europe broadly and here in the UK in particular, on permissions and the new regulations that they’re bringing in that are related to copyright and intellectual property ownership. Good luck with all of it, I say, because these are geographically based laws, and we’re not talking about geographically based protections. So I don’t know how on earth they’re going to solve that. I’m not sure that they can. In which case we’ve got something, have we not, that is almost an impossibility: that if this continues like this — and to your point you mentioned earlier, and I have seen reporting of that here too, of very strong anti-behaviors, including violence — that we see an increase in that. Data centers here don’t seem to be a prominent topic of debate; i.e., it’s not like dozens of them are sprouting up all over the place. It’s not like I read recently in the US, there’s this town somewhere in Oklahoma, I believe — might have been Texas — where the town’s council that runs the town, it’s about 2,000 people in this little town, agreed to the investment program of a company who wants to build a data center there. And to do that, they’re going to need to build, including the infrastructure for energy generation, that would serve a city the size of Chicago. So the whole nature of the whole living environment is utterly changed if they go ahead with this. So —

Shel Holtz: Are you suggesting that more than 2,000 people live in Chicago?

Neville Hobson: Just a few more. So I get the logic of that, but it seems to me that there doesn’t seem to be any strong desire at government levels, whether national or local, to seriously address people’s concerns here. And there you have the paradox, because, “Yes, I love what I can do with this AI tool, it’s wonderful, but I hate it. I don’t want it building a data center in my town, but I want the benefits of using this AI.” Is it what we call in the UK NIMBYism? You’ve heard of the acronym?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, “not in my backyard.” Certainly.

Neville Hobson: Right, but I don’t mean to belittle people who do. It’s not all just that. There is some of that, clearly. But these are genuine concerns people have.

Shel Holtz: Well, I mean, in this instance, where you don’t want it in your backyard, it’s because it’s going to drain your water. There are places where data centers have been built where you turn on the tap and it trickles, because all the water’s going into the data center, and electricity rates are rising because of the consumption of the data centers. I think the companies that are building and running and operating these really need to make the investment in energy infrastructure so that they are actually contributing something rather than taking it away. By the way, I looked it up: KPMG did research. In the UK, 42% of adults are willing to trust AI, so the majority does not. 57% are willing to accept or approve AI use, meaning nearly half remain hesitant. 78% are concerned about negative outcomes from AI, and 72% are unsure whether online content can be trusted because it may be AI-generated. 80% believe AI regulation is required, and 91% want laws to combat AI-generated misinformation, and only 29% trust the UK government to use AI for its tasks. So that’s —

Neville Hobson: Well, addressing the issues — that’s the 91% who want that happening — that’s in train, as it were. But I get a little cynical about some of these surveys, particularly where you’ve got such huge numbers that you then say, “Therefore the majority of people don’t support this or do support this,” or whatever. I want to know how many of the “don’t knows” or didn’t respond or whatever. But either way, it’s a hot-potato topic, more so in the US than here, that’s a fact, because you’ve got situations happening that aren’t happening here yet, particularly related to data centers. There’s not dozens of them springing up everywhere. Hey, we’ve got a nuclear power station being built further north of here, but that’s not quite the same thing, right? So I don’t believe there’s a way to solve this cleanly that will keep everyone happy. Like most things in politics, you can’t please everyone. But this in the US certainly, according to all this research, is a growing issue.

Shel Holtz: I think the frontier labs — OpenAI and Anthropic and Google — certainly need to put their heads together on a strategy to turn this around. This can’t be something that they just shove into the background. The frontier labs are going to have to get together and really figure this out. I know they’re trying, because I’ve seen the $400,000 salaries for storytellers, which is a cute, very precious way of saying they need good PR. And we need better communication, and stronger strategic planning in our organizations. This is a perfect storm that has to happen, and I don’t know how it will, but I’m sure we’ll be talking about this in the future.

Neville Hobson: Yep, I’m sure too. So let’s move along and talk about the decline of trust in news. Trust is one of those words that gets used so often in discussions about media and communication that it can start to feel abstract. But every year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford puts a very concrete number on it. And every year for the past several years, that number has been going in the wrong direction. The Reuters Institute Digital News Report is now in its fifteenth year. It covers 48 markets and draws on responses from around 97,000 people worldwide, which makes it one of the most comprehensive ongoing studies of news consumption habits anywhere in the world. We’ve referred to its findings many times over the years on For Immediate Release, and it remains, in my view, the essential annual benchmark for anyone working in or around journalism, communication, or media. The 2026 edition was published just recently, and I want to focus on one finding in particular — not because it’s the only important one, and we may well return to other threads from this report in future episodes, but because it captures something important about the environment in which all of us as communicators are now operating. Global public trust in news has hit a new low, says Reuters. Just 37% of people worldwide say they trust most news most of the time. That’s down three points from last year. Falls were recorded in 29 of the 48 markets surveyed. In the United States, the figure has dropped to 25%. Among right-leaning Americans, it’s 15% — the lowest figure recorded for any demographic in any country in the entire 15-year history of the survey. In the UK, where I’m based, the picture is also stark. Trust has fallen five points this year, to 30%. But here’s the figure that really stopped me: that’s 20 points lower than it was ten years ago. Twenty points in a decade. That’s not a dip. That’s a structural collapse in the relationship between news organizations and their audiences. And it’s not as though people have stopped caring about news or stopped believing in what journalism should be. The same report finds that 48% of people globally still say they prefer news with no particular point of view — an endorsement of impartiality as an ideal that has barely shifted in years. People still believe in what journalism could and should be. They just stopped believing that’s what they’re getting. So when trust has fallen this far, this consistently, across this many markets, is there a realistic path back? Or have we crossed a threshold where declining trust in news is simply the permanent condition of the information environment we now inhabit? Shel?

Shel Holtz: I think it’s not something that’s going to be solved easily, if ever. The fact that right-leaning Americans distrust news more than centrist or left is consistent with the data that we talked about on the last weekly episode, when we talked about — I mean, the episode was about misinformation, or actually disinformation, and media bias. But the media bias effect that we talked about in that episode, that has been around as a measured phenomenon since the 1980s and has been reaffirmed with research ever since then, is at play here, because it finds that right-leaning Americans are more inclined to believe that media reports are biased against them than centrist and left-leaning. Now, centrist and left-leaning also believe that media reports are biased against them, just not to the same degree. So this is that. This is people getting into their bubbles, feeling that media bias effect, and not trusting the media. I think you see a lot of reporters, journalists, leaving the outlets they work for and starting their own media companies, starting Substacks, because they as individuals find that they are trusted; it’s the outlet that they work for that isn’t. So we’re seeing a shift in where journalism comes from. And when you talk about this shift toward social media being the source of news for people, a lot of that is journalists who have started media operations that present their content through social media. The other thing that I find interesting is that 70% of adults in the US say they have a lot or some trust in information from local news organizations. That’s way higher than those who say they trust the national organizations. Republicans trust local news more than national — 64% trust it more. So it seems to me that — I mean, we could speculate about what news media organizations, the New York Timeses of the world, the Washington Posts of the world, the CNNs and NBCs of the world, what they can do about it, but that’s really outside our area of expertise, isn’t it? What do communicators do about this if they’re trying to get news coverage in outlets that people don’t trust? I think the first thing to do is start looking at those local news organizations. And you know that there’s been a serious decline in local news because of the internet and because of social media. I think business needs to invest in local news. I don’t know that you want to go as far as what Alabama Power did — we’ve reported about that on FIR. They actually created a local news outlet that they maintain is independent and unbiased, but it definitely skews toward the topics that are relevant to them. But I think we need to find a way for the business world to help bring local news back. And I think there are other ways that this can happen. I’ll tell you, I set up a Claude Skill, because there is no local news where I live in Concord, California. There’s something in the next community over, it’s called the Clayton Pioneer. It is absolutely awful. You don’t find out what the city council did, or the zoning commission, or the school board. It’s all puff. So what I did was I set up a skill, and it goes out and it checks the minutes of the last city council meeting and the zoning commission and the planning board and all of these agencies in the city, and it builds a newspaper. It’s just for me at this point. And every day I get — it’s like five pages, in a PDF. It also talks about where streets are going to be closed and stuff people actually need to know. I keep tweaking it, but when I get it where I want it, I’m going to buy a domain and I’m going to have this skill publish it as HTML to the web, so that there is an outlet. And I’m going to get out there on Nextdoor and other platforms and let people know it’s there. It’s not a place where opinion is shared. This isn’t puff. You want to know what the school board decided? You want to know what the zoning commission approved? This is where you’re going to find that, in addition to today’s weather and street closures and the police blotter and things like that. But this is where I think businesses need to start building relationships with reporters — in the local news media, because that’s what’s trusted. The other is that they need to do the owned stuff and start doing that external-focused journalism. Not press releases, but journalism.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. There doesn’t seem to be a huge groundswell of interest in doing any of those things, though, I would say. But I found it interesting that this whole trust paradox is not resolved at all. So audiences say they endorse impartiality as an ideal. And that makes complete sense to me, particularly your point, which I agree with. You’re talking about journalists starting Substack newsletters and all that kind of business. I see it not just that — I see it more as, who do we trust? We don’t trust an algorithm to create news, do we? We trust a journalist writing the news. And that plays very clearly to your point about people connecting with a journalist much more than the medium they’re writing for. So hence many people have moved on from the employment in the newspaper to running their own newsletter, some people making money at it, doing quite well. I think the Reuters report also mentions something: 48% globally say they prefer news without a point of view. I agree, I’m in that group, I have to tell you. I don’t want editorialized news. I do not want to read news that’s dressed up as news, and it’s not, it’s an opinion piece. You see that a lot, particularly online. Here in the UK, we’ve got a move in regional newspapers up and down the country, many of which are owned by large monolithic organizations, that publish AI-generated content as their news stories. And we’ve talked about this before. A lot of it is the sports reports, for instance, but just generally local news. And I’d be amazed if they have a sustainable business model. Or could it be that people don’t actually care, because it’s gone beyond — “I can’t do anything about this, I don’t see any change, therefore I don’t care anymore,” so they’re looking at other places to get the news from? And therein is a paradox of your idea of doing what you proposed — creating news content. That, to me, is a smart way of doing it. Your example of the Alabama Power Company, I think, wouldn’t meet the impartiality test, no matter how good they say their content is. And I think there is the problem, then, with businesses trying to do deals or trying to cozy up to journalists: you need to have genuine impartiality. So there’s probably few business models in that mix there, I would say. But in the small town where I live, there’s only 9,000 people here, so it’s actually quite a large town by UK standards. Local media is pretty good online. There are a number of reporters I like, particularly the ones who talk about things like you mentioned — planning applications, roadworks and diversions, all that stuff. It’s good, it’s up to date, and they’re using Facebook mostly, and there are lots of groups that you can join to follow this. But that’s all individual actions and a couple of local newspapers. There’s nothing scalable in that at all. So I don’t know where this actually happens, Shel. I don’t see — people haven’t given up on what journalism should be. They probably don’t even think about the word “journalism” in all of this. They just want impartiality in their news reporting. They’ve given up on it. Is that fixable, do you think? Is there a fixable gap here?

Shel Holtz: I’m sure there is, but I don’t know what it is for the news media. I just have to think about what communicators do to get their news out in this environment. That’s what concerns me. And I think a number of things we need to do. One — it’s interesting that Cision and the companies that do the press release distribution and the contact with the reporters, they all know the reporters that work for the mainstream news outlets. Do they have the Substacks from professional journalists, or the Ghosts, or whatever service they’re using? I don’t think so. I think somebody might be able to make some money by offering a service that does what Cision does, but with those independent journalistic enterprises. But I think as communicators, we need to find the journalists who are doing that and have big followings, and start to build relationships with them, just like we have been with those who work for the newspapers and the TV news. We need to find the podcasts. Increasingly we find — and we’ve talked about this on FIR — that the interviews on podcasts make news. You want to get the word out, get on a podcast that is influential in your industry or whatever your area of subject matter expertise is that you’re dealing with. But we need to move where the trust is. And getting your news out through outlets that people don’t trust, I think, is not a viable solution. But it’s what we’re accustomed to, and it’s what agencies get paid to do. And it’s a shift that I think will be very, very slow, but we have to start.

Dan York: Greetings, Shel and Neville, and everyone of our listeners all around the world. It’s Dan, coming at you on a gorgeous sunny day, the first Saturday without rain in Shelburne, Vermont, for quite a while. So we’re enjoying it. But right now I want to talk about Mastodon, and specifically about collections and helping people get started with finding accounts to follow. This has always been a challenge, right? When you start up with a new service, you go in there, and who do you follow? What’s your feed doing? Now, Mastodon has had for a while a thing with some recommended accounts that you could follow, but those were ones that Mastodon, the central entity, put together, and they were looking for a way to do something broader. In the meantime, of course, Bluesky came out with what they called starter packs, where anybody could create a starter pack full of people of a certain topic, whatever else, and you could then discover one of these starter packs, and you could follow everybody. You’d be able to get on there and see that, and boom, your feed suddenly is full of a lot of different activity and things that were there. So people in the Fediverse were looking at what Bluesky did to make it easy, and there were several different experiments people have tried. There are actually some people calling something starter packs. There are some other people trying other different ways to go and do it. But there wasn’t something quite from the central Mastodon company until this latest 4.6 release, where it has created these collections. Now, it’s actually interesting. It’s kind of the beginning of the journey, because with this release, what they did was they made it easy to create collections. You can create them, you can have a link to share, but there’s not as much about finding them, and the rationale makes sense. They said, you know, before we can really get a lot of search and discovery working, we need to have collections. So this release, 4.6, was all about getting the mechanism to create collections out there, and then in subsequent releases, they will work on making them more searchable and discoverable, so that they could replace, for instance, the recommended accounts that Mastodon has when you first join. Now, there are a couple of interesting aspects. One criticism of Bluesky’s starter packs was that your Bluesky account could be added to one without permission. So if I wanted to create a starter pack of people I don’t like, for instance — I don’t know why you would do that, but I could. I could add accounts to something, and if you didn’t feel comfortable being part of that, maybe you don’t want to be there. There wasn’t a great mechanism when Bluesky first came out with that. So collections brings that in in a big way. When you go and add people to an account, first of all, they have to have turned on — or not turned off — a switch in the settings which allows them to be used in search and discovery. So that’s one way: if you just don’t want to be in anybody’s collections, you can turn that off, and then people will have no ability to add you to any of these kinds of collections. Now, the other aspect is, when you are added to a collection, you get a notice that you have been added, so that you can choose to remove yourself from a collection if you want to. And at any point in time, if you find that you don’t want to be part of that collection, you can go and remove yourself. So it’s a much more consent-based thing. And also, in this initial phase, they are not putting a “follow all” button. So there’s no way to just go and click on “follow all” and do it. You just have to go down through the collection and click, click, click, click — follow the people that you want to. Other note: it’s right now restricted to only 25 accounts, not the 150 that were in Bluesky starter packs. And again, partly it’s to learn and to see what was there. They found one of the criticisms of some of the Bluesky starter packs was that they became stale, with too many dead accounts. So this is partly a forcing factor to go and see what’s there, and they want to learn, and that may change over time, and we’ll have to go and take a look at what happens. But it’s very interesting. I’ve created a couple of collections. One added factor here is that Mastodon is a collection of thousands, tens of thousands, of servers, each one of which has to be running the 4.6 software for the accounts to be on it. So I could add Neville, because he was on a system that was upgraded. I couldn’t add Kjell, because the system he’s on is not upgraded. So there’s a factor here that will take some time for this to be able to work with. But it’s an interesting way to go about how do you do this form of discovery and how to work with it. So it’s called collections. If you go to my account on mastodon.social, Dan York, you’ll actually see on my profile page now there’s a link to where these collections are, and you can see them. I have kept mine public. There’s also, of course, a feature to make them unlisted so that people couldn’t find them. But it’s something interesting, something new to try, and we’ll see how this helps with the further adoption of the Fediverse and Mastodon. Speaking of Fediverse and Mastodon and other stuff, I want to just tell you that there’s a woman out there named Elena Rossini — she’s from Italy, but living in Paris — who’s been writing some amazing articles right now about the service called W Social. It was launched to great fanfare at the Davos meeting, where all sorts of folks are, and what’s happened in the past several weeks or so is that the accounts from Bluesky of the European Commission, its president, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Central Bank, and other different people have moved from Bluesky over to these W Social servers. There’s a lot more than I can talk about in the scope of this report, but to say that it’s a very curious thing, because the people announced this, then they seem to have seized on using Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that piece of that. They’ve launched their service. They’ve then moved their code to be closed-source, and they’re just doing a bunch of different kinds of sketchy things. They’re promoting it as a social network that will require age authentication, age verification, age assurance — I’m not sure even which term they’re using — but you have to prove your identity or provide a government ID to show your age, and they’re working with another entity called W Identity to create this. There’s a lot of splash, a lot of fanfare, but it’s turning out they haven’t actually been talking to people in the “atmosphere,” as it’s called, the set of people working with the AT Protocol. So I would encourage people to read the articles from Elena Rossini, and to think about what is really going on here, and is this actually something that will provide a true, decentralized, open service for the Europeans, or is this somebody else trying to create a centralized service that happens to be Europe-based? Not clear yet. Lot of unanswered questions in all of this. I’m going to leave it there, send it back to you guys. Back to you, Shel and Neville. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.

Neville Hobson: Thanks for the report, Dan. We’ve not had a chance to listen to it, but I’m very interested to hear what you have to say with regard to W Social, because that is something I’ve been paying attention to. I signed up for it way back, some months ago now, when they first announced they were coming. I’m still on the wait list. But I’ve seen a number of reports literally raising cautionary notes about this, along the lines of what you’ve included from Elena Rossini, for instance. A really good website, by the way, I would say. So I haven’t read her report yet, but I’m keen to listen to what you have to say about this. So I’ll be doing that once we’ve published the recording.

Shel Holtz: Me too, Dan. I got home at, what, about one o’clock this morning, and I barely made it to the scheduled start of this recording. So I’ll be listening to you a little bit later. Always look forward to it, though. There is a shift going on. I suspect a lot of our listeners are living through this, whether they’ve put a label on it or not. And I read about this most recently — it’s something I’ve been aware of, but I just read this piece by Geetikka Bangia, who heads PR and corporate comms for Stryker in India. The oldest rule in our profession has flipped. Think back 20 years. The best PR people were the ones you never heard about, unless it was through a professional association, right? The Gold Quill Awards or the Silver Anvil Awards, that type of thing. They were invisible, but they were essential. We built the brands for everyone else — the CEO, the company, the product. That’s what we wanted to shine a light on, and we stayed in the shadows. That was the job of PR. In fact, if PR made the news, it meant something went wrong. Well, according to Geetikka, that rule is now dead. Today the most effective communicators are the ones publishing thought leadership on LinkedIn, speaking at conferences outside of the industry, putting their insights out in public. Her line — and I love this, because it’s pretty blunt — is, if you’re still operating like it’s 2005, “brilliant but invisible,” you’re playing a game that no longer exists. Your personal brand, she says, isn’t vanity, the way the industry used to see it. Today, it’s survival. So what changed? Social media, and LinkedIn in particular, democratized visibility. Suddenly junior people were building audiences, mid-level communicators were publishing, and employers noticed. Trust is in play here. Edelman’s data keeps showing that peers now outrank CEOs in credibility, which means your own authentic, consistent voice can actually enhance your employer’s brand — or, if you get it wrong, you can certainly damage the brand. When Bangia looks at the people who do this well, there’s a clear pattern. They add value beyond their job description. They share insights. They don’t promote themselves. They build trust. They’re not looking to build follower counts. Her example is Parag Agrawal, who built a reputation as a genuine tech thought leader with educational posts long before he became the CEO of Twitter. So his personal brand signaled expertise, not ambition. But again — and this is where it gets interesting — she’s very honest about the dark side. The line between personal opinion and professional representation is thinner than we think. And in PR, where we manage reputation for a living, our own missteps get magnified. You know the Weber Shandwick stat that nearly half a company’s reputation is attributed to its CEO? She extends that logic right down to the individual communicator. If you’re credible, your employer benefits. If you’re controversial, they pay the price. She says she’s watched comms professionals torch their employer’s reputation with a poorly timed political post — personal brand is damaged, employer brand becomes collateral damage. So we need to figure out how to navigate this. And she offers what she calls a Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much, not too little. She has four rules. Be visible but purposeful — don’t post to post. Stay opinionated but professional — you can hold strong views without being divisive. Build your brand, not your ego — be known for something valuable, like crisis management or storytelling, not just chasing virality. And this is the one I’d underline: know when to stay silent. Know when to shut up. Not every trending topic needs your take. PR people, of all people, should understand message discipline. Her bottom line is, the question isn’t whether to build your personal brand anymore, it’s how — with intention, integrity, and the understanding that in our field, your reputation isn’t just yours, it’s intertwined with everyone you represent. And the thing I want us to think about is the organizational flip side of all this, because if every employee is now a brand voice, then our job isn’t just building our own visibility, it’s helping the whole organization navigate theirs.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I remember the days — I’m sure you do, Shel — when anything anyone wanted to say about the company externally was not allowed at all. It had to go through official spokespeople. And in fact, it was a disciplinary offense if you uttered something that was quoted in the newspaper, for instance, without permission. Imagine that today still. Imagine if that was still the case today. But the landscape is utterly different to what it was in the 90s, never mind the 2000s. What Geetikka talks about is the visibility thing first, that struck me. Because back in those days, none of these platforms, none of these tools, none of these channels existed. So there was limited means by which you could talk publicly about something and attract attention to you as the person saying these things. Things changed when blogs hit the scene back in the early 2000s, where suddenly anyone could be a publisher. And we relished those times, didn’t we? We wanted everyone to be doing this. We got our wish, so we had good stuff and bad stuff. But I can’t imagine this changing. If anything, it’s going to become more microscopic, in the sense of, you are under a microscope all the time. And hence her advice, Geetikka’s counsel in this really good post, is that you need to be cognizant, very, very aware, of literally everything you do and say online. And the thing that never ceases to amaze me, Shel, is the people in responsible positions, with authoritative opinions and presences, who don’t do that. It amazes me — where someone who’s a CEO of a company, or a senior politician of some type, says something, gets all over the tabloids in particular, and that’s it, your reputation’s toast. And before you know it, after a few months, that person’s gone, probably. But there is damage. And in fact, Philip Bourne has talked about this quite a bit too, the damage resulting from loose lips, if you like. So it is something to pay attention to. And I like the way she says that personal branding isn’t about becoming an influencer — heaven forbid — it’s about being known for something valuable. I utterly agree with that. And I think, if some of the people I know who were journalists or reporters on a national newspaper of some type, or were senior people in organizations who are now gone independent themselves, who retain the credibility they’ve earned from their previous experiences and roles —

Shel Holtz: A lane for that, right?

Neville Hobson: Right, exactly right. That’s carried forward to what they’re currently doing, because they are still trusted by people. So their reputation hasn’t changed, because they haven’t changed the consistency of how they walk the talk of their brand, if you will, as a means to talk about their client or their employer. So it makes common sense to me, much of this. Yet I am constantly surprised when I see examples of common nonsense being spouted, where, you know, “What were they thinking?” I say to myself every time I see it. So “know when to stay silent” is a very good one. And there are far too many people with verbal diarrhea, it seems to me, who have an opinion on everything and they will spout it. And I see that myself, particularly on LinkedIn, as literally, “Look at me, look at me, I’ve got these things to say, and it’s great, and I know all these topics.” That’s what I’m seeing. So that’s our landscape, Shel.

Shel Holtz: Well, yeah. And there are figures circulating out there that something like 70% of employers now consider a personal brand more important than a resume. And even LinkedIn has researched that people with active personal brands see nearly 50% more inbound opportunities than those without. So this is something that you want to do. And the other thing is that, as other employees in the organization and other parts of it are doing this, this is something to coordinate. We’ve got a guy who does an occasional post, maybe monthly. He’s out on one of our most important projects, and he does these great posts about milestones they’ve reached and what it took to do it. We end up sharing it through our advocacy platform. Now, what if other employees were doing that? The advocacy platform is one thing — it gives employees our content to share in their communities. But I’d love to see some of our subject matter experts, the people who really understand concrete, become — their personal brand in social media is now concrete, that sort of thing. And then we can coordinate that, and we can leverage all that as PR opportunities, and then we can share that in the advocacy tool for other employees to amplify. If people are doing this, communicators need to get their arms around it, not just manage their own personal brand.

Neville Hobson: They get known for it. They get known for it. Yeah, lots to learn from this, I’d say, Shel. Okay, so sound advice, very nice article. Now let’s talk about a reputation crisis — a PR crisis, but a reputation one. And this is something quite extraordinary that I want to share here. Sometimes a single incident cuts through the noise and forces a conversation that the industry probably would have been having for a while. Recently, a week or so back, that incident involved a UK discount voucher website called Wowcher, a three-year-old boy, and a crocodile enclosure in a zoo. Let me give you the background, because if you’re not based in the UK, you may not have followed this disturbing story, although I have seen it talked about in media around the world, actually.

Shel Holtz: I read this on CNN and The New York Times, so this has made the rounds.

Neville Hobson: Right, yeah. So on Thursday, the 18th of June, so not long ago, a toddler three years old was pushed by a stranger into an enclosure containing Nile and saltwater crocodiles at a zoo in Huntingdonshire in England. The child suffered serious injuries and was taken to hospital in Cambridge, where he remains in a critical but stable condition. It’s a deeply distressing story. A family’s worst nightmare played out in public, and a news event that dominated the UK media cycle for days. It gets worse, Shel. It really gets worse. Two days later, on the Saturday, just two days on, Wowcher sent a marketing email to its customer distribution list — so we’re probably looking at tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people on that list. The subject line of the email read: “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid!” Exclamation mark. Well, as you can imagine, the reaction was immediate, universal, and unsparing. Marketing professionals, commentators, and members of the public condemned it without reservation. There was no debate about —

Shel Holtz: Russell Brand thought it was hysterical.

Neville Hobson: We don’t talk about Russell Brand, sorry. There was no debate about whether it was misjudged. There was no defense offered from any quarter. Just about all mainstream media in the UK, including the dozens of regional press outlets, covered the story. It featured in the news podcasts and across social media. LinkedIn lit up. Email marketing specialist Beth O’Malley, whose post on the subject drew widespread engagement, described it as reflecting a wider problem: that the drive to get the open, to get the click, to make the metrics go up, has overtaken something more fundamental. As one commenter put it simply, whoever was involved in creating and sending that email forgot that there are real human beings on the receiving end. Wowcher issued an unreserved apology. They described the wording as unacceptable, said it should never have been written and was never approved for use, and committed to urgently reviewing and strengthening their creative approval and sign-off processes. Which, of course, raises the obvious question: if it was never approved, how did it reach what is presumably a very large mailing list? We don’t know the full answer to that yet. There has been speculation that AI may have been involved in generating the content, and that’s possible. But I want to be clear about something. Whether a human wrote those words, or an AI generated them and a human failed to catch them, the root cause is the same. It’s a failure of humanity. You hear this word “humanity” applied a lot, but it’s a real word, and it’s worth paying attention to. A failure of empathy. A failure to pause for even a moment and ask the most basic of questions: how would the family of that little boy feel if they opened their inbox and read this? That’s not an AI problem. That’s a people problem. And it sits at the heart of a broader crisis in email marketing culture, one where the relentless pressure to perform, to stand out, to optimize for attention, has gradually crowded out the human judgment that should be the last line of defense, if not the first. So here’s the question I have. In a world where content is created faster than ever, approved under pressure, and distributed at scale, who is actually responsible for ensuring that basic humanity remains in the loop? And what does it take for an organization to lose sight of that so utterly completely?

Shel Holtz: It’s unbelievable. Just staggering. I have no problem with newsjacking — this is the term that David Meerman Scott coined. He wrote a book about it. He had great examples of it. I even have a Claude Cowork skill set up that runs at 4 a.m. every Monday morning to scour the news for stories that I can leverage and write on their coattails. I haven’t found one yet that I’d actually want to use, but it’s giving me some interesting stuff, and I’m convinced that one of these days it will. I’m tweaking it every now and then based on the results I see. I am a fan of newsjacking, but for God’s sake, use your head before you go with one of these things. Was the wording clever? Yeah. It was also insensitive and inhuman and horrible. I don’t know what else to say about this. I will comment, though, on the apology. I love the fact that it was an unreserved apology. They were unequivocal in their condemnation of it. But I think they needed to end the apology by saying, “We will report on the steps that we are taking in order to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, and we will continue to report on what we learn about how this happened,” and then follow up on that. Just to leave it to say “we’re going to change our procedures” is woefully inadequate. I think people need to know that you’re actually taking the steps that you say you will. The trust gap is huge here. After you have done something like that, just to say, “We’re sorry, we’re fixing it,” is not enough.

Neville Hobson: Yet it looks like people are willing to accept that. So, I mean, this is a business that is hugely successful. They do really imaginative, creative TV advertising campaigns. And the play on the name Wowcher, you know, “voucher” with a “wow” — I mean, it’s smart, it’s very clever.

Shel Holtz: Sure. Well, it’s like Groupon — “group” and “coupon,” right?

Neville Hobson: Yeah, very clever. Yet — what bothers me, I think, is, are we as a society — you know, condemnation was universal, people expressed horror at what they did, all that, and the poor little boy was savaged by crocodiles — yeah, they’re still buying stuff from Wowcher. They’re still doing business with Wowcher.

Shel Holtz: No boycotts, huh?

Neville Hobson: I’m not suggesting, for instance, that they shouldn’t be doing all those things. But isn’t what happened so grotesque that you’d think it would stimulate people to be, “That’s it, I’m not doing anything more with this company”? And the campaigns online — I’ve not seen anything like that. So what does that tell us about our society, is my kind of rhetorical question, I expect. But I think the point that Beth O’Malley raises — that this reflects a culture in email marketing where anything that drives opens and clicks is tacitly approved — is worth looking at. Is this a Wowcher problem? Or is it symptomatic of how the entire performance-metrics model of email marketing has just normalized a race to the bottom in judgment and taste? What do you think?

Shel Holtz: I think you’re looking at two sides of this issue. The first is the creation side, where all of what Beth O’Malley talks about comes into play. And yeah, I think she’s right. I think the drive for clicks is overwhelming the application of judgment and common sense. The other side is the reaction, where people are horrified for 15 minutes and then they continue to use the product. They’re not boycotting. It’s not a revocation of their license to operate. So I think on the societal side of this, I wholly agree. I think we tolerate a lot more these days. We tolerate corruption in government a lot more these days. I mean, Vice President J.D. Vance was on some show — this happened while I was traveling, so I just read it in passing — but basically he said, if what Richard Nixon did that cost him his presidency happened today, it wouldn’t last in the news cycle for 15 minutes. And I’ve read news outlets say, you know, he’s probably right. It’s not that what he did wasn’t illegal and probably should have ended his presidency. It’s just that today people would have shrugged and gone, “Yeah, just business as usual. Those marketing guys, they’re terrible, but I love their product.” So yeah, I think the bar has been lowered considerably for what we’re willing to — I mean, outrage is everywhere, so I’m reluctant to say “outraged about” — but what we’re willing to act on, that bar has dropped precipitously, I think.

Neville Hobson: ‘Tis.

Shel Holtz: Yep. Let’s move on to our final report, which is really fascinating, because there are two studies that have reached entirely different conclusions. And I have to say, this casts any study that I look at into doubt when I see this. So let’s take a look at these, because they’re both studies that would be of interest to anybody engaged in internal comms. A Fresh Intranet Employee Attention Recession report, which came out in May, found that just 12% of employees read internal communications in full. That’s 12%. The other 88% are skimming, filtering, and ignoring it unless a manager flags it, or they’re handing it to an AI tool and reading the summary instead — at the same time that they’re saying, “I don’t like AI.” Now, here’s the part that makes that number really uncomfortable: 91% of those same employees say the communications feel relevant to them, always or most of the time. So this isn’t disengagement. These are people who want to engage, who say the content speaks to them, but the sheer volume has made reading the whole thing an unsustainable act. Mike Klein, writing this up for Strategic — a great magazine, if you’re not reading Strategic, you probably should — points to the cause. The single biggest factor in whether someone reads a message in full isn’t the subject, the sender, or the format. It’s the cumulative weight of how many other messages arrive before it. And the internal communications index backs this up. Most employees now have ten minutes or fewer per day for internal comms. The most common answer is five minutes, and that window’s been shrinking every year since 2023. Now, here’s the twist on this, and it’s why I wanted to pair these. A second study, from Corbett and Reworked, which Chuck Gose’s ICology was involved with, found almost the opposite. Half of workers say the volume of messages they get is about right, and yet 44% still tune out. Chuck Gose’s read on this is the scarier one. This isn’t overwhelm, it’s passive disengagement. And when employees stop noticing that they’re overwhelmed, your satisfaction scores start lying to you. 89% of workers are only moderately confident that they’re not missing something important. So, which is it? Too much volume, or something else? And I think the answer is both, and they’re not actually in conflict. Volume genuinely destroys attention, but cutting volume alone won’t fix a tune-out that’s really about relevance and trust. Because when you dig into what makes people actually pay attention, it’s specific. 57% engage when a message is timely or urgent. 56% when there’s a clear action required. What makes them tune out is repetition. And I think that’s important, because a lot of communicators operate under that formula that says you have to tell people something seven times before it sticks. They also tune out because of vagueness, and content that could have been sent to anyone. There’s a brilliant one-line test in the report: before you hit send, you should be able to finish the sentence, “After reading this, employees will ___.” If you can’t fill in that blank, the message isn’t ready. And the finding that crosses every one of these studies is about who’s talking. 73% of workers say the sender is the number one factor in whether they trust a message. “From the leadership team” doesn’t cut it. People trust people, not titles. Which leads straight to the manager gap. Across all of these reports, managers are the most trusted, most critical link in the chain, and the most under-supported. 87% of comms pros call manager capability their single biggest risk, and fewer than one in four organizations actually give managers a toolkit. And there’s one more thing I want us to really pay attention to: Mike Klein’s argument that we’re measuring the wrong thing entirely. 70% of comms teams are still tracking opens, clicks, and page views. Only 12% measure anything close to business impact. As Mike puts it, reach without understanding isn’t communication, it’s noise. So the question he leaves hanging, and I’ll leave it here with you, Neville, is whether the profession responds to all of this by refining its content or finally changing what it measures.

Neville Hobson: That last option — changing what it measures — is the one that interests me, because AMEC is a big proponent of, let me call it, proper measurement. Opens and clicks don’t cut it, the same way how many impressions something has got — eyeballs. It’s like, I don’t care how many eyeballs saw the content. I want to know what they did when they saw the content. Did they just move on? Did they click something? What did they do?

Shel Holtz: Yeah, outcomes-based.

Neville Hobson: So I think it’s most interesting. And reading about the other survey that you mentioned that was in the other publication you shared, ICology, that had some interesting findings in there too that struck me as worth attention. You mentioned one: direct managers are the missing link most organizations keep overlooking. Employees trust their manager more than anyone else — yeah, absolutely. But I found this one interesting, the shadow comms finding. That’ll resonate, if you listened to the story earlier, with anyone who’s worked in internal comms. They’ll recognize it immediately: when official channels fail, employees don’t stop getting information. They just go somewhere else — Slack DMs, WhatsApp groups, text messages, hallway conversations, all of those things. So that’s shadow comms. That’s a good way of describing it. Not approved channels. But it has ever been thus, hasn’t it, Shel, for goodness’ sake? It’s not new. The tools and the means have shifted over time, but this has always been the case. You’re going to find other ways of finding out what Harry down the hall thinks about something and share your thoughts with him. And now you’ll do it on WhatsApp. Before, you might mosey down to his cubicle and surreptitiously chat with him. Look, if you haven’t seen the show The Office —

Shel Holtz: About the —

Neville Hobson: — but it’s nothing new in all of this. And yet we still don’t seem to be addressing these things. I wonder why that could be. Could it be it requires some big changes to happen in how you act as a manager, how the leaders behave, and so forth, and indeed how regular employees themselves behave? That’s a leadership issue, it seems to me, first and foremost. So there’s plenty to digest in both these stories. Mike Klein’s piece is a good one, I agree with you. And I think “not measuring the wrong things” is excellent. And Richard Bagnall at AMEC would have some views on that, I’m sure. Are we measuring the wrong things? So plenty to take away from this show.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, absolutely. And the shadow communications has always been real, and more so now that there are digital tools that enable it. How many communicators have mapped their influence networks? If you know who people go to when they want to know about something, then you can reach out to them and say, “What are people asking about?” And you can figure out what communication has been missed. But if you don’t know who those people are, you can’t do that. So we’ve been talking about mapping employee influence networks. I know Katie Macaulay likes seven different networks. If you can only do three: who do people go to when they need to know how to do something? Who do people go to when they need to know if something is true? And who do people go to if they want a reaction to what they’ve heard? So, “How do I do this? What’s going on? And should I trust this?” Those are three separate influence networks, and people tend to go to different people for those things. But if you can do some research and find out who those people are, then you can get ahead of this game. But I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been thinking about this. I’ve been thinking about using our intranet tool for a greater targeting of information to the audiences that care about it, and not sending it to the people who don’t, so that our communication is more relevant. And I have been thinking about our next internal comms survey. I’m going to rethink the questions around these issues, and then I’m going to think about a substantial change to our internal comms that may be phased in over a couple of years. But I absolutely see this applying to us. We have people out on project sites who are on ridiculous time schedules, and how much time they have to read a 2,000-word article is none. I don’t need to do the research to know that. So this needs a serious rethink.

Neville Hobson: What to do, indeed.

Shel Holtz: Yep. And that’ll wrap up this episode of For Immediate Release. We hope that you will comment on any or all of the stories that we have discussed today. Send email to [email protected], drop a recording in there and we’ll play it. It’s been forever since we’ve had an audio comment. We make it easy: if you go to the FIR Podcast Network website, you’ll see SpeakPipe voicemail on the right-hand side of the page, and all you have to do is record. You don’t need your own recording equipment for that. And then we’ll get it. You can leave comments on the post on this at firpodcastnetwork.com, or on LinkedIn, or on Facebook, or Threads, or Bluesky, where we share the release of each episode. We want to hear from you about these. And Vincent, we want to continue to hear from you. We enjoy your comments. We would love an audio comment from Vincent one of these days. And the next monthly episode will drop on Monday, July 27th. We’re planning to record that on Saturday, July 25th. But in between now and then, look for our short midweek episodes.

Neville Hobson: We have an interview coming up with Pete Blackshaw.

Shel Holtz: We do. Pete Blackshaw, who — I believe he was the first person we ever interviewed on FIR Interviews, wasn’t he?

Neville Hobson: No, he wasn’t the first, but he was in 2005 when we started. We’ve interviewed him three times, up to about 2009, and now we’ve got this long gap till now.

Shel Holtz: So looking forward to that. He’s talking about using artificial intelligence in order to figure out which product you want to buy, as opposed to other mechanisms, and why it’s better. I have lots of questions for him. We’re not going to get to them all. I’m sure you do too, but —

Neville Hobson: We do. Yeah, we’re interviewing Pete on Monday the 29th of June, and that interview should be published within a week or so of that.

Shel Holtz: Looking forward to that. And that will be a 30 for For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #520: AI’s PR Meltdown appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies have corporate values. Most companies get them wrong. In episode 4 of “On the Same Page,” Shel and Steve look at what works, what doesn’t, and why, with examples and tales from their own experiences.

Transcript:

Steve Crescenzo

Hey Shel.

Shel Holtz

Steve, how you doing?

Steve Crescenzo

Doing good, doing good. We’re doing this on a record I’m doing this on a Saturday, which is fun. well, I mean it’s it’s what else am I gonna do? It’s too early to drink, so what yeah, this is this is good time spent. but I’m really glad I’m excited about our topic. More importantly this this week. we decided to talk about values, corporate values. And I think there’s there’s two camps of people when it comes to values. There’s people that really believe they can drive the culture and affect how people feel at work and how they work and how they treat each other and

Shel Holtz

Yeah, is it?

Steve Crescenzo

All that good stuff. you know, and there are companies where that happens. I I’m not gonna say there’s none. Second camp is people who just think they’re completely worthless and they just are posters on a wall and nobody pays attention to them, nobody can name what they are. And I’m in the third camp. I think they do some damage at some a lot of companies for two reasons. Number one, they’re they’re too generic. You look at it, I could pull up any and it’s it’s integrity, respect, excellence, agility. Teamwork, putting people for you it’s all the same crap. So it’s so generic that everyone just agrees with them, and of course who’s not gonna agree with that? the second thing though is that if you don’t live your values, if it’s I I go into so many corporate communications departments at companies where one of the values is innovation, and their intranet looks like it’s from nineteen ninety five. they’re not innovative. they’re in a you know, so agility, no no. Transparency, absolutely not. Not so you gotta poster on a wall with this list of stupid words, and everybody sees what’s in front of them and says, That’s not us. That’s not us. So I think they actually might do more harm than good.

Shel Holtz

Well l let me read you some corporate values. these are from one company, these are their values integrity, respect, excellence, and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

For the swords I said. Who’s it?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. You see anything wrong with those, other than the fact that they’re generic?

Steve Crescenzo

I I think that’s great. I’m glad they operate that way. That’s great. you making

Shel Holtz

Yeah, well that’s Enron. Yeah, it is. Liv they were literally Enron’s values. excellence and teamwork.

Steve Crescenzo

teamwork. That’s classic. Yeah, that’s that’s my experience too. I I’m I’m with that I’m with I’m with that example.

Shel Holtz

Well, we will talk about that. We will talk about your other issues too, because I think they’re spot on. But I do believe that when it’s done well and done right, they can really rock an organization.

Steve Crescenzo

Not gonna disagree with that, but let’s talk about it.

Shel Holtz

So before we jump into the values discussion, I did want to share one comment we got over on LinkedIn where I shared the last episode where we talked about employee voice. This is from Vincent Bruneau, who is commenting pretty regularly on our show and also on my other podcast for immediate release. and he’s always got he’s he’s he’s got great stuff. I I I want to know more about him. but he says in terms of employee voice, the most effective employee listening strategies don’t start with asking more questions. They start with demonstrating that previous feedback led to meaningful change. When people can see the connection between their input and organizational decisions, participation becomes much easier to sustain. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. That’s why that’s the point you made, is that we don’t have a survey fatigue. We have a nothing happens when we take a survey fatigue.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, the way I heard it at a conference was it’s it’s not survey fatigue, it’s bullshit fatigue. yak because if we if we survey you and then don’t tell you what the survey results were or how things are changing as a result of that, that’s bullshit.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, you know, Cindy does probably, you know, she’s she’s our measurement arm of Crescent Communications. She does, you know, fifty surveys a year. And her first question is, Why are you asking that question if you don’t if you if you it’s ac if you don’t have the power to change something? And they do it. They load the survey up with a j a wish list of things and they can’t change any of it. And they still ask and nothing happens and then they do it again the next year.

Shel Holtz

And nobody wants to take that survey. Right. Yeah. All right. So let’s jump into values. And I think a good place to start is what are corporate values supposed to be? And the way I see it, the way I’ve always heard that values are supposed to be presented to employees, is these are the underlying beliefs that drive decisions and behavior in the company. These are the things that we believe. And how do you get to that? I I I think, you know, first of all.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, exactly.

Shel Holtz

It has to be shared between the leaders and the employees. Nothing is going to turn employees off more than leadership coming to them and saying, hey, everybody, these are our values. And employees look at it and say, well, first of all, I don’t see those values reflected in decisions or behaviors. And second of all, they’re not my values. I worked for an organization once and I left them in 1993. They have changed owners a couple of times. I don’t think anybody is there. Who was there when I was there? So I’m going to go ahead and name them. It was Allergan, a pharmaceutical company. where yeah, they came up with the values and and I wasn’t involved. I was director of communications, but this was like the executive committee. And they came to me and said, we’ve decided these are the corporate values, go communicate these. And I looked at them and I I said, do we have employee buy-in on these? And they almost literally said, Employee buy-in, hey, this is my way or the highway. If they don’t like these, they can go work somewhere else.

Steve Crescenzo

I remember that. Yeah. my God. Shell, so we’ve done this kind of work with five or six companies over the years, mission, vision, and values. And you know, our we they they hired us to help them write these statements in these words. And our thing was we always said, we’re not gonna do it unless we can talk to employees first. We’re gonna do focus groups. So this company sent us to London, Paris, Singapore. We did focus groups globally to get to the mission, vision values, what people really believed, what was in their core, what brought them to work every day. You know, we did. Cindy led the focus groups and she’s good at that, and we got such great stuff. Then it came time to present it to the C suite. This was a big company. And here’s why everything ends up sucking so bad. It’s all written by committee. Like we we gave them three great examples pulled from their own employees that were unique. You couldn’t pull them out and give them to any other company. They were, they were good. And by the time we walked out of that half day session, they had been watered down. Because yeah, you had eight eight guys in there, eight guys and two women, and they all had their own ideas and they all just wanted to be safe. Well, safe. Yeah, they all always default to safety. Like, let’s just be safe. That’s why you get integrity. Who’s gonna argue with integrity? Transparency, who’s gonna argue with that? Well, by the time I d I don’t even know what they ended up with, but I know that they watered it way down from what we gave them. And our communications people loved it. Our clients loved us. We worked with them again and again and again. But when you’re up against that C suite in that that lemming like thing like to not take a chance to just be safe and you know and they wanna be kinda corporate and we gotta be serious and that’s where it all falls apart. It’s writing by committee. You wanna have values. I mean it just it’s really hard.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and another place this falls apart is what you mentioned at the outset, which is that the behaviors don’t match the values. I’ll tell you, I was doing a focus group with employees of a technology company. It was in their Los Angeles office. They’re headquartered up here in Silicon Valley, but this was in their LA office. And their values were printed on the back of the security badge that they all wore on lanyards around their necks. And I said, What do you think about those? And they laughed. I literally laughed out loud. And I said, Okay, tell me about that. And one of them turned his badge around and he read off the values. He says, You see all of these? There was a guy who was just promoted to executive vice president and he violated every single one of these. He he he got the car and the stock options and the huge bonus potential. And he violated every one of these, but he blew his numbers away. So

Steve Crescenzo

Ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Every employee in this company knows that we can do what these things say or we can do what gets us ahead based on what we see actually happen in the organization. And that’s where values become a source of incredible cynicism and derision.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, yeah, I I I can I I can tell three or four different clients that we’ve had. One of the one of the values was transparency. no, I’m sorry, one of the values was innovation. I have a transparency story too. was innovation and ri risk taking. You know, that was the that was in the values, that was in the then we did focus groups with employees and they’re like, You’re they’re out of their mind. If you make a mistake around here, you’re punished. Like I and you’re not gonna you’re you’re not allowed to fail forward. You’re not allowed to try things. I mean, you’re you supposedly are. But you’re gonna spend time and money doing something, you’re gonna go after what you know is gonna work. You’re where they’re not being innovative. So it’s it’s preached up here at the top, and it’s not happening down there. The other one is transparency, right? Everyone’s got that one lately. I was working for a big oil company, and transparency was one of the values, and I was doing focus groups, and everyone kept saying it I we just don’t feel leadership is transparent. We don’t think they’re transparent. Transparent, we don’t think it kept coming up. The number one theme out of like fifteen focus groups. So I go to give my report to the communicator and he loves it. Then we got to take it to the next level to a bit one of the leaders, not yet the big guy. And he looks and he goes, stops me like six slides in and says, You’ve already mentioned lack of transparency three times, and that’s not the case. I said, Well, that that’s what I heard. I mean, I I did fifteen talking, I talked to 110 people or whatever. And he goes, No, that’s not the case though. They’re they just don’t understand what we’re telling We we are very transparent. I’m like, all right, I can see exactly how much good this audit’s gonna do. And it’s just it’s it’s so it just doesn’t happen up there often enough to make a difference down here where people are doing the work.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and you know, when you’re sharing things transparently, and I this is a bit of a digression. It also needs to be relevant. I did work with a media company whose name everybody listening or watching this podcast would recognize in a heartbeat. And I was interviewing their CEO, who’s very famous, and he said, we actually don’t need employee communications. He says, you know, the cachet of working here. Is is all we really need because people go out at night and say, I’ll tell you when we stop recording. But I went out and did the focus groups and I heard the same thing i i in every focus group. and what they were saying was they keep talking to us about our international expansion. And I am a producer on a US-based show.

Steve Crescenzo

Well now I I don’t know who it is.

Shel Holtz

International expansion doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to be involved in that. There are other things I want them to be transparent about. I don’t ever hear about that. And then what they said was every year we’re told what our financial goals are. And from January to October, everything is great. Everything is rosy. we get these all company updates where they tell us how wonderful everything is. Then in October, we’re far behind budget and we have to

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

Take measures to to to fix things. And I asked this of the CEO when I had my follow-up call with him. And he said, Well, if we told employees what was going on earlier in the year, in 10 minutes it would be on the related blogs and all of this stuff would be out in public and it would affect our share price. And I said, Okay, so your employees don’t trust you. And you don’t trust your employees, but you don’t need employee communications. Yeah, it was that was a I I went in there thinking that was going to be a fun gig and it it it ended up being really, really challenging. But anyway, another problem with values is a lot of leaders make them aspirational. You know, so employees in the focus group say they’re not transparent. And leadership says, No, that’s what we’re working toward. That’s not values, right? That’s a maybe a strategic plan.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, no, no, no. That’s that could be a vision. That could be yeah, something else, but it’s not values are how what we do every day right now. What are our values?

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What are the what are the beliefs that underscore everything that we do, every decision, the way we behave, the way we treat each other? You mentioned innovation. Innovation is one of the values at my company, but it’s real. Nobody doubts this. We do very complex, yeah, we yeah, we do very complex things that other, you know, some of our competitors turn down these projects, saying that can’t be done.

Steve Crescenzo

no, that’s what yeah.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we we did one it was a hotel in San Francisco that we built and the footprint was ridiculous. There was no place for staging. you had a building right abutting where the back was and two abutting where the side was like a vacant lot between two high rises and the building on the street behind it, right there. no place to put a crane. I mean, all kinds of issues and we innovated ways. To do I’ll tell you one great innovation story if I can digress a little on this. We we built the California Academy of Sciences, and there were two things in that building that were challenging. And one of them was that we needed fire suppression systems in a not a vacuum-sealed room, but you know, an airtight room. And this ended up being a challenge. And somebody said, Well, you know, who lives in that kind of environment is people on submarines. So we went to a submarine manufacturer to find out how they did it. the other one was in this simulated rainforest. Yeah, the other one was the rainforest it in this dome had this sort of curving walkway that you could it it started at the top and winds its way down. And you see, there’s no stairs that do this. What does it? And somebody looked at the design and said, you know what it looks like?

Steve Crescenzo

That’s that’s that’s cool. That’s a great story. That yeah, I’m

Shel Holtz

It looks like a roller coaster. So we worked with a roller coaster company on this walk. So this is things other people go, we you can’t do that. And that’s innovation. And you know I that’s relevant to the people in the organization. And yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s cool. Yeah. Yeah, you know so we we were lucky enough to do work with Sandia Labs. and you remember any old days Dan Dan Baum? He wrote he wrote like a funny corporate column in the in the in the Sandia Lab News. And he was like a Mike Roykko level comic columnist. But anyway, I digress. He’s retired. But we went on there innovation’s one of their values, and of course Sandia Labs. They’re they’re making weapons and and they’re

Shel Holtz

I did some work with Seth. They’re great. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

They have to be innovative, right? So innovation’s all over the place and it’s a value and it’s it’s really driven into the DNA. But then what w if you had to guess in the United States, what’s the most innovative healthcare organization in the in the United States?

Shel Holtz

Mayo clinic would would come to the top of my mind. Mayo clinic. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

If you think Mail Client? Yeah, exactly. That’s one of our clients. And there’s a one he’s retired now, I think, but think he retired just last year. Hoy Cinemore was one of the best corporate editors in in my in in that I’ve ever stated him. He was a brilliant writer, brilliant editor. And he go and he and he measured everything. Every article he would measure the you know, everything. How long they stayed in the page, metro opens, clicks, w everything. He goes, Steve, if I ever want to guarantee that nobody reads a story that I write. somebody else writes, I’ll put the word innovation in the headline. It’s just so beaten to death. It’s beaten to death. And Mail Clinics as innovative as anybody gets, but they don’t talk about it all the time. They they just tell stories. They they would tell that story. And they might say the word innovation in there, but they don’t constantly talk about how innovative we are because

Shel Holtz

No, no, no. You can’t beat people over the head with this stuff. in our internal comms department, we have a test. What value or values does this article reinforce? Doesn’t mean we put the value in the headline or even in the story. But it has to align with at least one of in some way. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

I love it. Shut up. And I have seen companies in the in the employee on the internet, back when back in print even, that have a little icon for each value and they would just stick the icon next to it. So it wasn’t in the headline, it wasn’t like that, but it it was a way to kind of reinforce that, you know, these things matter. This is th this is this is what we’re saying and this is how we’re working and that’s how they blend together.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the other thing that I like about where I work is that I know because I’ve been in the room a few times, that the executive leadership tests decisions against the values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

That’s awesome. So that’s a g that’s great. I mean, if that more people did that, they wouldn’t be so either useless or harmful. When I was doing the focus when Sydney was doing the focus troops for that large company globally, one of the things she would ask was now we’re gonna talk about now I want to talk about values. We talk about mission, vision, values, but you know, corporate values is a very strange concept, she would say, because there’s fifty thousand people in this company. How can they possibly all have the same values? Now think about your personal values. Which what are your values, Shell? I know yours. You’re you’re kind, you’re a deadhead, you take care of people, you mentor people, you’re generous. Those are your values. Always have been, always will. not everybody has those values. I would argue that certain politicians today certainly do not have those values. So a value should I why what do I a value is valuable when it forces choices. You know what I mean? Like it’s gotta force choices.

Shel Holtz

Exactly.

Steve Crescenzo

If you’re if one of your values is transparency, there are going to be some leaders that don’t agree with that and they may want to go work somewhere else. If one of your values is speed and agility, and you’ve got a worker who is precise and he came from a Swiss watch company and he’s not the kind of worker that likes to go move fast and break things, as all the tech bros say. Like they should values should force people to make decisions. Like, is this the kind of company I want to work with?

Shel Holtz

Well, it should force leadership. It should force leadership to make decisions too. And there’s there’s a great example one you know, one of the archetypal crisis communication examples, case studies, is the Tylenol tampering. It was right there in Chicago where you live. and yeah, you know, it’s taught in every business school. we look at that through rose colored glasses. I was talking to somebody who was there at Johnson and Johnson

Steve Crescenzo

Right. Well yeah, that’s the main thing. god, yeah. on there, yeah.

Shel Holtz

At the time that happened. And yeah, it was was saying, you know, everybody says this was this immediate thing that the board decided, that the executive team decided. It actually took three days and it took a lot of harping from I can’t remember his name, but he ran PR back then in the company. But what he kept telling them was, you know, because they they only wanted to pull the product in Chicago. You pull it nationwide, that’s a real hit to earnings. that’s going to affect the shareholders, and that’s bad.

Steve Crescenzo

really?

Shel Holtz

and his point, well, he had two points. One was if there’s an incident outside of Chicago, it’ll kill us if we leave the product on the shelves. But the other thing is, if you look at our credo, they called it a credo, but it was their values, it was their beliefs, was that our patients come first, our employees come second, the communities in which we operate come third, and shareholders come last. And if we pull

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

product only in Chicago and leave it up when there’s a risk in the rest of the country, that’s not what we say our values are. We’re putting the shareholders first. So they ended up agreeing. They pulled the product nationwide. They took a huge hit to their bottom line, but they innovated the safety seal. They reintroduced the product with a safety seal. No other pain reliever had this. Not only did they get their own customers back, but they got a bunch of customers who had been buying competitor

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, good.

Shel Holtz

Products because the competitors didn’t have safety seals. Shareholders made out like bandits. Take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the bottom line will take care of itself, you know. but you have to live your values. And I think this is why crisis tabletop exercises at least twice a year are so important because it builds the muscle memory when you’re in the midst of a crisis and have to make decisions really fast. You have to test them against your values. Right? I mean value should cost something.

Steve Crescenzo

without a doubt. Values should cost something. Like I I don’t know what Target’s values are. but I’m sure I’m I’m sure they’re I’m sure somewhere in there I’m sure they violated them when they didn’t speak up what was happening in Min Minneapolis. I’m quite sure that they value they they violated seven or six six or seven of their values. you know what you know who actually get another copy that gets it right, Shell is right in your neighborhood and you might not like because they, you know, they’re utility and nobody really likes the utilities. And they they yeah, PG and E. We’re doing a lot of work with them right now. through with Brad Whitworth over there and and the rest of the team. And we went out there and we gave a speech to 600 of their managers. And Patty Poppy is the CEO, and she led off. And then I fought we follow Cindy and I followed her, and she was just fantastic. I I I’ve been blown away by some really special CEOs in my life. mostly I’m disgusted by them, to be honest. but this one she blew me away. She was so transparent.

Shel Holtz

P G and E.

Steve Crescenzo

And real and authentic. And the 600 managers, you could just tell the that the culture in that room was vibrant and it was there. And you know, they they have values, and their values are their values are very actually very unique. They’re what was it? I forgot curiosity. There there were good values. but they also have you you talked a little bit about values being aspirational. So they have their values, which are cool, curious. all sorts of i I’ll remember later. but then they have what they call their stands. That’s this is what we’re gonna we’re gonna where we’re gonna take a stand, what we’re gonna make a stand on. And their stands are everyone and everything is always safe. If everyone you work for utility, well Shell, you’re in construction. Everything is safety, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah. S yeah, second most dangerous occupation in the country is is construction. Oil and gas.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I don’t with the first. well, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone and everything is always safe. Aspirational, right? Catastrophic wildfires shall stop. It’s almost like biblical. Is it it is enjoyable to work with and for PG and E. Clean and resilient energy for all. Our work shall create prosperity for our customers and investors. You know what? I would look at that if you didn’t know I didn’t know the backstory there and who she is and what she does. I’d be like, that’s they’re full, that’s just words, words. But they’re not with her. They’re not. They they she

Shel Holtz

Yeah. But they’re also not values. They’re they’re not trying to convince people this is what we this these underscore our behavior and activity today. They’re they’re aspirational and they’re separating those from their values. Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Exactly. And that’s that’s why I love it. And then but then the the values come into play and then the the strategic initiatives are tied to those two things and it’s all very mapped out and and smart and it makes makes a difference. I mean the the employees feel c connected. And you know what’s funny is when Patty Poppy came on board there, you know, they were losing money, they were they were in dire straits, they had gone through some I think lawsuits or whatever, I don’t even know. but she goes, If you came here for me just to turn the books around, I’m not your girl. I’m not your I’m not your person. I’m here to change the culture of this company. And she did. And that’s why I feel bad saying all values suck, because when they’re right, like Southwest Airlines used to get it right. I’m not sure if they still do. When they used to get it right, I remember having dinner with Ginger Hard, she just passed away recently. Did you hear that?

Shel Holtz

I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear that.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, I saw it on LinkedIn. She was a wonderful woman. She headed up all of employee communications for Southwest Airlines. And I had dinner with her once. And I said, What is it about you guys with this weirdo Kool-Aid drinking culture? Why are your people so nice on the flights? Why do people seem to love working here? And she gave it, went back to Herb Kellerher, of the CEO, the founder. And they said, because Herb always said, every other company says the customer’s always right. We’ve always said our employees are right, and then we trust them to take care of the customer.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, she was.

Steve Crescenzo

And that was a value and employees got that. And I mean y it can make a difference if it’s community if it makes something to begin with that came from employees and it’s communicated properly, it can make a world of difference.

Shel Holtz

I I I heard a story. I I don’t know if this is apocryphal or if it really happened, but there was a marketing team brought into Southwest. They did the dog and pony show for their their marketing slogan, and you know, they had the the big reveal and Herb Callaher and the board is there, and Callaher’s kind of looking at it, and he’s grimacing and and he says, You guys don’t get it. Here’s here’s our slogan: smiles on faces, butts in seats, money in the bank.

Steve Crescenzo

Now that’s real. That’s cold. I love that.

Shel Holtz

Yeah. Yeah. Hey Steve, I got one more thing I wanna talk about with values, but before we do, I wanna let everyone know that this episode of On the Same Page is sponsored by the strategy studio. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Steve Crescenzo

Just a couple of seconds, not an ad necessarily, but we started the str Crescenso Communications. My wife Cindy, myself, and Zach started the strategy studio. Our son, Zach. Start we started it about a year and a half ago. And it is a private community paid, but a drop in the bucket compared to going to even one conference or one one webinar, even. we got about 140 people in there now, and we share ideas in there. We do weekly live sessions. So we we just did one, we just interviewed Mary Lou Panzano. On her new book out, Cementing Change. She’s a board member of the studio. So we talked to her for an hour. We do live interviews. We do a lot of trainings on things like AI and content creation and measurement and strategy and planning and weekly live sessions. You know, they’re 20 minutes, they’re 25 minutes, micro trainings, so you can do it over lunch. And then we have we have the water cooler thread in there where people just go out there and say, It just happened last week. Someone goes, Hey, I’m thinking about proposing these changes to my employee newsletter. My boss is gonna be a little skeptical. Any advice? 20 people get out there and say, Yeah, do this, do this. And they’re just like sharing stuff all the time. So would love to have anybody listening join the studio. And here it is. Constrategy studio dot com.

Shel Holtz

Higher, higher, higher up. There it is, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Check it out. Check out our check out our website, crescendo dot com, and if you wanna you can get there from there too. So yes, we’re so proud to sponsor this because you’re my mentor. Not everybody gets a chance to talk to their mentor twice a month. That’s really cool. So thank you for having me again.

Shel Holtz

Out. Yeah. my pleasure, and you’re my mentor too. you mentioned you mentioned AI. So now I have two things to talk about before we wrap this up. Yeah. Well, this is this will be pretty quick, but AI is really the values test right now. You know, I mean there are companies that are laying people off and claiming it’s AI. How do you message that? are you disclosing what is machine generated? These are all, you know, values decisions in disguise, aren’t they?

Steve Crescenzo

Haha Well I knew and I should have got you off out of God damn it. Absolutely. Yeah, I d absolutely. I think companies are really gonna struggle with it. I really do. And here’s another ethical AI thing that has to do with values. You have all employees are equal, right? All associates are equal, all partner, whatever you wanna call your employees. Well we’re seeing with a lot of our clients is the only AI they’re allowed to use at work is Copilot, right?

Shel Holtz

yeah, because they were already Microsoft Office three sixty five customers. Yeah, yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they can only use copilot, but there’s two versions of copilot. There’s a standard version that comes with it and everybody gets that kinda. But then they have Microsoft copilot enterprise, which costs money. And that’s where you get the stored memory, that’s when you can train it, that’s where AI gets powerful.

Shel Holtz

It’s it it it it maintains all the inputs from your queries. It doesn’t share that, yeah. So

Steve Crescenzo

Absolutely. So it’s a whole d it’s two two different tools. and we have communication teams that we’re working right now where two of them have the enterprise version and five of them don’t. it’s gonna create a a have and have not world here because they gotta pay for each individual ticket. So it’s like Willie Wonka’s golden ticket. So how can you tell values, get back to values, how can you tell your employees they’re all valued equally and everyone’s great and we respect diversity, blah blah blah. And then you’re giving two people a professional advantage.

Shel Holtz

Yeah.

Steve Crescenzo

And you can’t afford to give the I mean, that’s gonna be a big deal. Come on, why mark my words?

Shel Holtz

absolutely. The only way you can get away with that is if you say we’re piloting it right now and we have a a group of pilot testers. Yeah, there’s another one that tests the values here, and that’s where you say the only thing you’re allowed to use is co-pilot, and then you hear that the CEO is using Claude and the the the president is using Chat GPT. Yeah, so that that’s another one. The the the other thing I wanted to mention though is the importance of values in recruiting, because people who are looking for a job, especially coming out of college, but pretty much anybody looking for a job.

Steve Crescenzo

Right, yeah, right.

Shel Holtz

is looking for a company whose values align with theirs. We’ve we’ve had people join us coming from some of our competitors. Why are they coming? culture. And what drives culture? Values.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah. No, you’re right. I think it is a dis a d a dis distinctive thing. I think it can set a company apart. I mean, especially nowadays, people are just more into their own values. It’s like we’re not that’s fifties or sixties where we just went to a company, you worked fifty years, you got your watch, and you went home. People are jumping and around and moving around and taking different and they they can go to I don’t know how long it’s gonna last, but they put values values matter to them. They don’t want to work for a company they don’t believe in.

Shel Holtz

No, they really don’t. So for everybody out there working on their values, let us know how you’re approaching this.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, we’d love to hear. If you have values that are actually working and that means something, please let us know. I I’m always looking for a great case study to teach in the strategy studio. So I’d love to hear from anybody.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, send an email to FIR comments at gmail.com. You’ll see that we’ll post this when it goes live online on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on on threads, and on Blue Sky, whichever one you’re on. Leave a comment there. Let us know how you’re approaching values or what kind of challenges or struggles you’re facing or what kind of success you’ve had. we want to hear it all. So share it. By the way, you can send us an audio comment. That would be awesome if we could play an audio comment or even a video comment would be great too.

Steve Crescenzo

Yeah, those are fun. That would be even more fun.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, we’ll see you in a couple of weeks on the next episode of On the Same Page. See you later, Steve.

Steve Crescenzo

All right. Take care, Shel.

The post Episode 4: Are Corporate Values Useless, Harmful, or Necessary appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

We have known about media bias effect for decades: the belief that the media is biased against your side of a debate. New research finds that the same belief applies to misinformation. While the research was focused on political issues, the underlying cause applies equally to misinformation about brands, companies, and business issues. In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel find that the PR industry has not yet acknowledged the phenomenon, which requires strategies to address it.

Links from this episode:

• Think the Media’s Biased Against You? You Probably Think Misinformation Is, Too
• The Hostile Media Effect
• The Influence of Hostile Media Perceptions on Misinformation Beliefs and Sharing
• Hostile Media Effects on Twitter, Social Identity, and Media Bias Perceptions
• Fake News Has Real Effects on Consumer Demand
• The Impact of Fake News on Consumer Behavior and Market Outcomes
• Political Identity, Media Trust, and Susceptibility to Misinformation

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 29.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [email protected].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

Raw Transcript

Neville Hobson:
Hi everyone, and welcome to For Immediate Release. This is episode 519. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz:
And I’m Shel Holtz. When you think about all the misinformation out there—fake news, bad-faith spin—do you think it’s mostly aimed at your side of an argument or the other side? Most of us, if we’re honest, feel like it’s aimed at us. And there’s now research saying that feeling is nearly universal.

Even though the research was based on political discourse, it has a direct connection to organizational communication. We’ll explain right after this.

All right, let’s start by backing up for a second. There’s a concept called the hostile media effect. It’s been around since the 1980s. The original study showed pro-Israeli and pro-Arab students the exact same news coverage of the exact same event. Both groups walked away convinced it was biased against their side.

Everyone saw exactly the same footage, but they reached opposite conclusions. And the more committed you were, the more certain you were that the media was out to get you.

That finding has held up for 40 years, and it’s a big reason trust in news has collapsed as politics has gotten more tribal.

Now let’s add the new wrinkle. A team at the University of Amsterdam asked whether that same instinct applies to misinformation—to fake news. They surveyed 4,000 people across Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland around the 2024 European elections.

Nearly half said their preferred party was particularly targeted by misinformation. Ask about the party they liked least, and that number got cut in half. They’re calling it the hostile misinformation effect, and it got stronger the more politically engaged people were. The more plugged in people felt, the more victimized they felt.

Now, Neville, you might think that’s a political science finding. But the mechanism underneath isn’t about politics; it’s about identity and motivated reasoning. Every brand, every company, every department is an identity group.

Your most loyal customers are partisans. Your most engaged employees are partisans. The research says the people most attached to your organization are exactly the ones primed to believe any criticism out there is unfairly targeting them.

Now think about a crisis. Your defenders don’t need convincing that your critics are unfair. They already assume it. The minds still open are the uncommitted people in the middle.

Among neutrals, knowing more made them see less bias. It’s only partisans who dig in.

So if someone criticizes a brand that some people love, the brand’s biggest fans may see that as an attack rather than just an honest review—and respond in kind. There was no crisis, but now maybe there is.

There’s an internal angle here, too. Picture a layoff memo or a return-to-office announcement. Leadership reads it as fair. But every faction inside the company—by department, by level, by tenure—is wired to read the same message as unfair to them.

“We said it neutrally” is no defense because neutrality is in the eye of the beholder.

This notion reveals a trap for communicators. When bad coverage hits, it’s tempting to wave it away as misinformation. But “fake news” self-destructed as a term the moment it got weaponized to mean “any story I don’t like.”

Cry misinformation every time you’re criticized, and you train your audience to tune out the label. You also look evasive to the exact neutrals you need to reach.

So this is where I want to bring you in, Neville. We’ve spent years on this show talking about declining trust and the misinformation environment. This research says the problem isn’t just that there’s more bad information out there; it’s that people are wired to feel personally besieged by it.

And I’m not sure our profession has reckoned with what that means.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it, Shel. I don’t think so.

It’s actually quite fascinating looking at the Nieman Lab article you shared with me in our Slack channel and seeing the depth of the research on a topic that I had no idea was even a thing to look into.

I found it interesting in a number of areas.

For instance, the study you quoted from the 2024 European Parliament elections got me thinking. The tendency to see misinformation as directed at you seems more pronounced the farther right politically someone is.

That caught my attention because isn’t that precisely what we’re seeing in the United States with the Trump MAGA movement?

Here in the UK, we’ve got Reform and an even newer party that’s emerged further to the right. Those groups often function as an echo chamber for the kinds of messages Trump promotes. They’re constantly criticizing anything anyone else says as an attack and talking about issues in ways that rile people up and stimulate hostile reactions in return.

We see a lot of that in this country right now.

It’s interesting that this study has been done, and I think the way you’re connecting it to organizational communication is a good call. It certainly gives us a lot to think about.

One question it prompted in my mind concerns the point about engagement and partisanship. If the more engaged and partisan someone is, the stronger this effect becomes, does that mean an organization’s most loyal stakeholders are actually its most vulnerable to this kind of perception?

What do you think?

Shel Holtz:
Absolutely. I think that’s exactly the connection we can draw between this study and organizational communication.

If somebody criticizes the company based on an experience they had—and let’s say that criticism goes viral—and it was sincere and well-intentioned, then the partisan defenders of that organization are going to feel attacked. They’re likely to respond in kind and escalate a situation that probably would have faded into the background if left alone.

I think that’s one of the fallouts organizations can experience from this phenomenon. The more partisan you are, the more besieged you’re going to feel when you perceive something being said about the brand or organization as unfair—even if it was perfectly fair.

Neville Hobson:
So how do you address that within the organization?

Shel Holtz:
That’s an interesting question, and it’s hard to fight because you really can’t argue people out of it.

One related concept is the third-person effect—the idea that other people are more susceptible to media influence than we are ourselves.

In other words: I can see what the media is trying to do, but other people are going to be fooled by it.

When you stack that together with the idea that your group is being unfairly targeted, you get a complete worldview: I’m clear-eyed, my group is the victim, and everyone else is gullible.

There was a fascinating study where researchers took 661 Coca-Cola drinkers and showed them a real fake-news story—a 2016 hoax claiming that Dasani water was being recalled because parasites had been found in it.

The finding was that the people most confident in their own ability to spot fake news were the most convinced that other people would be fooled by it. They were also the ones most loudly demanding that Coca-Cola take corrective action.

Sometimes the stakeholders who are screaming “Do something about misinformation!” aren’t reacting to the actual threat. They’re reacting to a belief that other, less discerning people are being duped.

That makes the challenge even more complicated for communicators.

Neville Hobson:
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it?

The next question that comes to mind is this: If both sides feel targeted regardless of what’s actually out there, what should communicators do? Is there an approach that works when perception is this detached from reality?

Shel Holtz:
From an organizational standpoint—and I’m less interested in the political implications for purposes of this podcast—I think there are a couple of things.

First, the more prebunking you can do, the better.

When one of these situations comes up—a bad review, criticism from the media, negative reporting—you can immediately point people to information you’ve already published that addresses the issue. Having a bank of credible material you can reference may keep people from getting unnecessarily riled up.

The other thing is to respond quickly, but not emotionally.

If you can maintain a sense of calm—or even a sense of humor—you increase the likelihood that others will follow suit.

If people see that the company isn’t feeling besieged and isn’t acting attacked, that may help tamp down some of the reaction.

Neville Hobson:
So this becomes a major issue for trust, doesn’t it?

And I imagine the role of artificial intelligence in all of this only exacerbates the problem. Is that how you see it?

Shel Holtz:
Yeah, I do.

The flood of AI-generated slop out there—content targeting your organization, your brand, or your leaders—is only going to increase exponentially.

If somebody has an axe to grind and wants to flood search engines or AI summaries with negative content, AI makes that dramatically easier.

Now, to be fair, the research we’re discussing focused on information published through media outlets. That may be an important distinction.

People might be more skeptical of something posted on a blog or LinkedIn than something published by a mainstream news outlet.

That’s where this research suggests people feel especially attacked.

Neville Hobson:
That was my thought as well.

Going back to the study, we’re looking at this from a political perspective. We all consume information online, and most of us have preferred sources.

Meanwhile, mainstream media is going through what seems like a growing crisis of trust.

You see constant battles online between people citing one newspaper versus another. It’s distracting, and it wastes an enormous amount of time and energy.

It also got me thinking about how I react to some of this. The suggestion that people on the political right are more susceptible to this phenomenon doesn’t really describe me. I’m more in the middle.

I don’t react the way I see some people reacting—especially on that delightful conversation platform known as X.

People vent their spleens there. Maybe it makes them feel better, but I don’t think it advances understanding in any meaningful way.

Then again, perhaps that’s not the point.

The point seems to be: I win, you lose.

And that’s very much the Trump approach. It feels like that’s where much of this is headed.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah.

One of the stranger findings from the research was that when researchers examined whether people felt more victimized after their party lost an election, the results weren’t what you’d expect.

You’d think the losers would feel most targeted.

Instead, the people whose party won were more likely to believe their side was being targeted by misinformation.

Feeling besieged isn’t necessarily about being under threat. It’s about identity.

And since you mentioned X, there’s another interesting strand of research.

People may dismiss something because they saw it on X. But researchers found that the source of a message can trigger hostile media perceptions independently of the content itself.

Your company’s name on a statement can be enough to act as a bias cue for people who already have feelings about you.

The exact same words can land very differently depending on whose logo appears at the top.

That’s worth thinking about because it means message discipline alone can’t solve a credibility problem.

Neville Hobson:
This is a bigger dilemma than it might seem at first. A real conundrum for communicators.

The Nieman Lab article is lengthy, but it’s definitely worth reading.

Shel Holtz:
Yeah. And there will be links in the show notes to some of the original research on identity bias as well.

The reason I chose this topic is that I’ve never heard it discussed in PR circles. I’ve never seen it covered in PR textbooks or books about public relations.

This was completely new to me.

That’s one reason I’m still struggling with an answer about how to deal with it.

But it certainly starts with recognizing that it’s happening.

Neville Hobson:
I agree. It was new to me as well.

The more I think about it, though, the more it seems to describe the environment we’re operating in today.

Now we just have to figure out what to do about it.

Shel Holtz:
Yes, we do.

And that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #519: Is Misinformation Biased Against You? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.