Anthropic’s watermark scheme is the focus of so much discussion that you could be excused for thinking there was nothing else to talk about. For many, it’s the solution to identifying all those evil-doers who offload their writing to large language models. But we are wasting far too much time trying to determine whether (and to what degree) AI was involved in creating content. Much more important is determining whether the content was crafted with respect for the reader, and whether the creator can stand by every word. That’s the idea behind the new AI writing policy from the software company Clay, which makes far more sense than trying to detect a watermark.

Links from this episode:

• Clay AI Writing Policy: 4 Guiding Principles
• How Claude marks AI-generated content
• Anthropic’s watermark survives copy-paste, but not the real dev workflow
• Can Anthropic’s invisible watermarks curb ‘AI slop’? Researchers remain sceptical
• Anthropic’s text watermarks signal new front in AI detection
• Claude’s new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now
• How to Build a Responsible AI Writing Policy
• How Claude’s text watermarking works
• Claude is now watermarking every response — here’s what that means if you use AI for writing
• I’m Begging You: Never Write With A.I.

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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 526. I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz. In the last episode of FIR, we talked about workslop and the implications workslop brings to the workplace. We’re going to continue down that path today.

I’m sure you’ve all seen the headlines about Anthropic putting an invisible watermark on anything Claude writes. I want to separate what that actually does from what people have been claiming.

First, you won’t see this watermark. It’s not a “written by Claude” tag. It’s machine-readable. It survives copy and paste, and it may even survive some editing. The reason Anthropic came up with this is to comply with the transparency rules under the EU AI Act, and it applies everywhere Claude runs: the app, the API, Claude Code, Cowork, cloud providers — you name it.

You can’t paste text into a public detector and expose someone yet. Anthropic says detection tools are coming, but it hasn’t released any of them.

Here’s roughly how it works: Every time Claude generates text, it’s choosing between several equally good next words — say, “gray” or “overcast.” Normally, that choice is random. With watermarking, though, a secret cryptographic key nudges that randomness in a consistent way.

No single word looks suspicious, but across a couple hundred word choices in an article, the pattern becomes statistically detectable if you have the cryptographic key.

That’s completely different from tools like Pangram, which look for writing patterns that seem AI-like — you know, em dashes, overuse of words like “delve” or “tapestry” or “underscore,” constantly grouping things in threes. These are all things real writers do, by the way. The rule of three is nothing unique to AI, nor are em dashes. That’s why I don’t put much stock in these tools.

Anthropic’s detector doesn’t guess. It tests whether the text matches the pattern its own cryptographic key would produce.

Now, it’s particularly important to understand that a detected watermark means the content was processed by Claude. It doesn’t mean Claude wrote it. You could write something yourself, have Claude clean up the grammar, and it would still carry that watermark. Axios flagged exactly this risk for communications teams that polish a human-written press release with Claude.

It also works in reverse, by the way. Heavily edit, paraphrase, translate, or blend the text with other writing, and that watermark can disappear. Short passages may not carry enough signal to be detected at all.

So this isn’t a foolproof “Did a human use AI?” detector. Picture a reporter running a company statement through a detector and calling it AI-generated when your team actually wrote it and just had Claude do the final polish.

The watermark tells you about processing. It can’t tell you who did the thinking.

And that brings me to Clay, the software company, which just rolled out an AI writing policy. I think this is actually more important than a watermarking system.

The policy had its origins in Clay’s engineering department, but it has since gone company-wide. It’s not a ban. Brainstorming with AI, drafting, proofreading — all that’s fine.

Instead, the policy has four principles.

First, stand behind every idea and every sentence.

Second, writing is thinking.

Third, spend more time creating a document than you expect someone to spend reading it.

And fourth, longer isn’t better. And AI, by the way, notoriously pads its content.

I like this policy a lot. I like it a lot more than “Don’t use AI to write.”

Because sometimes AI writing is exactly the right call. Plenty of people are great at their jobs and bad at writing. Engineers are a great example. I’ve used engineers as an example of this before. If AI helps these people organize their explanation and turn an incomprehensible email into something readable, that’s good for everyone.

The problem is AI can make bad thinking look like good writing. This is what we were talking about last week with workslop. You give the model a thin prompt, it hands back three polished pages, and now you’ve just shifted the work of figuring out what you meant onto everyone else who has to read it. The prose looks finished, so the creator of that content feels like they’ve finished, but the thinking never actually happened.

That was how we defined workslop last week when we talked about it.

So companies don’t need an AI policy that’s focused on AI. They need one that’s focused on accountability, quality, and respect for the reader.

Cover the basics, for sure. List the approved tools. Talk about confidential information and how it gets used. Talk about fact-checking and human review and brand voice and blah, blah, blah.

But add that Clay test: Can you defend every sentence? Does it represent what you actually think? Did you verify the facts? Did you cut the padding? And did AI make the communication better, or did you just shift your effort onto your audience?

For communicators, that last question is the one to focus on. The watermark debate is going to tempt organizations to obsess over detection: Was AI used? Can we prove it? Should we disclose it?

Yeah, sometimes, I guess, that’s a fair question. But the better ones are: Is the thinking ours? Is it accurate? Does it serve the reader? And is a human willing to stand behind every word?

If we can get those things right, I’m not too worried about whether Claude helped fix a few sentences along the way, watermark or no watermark.

Neville Hobson: Hmm. We have talked about this before — this kind of weird obsession so many people seem to have with trying to figure out whether someone used AI to write a piece so they can exclaim with great glee, “Yeah, this guy wrote this. It’s 96 percent AI. He didn’t write it at all. It’s a scam, it’s fake,” blah, blah, blah.

Shel Holtz: Yeah.

Neville Hobson: We’re already seeing it happen with this. Someone wrote the other day about this, “Finally, a way to get rid of AI slop.”

What? I mean, isn’t —

Shel Holtz: No.

Neville Hobson: It isn’t going to do that. This obsession isn’t going to stop, I don’t think.

And, in fact, maybe the best thing out of the Clay principles is taking the focus away from that and moving it to the writing, to authorship, to accountability, as you point out.

The caution, I would say, is don’t obsess about this. Don’t set concrete rules that are so inflexible that you’re going to end up with writing that isn’t flexible at all.

The point, I guess, is to concentrate on the actual writing. Think about what it is that you’re writing.

So let’s move away from “Did you use AI to write this?” to something like, “What was your contribution to this?”

That, to me, is a healthier discussion to have.

There are still going to be lots of people who do the “gotcha” talk. I saw one today on LinkedIn: “I would never hire someone who uses AI to copywrite. That kind of approach isn’t for my team,” and stuff like that.

I think asking what your contribution was encourages accountability, whereas “Did you use AI to write this?” is all about concealment and policing — discovering that someone did and assuming or implying that they’ve cheated somehow.

That said, I think the point that you need to stand behind every idea and sentence is absolutely spot on. And that’s not new. We should have been doing that all along.

That’s probably the right way to approach it.

For example, don’t ask Claude to write something: “Here’s a topic. Write a 1,200-word piece arguing that communicators need to take responsibility for AI governance.”

Claude produces it, you might edit two or three sentences, and you’re done. You publish it under your name. That is substantially AI-generated writing, and the watermark is relevant.

But for what, though? So someone could say, “Gotcha”?

You don’t know what that was for. You don’t know what’s wrong with that. Has someone deceived you? I suppose, by implication, if it’s under their name, they have deceived you in that they wrote it. They didn’t; the AI wrote it.

But what’s the difference between that and, as a comparison, Grammarly or something like that, which suggests paragraph changes and you accept every single one of its recommendations? You end up with something that’s then 70 to 80 percent Grammarly, as opposed to you.

Better, though, to avoid ethical issues and accusations and all that stuff, is that you do the writing. Don’t dump the stuff on the AI. You do the writing and introduce your own thinking to this.

Have the AI — Claude or whatever it might be — check it. Ask it to proofread it. Ask it, “Is there any other angle I could have incorporated in this?” or “Do you think this is the right approach?”

I do that a lot with the stuff that I write. And I must admit, probably two out of three times, I’ll accept some of the recommendations the chatbot comes back with.

Sorry, the AI assistant comes back with. I don’t call it chatbot.

Shel Holtz: Ha ha ha.

Neville Hobson: And there I just slipped up. I did.

So I think we’ll have to weather the gotchas all the time, and so be it. But if you are confident in doing the writing, using your AI assistant as the guide for you — as, in a sense, the editor that sits by your side, the critiquer that tells you what it thinks and where you could improve this or don’t say that — follow guidelines such as Clay has done, and you should be okay.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. The piece on Clay’s writing policy makes the point, as I mentioned, that writing is thinking. Writing is the way we process our thoughts and test our thoughts.

And this is a point that I think a lot of people have made. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times. I think it was over the weekend. I think it was an op-ed that was exhorting people to please, for God’s sake, write your own stuff because we don’t want to lose the ability to think.

The problem is, I think most of these proclamations come from writers. You and I are writers, and the communities that we interact with on LinkedIn in particular are probably also writers. We’re connected to people who are engaged in communications, and hence you get the opposition to using AI to write.

But again, what about an accountant? What about an engineer?

There are so many jobs out there where being a really good writer was never a requirement when these folks were earning their degrees or their certificates. And now, because they’re in the business world, they have to communicate effectively.

So how do you go about the thinking process?

No, you don’t want to delegate it to AI. You don’t want to say, “Write an email about X” or “Write a blog post about X.” You want to think it through.

But does that mean you think it through by writing? Well, not if you’re not a writer, necessarily.

You may think it through by creating an outline, by doing a brain dump. It could even be — this is something Chris Penn talks about a lot — just recording your thoughts as audio and then uploading that file and saying, “These are my thoughts. Now turn this into a coherent email to this audience designed to produce this result.”

Then you go back and you review it and edit it so that you can defend every sentence, every word.

Again, I think this is all about respect for the reader. And if the way you demonstrate respect for the reader, knowing that you’re a terrible writer, is using AI, that’s appropriate.

If you just knock out this email, people are going to go, “What is he talking about? I don’t know what he’s trying to get at here.”

Respect for the reader is using the AI to make that message clearer, more cogent, more understandable, and more actionable.

So, again, I really like those four pillars.

And I think there undoubtedly will be ways to defeat the Claude watermark. People will come up with them. Anything that is designed to catch people is something somebody else is going to come up with a way to circumvent.

In the meantime, though, as you say, this is not a surefire way to catch somebody. It’s going to identify that Claude processed this, not that Claude wrote it.

So I think people need to calm down and start thinking about this tool in a way that provides the high-quality content that you’re trying to deliver to people — not just something polished that makes them have to figure out what you intended because it’s polished but no thinking went into it.

The thinking still has to go into it, whether Claude’s going to do the lion’s share of the writing or not.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think the interesting distinction is between AI-generated and AI-assisted writing. Although I add my own caveat to that, which is: Who cares?

I mean, truly, do I want to get into a discussion about that? No, I do not.

So I know the difference. I’m not evangelizing that everyone should understand and follow the difference, although it’s helpful to.

For example, using Claude, you give Claude a short prompt — it’s not Cowork, by the way; this is just the chat — and it produces an article.

You tell it, “I want to write about X, and the topic is this, and I want to achieve this. These are the points I want to make.” Maybe not even as much as that. And Claude produces, you know, a 600-word draft, and you lightly edit it.

Lightly meaning maybe you change not the syntax so much, but certain expressive words that you might use. If that’s your bag, sure. Although you would have given —

Shel Holtz: Or adding the Oxford comma.

Neville Hobson: — your AI assistant the guidance about your preference on the Oxford comma.

Shel Holtz: Presumably, yeah.

Neville Hobson: It would know.

So you do that. On the other hand, if you’ve already developed the argument, you’ve already got a clear picture in your mind, you’ve researched it, you’ve used Claude to challenge or improve your thinking, and you make the editorial decisions yourself, that’s another matter entirely.

That, I believe, is AI-assisted writing.

So, as we mentioned earlier in the discussion, the better question isn’t, “Did you use AI?” but, “What was your intellectual contribution?”

So, writing is thinking. Yeah, I don’t disagree with that. Although, again, I don’t want to get hung up on having definitions all over the place about this.

The danger is real of turning this into another policing technology, which many people are already starting to do.

I did see in Anthropic’s FAQ about watermarking where they say, in answer to the question, “How do I check if a piece of text was written by Claude?”, “We will soon be offering a watermark detection API. We’re in the process of working out the details of its implementation.”

So that’s coming.

That’ll give those gotcha people a lot more ammo to say “gotcha” a lot more, I bet. It just takes attention away from what really matters with all of this.

But, you know, like a lot of things that are new, we have to go through all this.

So my recommendation is: Don’t give it too much attention. Be sure in your own mind that what you’re doing is, in your definition, the right way of going about it. You feel confident that it is. You have guidelines to follow, such as Clay’s, for instance, so you are able to say, “Yep, these four things — I do these things in all my approaches to this.”

In which case, you can wave two fingers at the gotchas.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, and I can’t emphasize this enough: The detection is not going to be focused on whether Claude wrote this. It’s whether it processed it.

So you could have written it and then sent it through Claude for grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and the watermark will show up, even though you wrote it.

So the gotcha is, I think, a little disingenuous in a lot of cases.

I mean, it could be that somebody used it to write, for sure, but it’s not a sure thing. It’s not a lock that if the detector says, “Yes, Claude processed this,” then, “Aha! You wrote this with AI.”

Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean that at all.

Neville Hobson: But even if he did, so what? If someone says that, do I care? Not at all.

Shel Holtz: Well, and again, I come back to the engineer or the accountant who wants to be understood and is not a writer.

I think that’s where this tool shines and where we have opportunities for better clarity and better understanding in the workplace.

Do I expect my professional writers to write? Yeah, absolutely.

Do I expect my accountants to write? My lawyers? Not necessarily.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s one other thing about this, too.

I did read Anthropic’s technical paper describing what this is and how it works. I’m going to have to actually ask Claude to simplify this — give it to me in simple terms so I can understand it well.

Shel Holtz: Ask Claude. No, better yet, ask ChatGPT to do it.

Neville Hobson: Because it talks about, for instance, let’s say you asked Claude to write a piece. You briefed Claude, it did that, you edited it, passed it back to Claude, it made some recommendations, which you implemented, including removing a chunk. You passed it back to Claude again.

You went to and fro a bit, and you might then have — let’s say it’s an article for an academic journal, for instance — passed it to a colleague, saying, “Can you review this and give me your opinion?”

They did, and you made some further changes as a result.

The end result of all of that is so muddy that Claude would have — or rather, the watermarking wouldn’t be clear as to who wrote which bits and so forth.

You could pinpoint where the words came from, but you couldn’t pinpoint who the author was.

In which case, the gotcha folks are not going to be happy with that. But, you know, just get on with it, for God’s sake, and stop all this stuff.

Shel Holtz: Yeah. And you don’t know which words it selected to accommodate this watermarking. If your edit changes them, then the watermark vanishes.

So again, no guarantees here at all.

This is compliance with the EU AI law. That’s all it is.

By the way, I think you can expect to see the other frontier models follow suit, also to be in compliance with the EU AI law.

So the fact that only Anthropic is doing this so far —

Neville Hobson: Undoubtedly.

Shel Holtz: — doesn’t mean that you won’t see it in ChatGPT and Gemini and even maybe Grok. We’ll see.

Neville Hobson: Yeah. I mean, they talk about retrofitting this to earlier versions of Claude, and that makes total sense to me.

You are right. I believe it would make no sense if Claude was the only one doing this. So we’ll expect news from the others.

But in the meantime, my suggestion to everyone is: Don’t worry about this. Be true to yourself.

Read Clay’s guidelines — what are they called? I can’t remember. It’s kind of a policy, writing policy.

Shel Holtz: Yeah, policy. Writing policy. AI writing policy, yeah.

Neville Hobson: Okay.

And there’ll be others adding to this and saying, “Here’s my version,” and so forth. So you can pick what’s best.

But just focus on your writing.

One of the points that comes out of this is absolutely right: You do the writing. Don’t just say, “Give me a 1,200-word article on whatever topic.”

That’s the best approach, and that has been the case since before this topic emerged.

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

The post FIR #526: Forget Anthropic’s AI Watermark. Can You Defend Every Sentence? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Times change, but somehow the job hasn’t. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into what’s stayed constant across their combined decades in PR and marketing, and why chasing the latest platform update is a losing game if you’ve lost sight of the fundamentals underneath it.

The episode was sparked by a LinkedIn series from Doug Simon, who asked longtime PR pros what has remained constant in their careers. Gini was asked the question of whether the PESO Model still holds up, and her answer is that the four media types haven’t gone anywhere, and earned media’s third-party credibility now matters more to how LLMs learn. Chip extends the logic to SEO and its successors, advising to chase the people, not the algorithm or the platform.

Other changes may also have less of an impact than you might think. Influencer marketing is the latest version of celebrity TV endorsements, but with a YouTube channel. The agency-client relationship continues to run on the same dynamics it did 70 or 80 years ago. Gini brings up the story about a UK agency reportedly running AI agents to pitch journalists undetected for eight months. Chip’s take is that just like with interns and inexperienced team members, there are well-managed AI agents as well as poorly managed ones. It’s the human factor that matters most. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 313: The audience has (and always will) matter most for PR and marketing leaders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

We have been hearing about work slop for a while now, and evidence is mounting that it can create long-term problems for companies. Yet we are hearing very little (if anything) about what businesses are doing about it. There’s new research, which Neville and Shel discuss in this episode, along with some thoughts about actions companies can take.

Links from this episode:

• Why People Create AI “Workslop”—and How to Stop It
• Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026
• Harvard Business Review warns AI ‘workslop’ is rotting companies from the inside
• Botsitting, botshitting, and the hidden human labor of AI at work
• 27 Seconds to Breach: The AI “Workslop” Tax Hitting 2026 Bottom Lines
• How to Eradicate AI ‘Workslop’ From Your Office

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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 525 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz.

Neville Hobson

And I’m Neville Hobson.

Shel Holtz

And Neville, it is great to have you back on the show. You’re well enough to record again.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it’s certainly been an interesting few weeks, including the kind of disconnection that I did from just about literally everything with this heat exhaustion that I suffered, which was quite profound and far more serious than I thought, according to the doctor.

And then the R&R, as I described it—the rest and recuperation—slotted in nicely with our existing family plans here to spend some time in Novato, Marin County, in California, which we did last week. And as some listeners will know, you and I and the family, in fact, all met together, had lunch in a delightful restaurant in San Francisco last Thursday, and took some pictures, which is what people saw.

So I’m back in the UK now. It was a worthwhile visit, and, well, here we are doing FIR again. It feels like déjà vu all over again. That’s great.

Shel Holtz

It is back to normal. I should tell people that if you’re curious about the wonderful restaurant we ate at in San Francisco, it’s called Waterbar, and my company, Webcor, built the building that it’s in. So it was fun to have you there and to say, “We built this.”

Neville Hobson

Yeah, it was. I agree. The hospitality was really good in that restaurant. Very nice service, friendly people, excellent food, of course. It’s focused on fish, so if you’re a fish connoisseur, this is the place to go in San Francisco, I would say. Yeah, really nice.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, and right on the water. You get a view of the Bay Bridge and a good part of San Francisco Bay. So, yeah, it was great to see you in person. It’s been since 2019.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, a long time.

Shel Holtz

And here we are looking at each other over Riverside, but that’s not the same.

Neville Hobson

No, the next best thing, but not the same.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, being together in real life really matters. But today’s topic is one that we were planning to discuss just before you took ill, so we’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

We’re going to return to it.

Neville Hobson

We are. And this is based on an article that caught my eye a few weeks ago in the Harvard Business Review. It was actually published back in January, but having returned to it, I think it’s even more relevant than it was then.

The title of the article is “Why People Create AI ‘Workslop’—and How to Stop It.” Timely topic, I’d say. The authors use the term “workslop” to describe low-effort, AI-generated work that looks polished on the surface but ends up shifting the real work onto whoever receives it.

We’ve probably all seen examples: reports full of generic language, presentations that say a great deal without saying very much, emails that are technically fine but leave you wondering what the sender actually thinks.

Since that article appeared, the wider idea of AI slop has become much more prominent. We’re hearing the term applied to the flood of cheap, AI-generated material appearing on social networks, in publishing, marketing, and elsewhere. There’s even research suggesting that people increasingly use “AI slop” as a judgment about authenticity. Something doesn’t necessarily have to be AI-generated to be dismissed as slop; it just has to feel like it.

Perhaps the most useful new evidence comes from research by the Society for Human Resource Management, SHRM, the world’s largest professional association dedicated to the practice of human resources management. Published in June, SHRM’s Navigating AI in the Workplace: 2026, based on more than 5,000 U.S. workers, found that 41% use AI at work, and 44% of those users describe at least some of their output as AI slop. Early-career employees feel the greatest pressure to adopt AI. SHRM also found greater engagement and commitment where organizations take an open approach to AI integration.

What interested me most about the HBR article was its argument about why workslop happens inside organizations. The authors suggest that it isn’t fundamentally an AI problem at all. It’s a leadership problem.

Many organizations are telling employees simply to use AI without defining what success looks like, without giving people sufficient guidance or confidence, and without creating an environment where it’s safe to experiment, ask questions, or admit uncertainty.

In that environment, people can end up optimizing for appearing to use AI rather than actually using it well. Putting it simply, the article says it’s the result of unclear AI mandates and overwhelmed teams. Leaders are issuing vague directives for employees to start using extremely powerful tools, while many of those employees are overburdened, psychologically depleted, and operating in environments where it doesn’t feel safe to admit uncertainty or ask for help.

Evidence published since the HBR article seems to reinforce rather than undermine that argument. We’re seeing more research showing significant numbers of employees encountering poor-quality, AI-generated work while, at the same time, employees are under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they’re using AI.

There’s another dimension to this that I think is particularly interesting: productivity.

Imagine that something that previously took me two hours to produce now takes me 20 minutes with AI. That’s a significant productivity gain for me. But suppose I send it to Shel—to you—and you then spend an hour trying to understand what I mean, checking my claims, and correcting some mistakes that I hadn’t spotted. Have we actually improved productivity, or have I simply transferred the cost of my work to Shel?

That’s essentially what workslop does. And some recent research into AI-assisted work describes this as a kind of tragedy of the commons. Individuals can appear more productive while imposing additional costs on everybody else.

If an organization measures AI adoption, output volume, or individual efficiency rather than the performance of the whole system, workslop might actually look like successful AI transformation.

That struck a chord because it echoes something we’ve discussed on FIR more than once. Whenever we hear stories about AI failing in organizations, the technology itself often isn’t the real issue. AI has a remarkable ability to expose weaknesses that were already there: unclear leadership, poor communication, lack of trust, unrealistic expectations, and organizations measuring activity rather than outcomes.

And there’s an important question of individual responsibility here, too. Poor leadership may create the conditions for workslop, but that doesn’t absolve the person who sends it. If I knowingly send something I haven’t properly considered or checked simply because an AI produced it, that’s also a failure of professional judgment.

So perhaps workslop isn’t really the diagnosis at all. Perhaps it’s a symptom.

Is AI creating a new workplace problem, or is it simply shining a very bright light on old management problems? What happens when leaders measure AI adoption instead of better decisions, better collaboration, and better business outcomes? And as AI makes producing apparently polished work almost effortless, does human judgment actually become more important rather than less?

The Harvard Business Review article may now be seven months old, but the questions it raises are becoming more urgent, not less. Shel?

Shel Holtz

Without question. And there—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—there is newer research. I found work done by the Work AI Institute. They did a 2026 research project called The Work AI Index. And in addition to workslop, they have a new term in there called “botshitting.” I kid you not.

Neville Hobson

Ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz

Botshitting describes employees knowingly shipping AI output they believe is wrong. And 12% of employees who were surveyed for this research admit to doing this. Interestingly, when they are basically caught, they blame AI. They say, “The AI did this.” Forty percent of workers blame the AI rather than themselves.

There was also a study in January 2026 from Workday. Some 3,200 leaders found that 37% of AI productivity gains are immediately lost to rework because the workslop isn’t adequate, with employees spending an average of six hours a week correcting or rewriting flawed AI content.

Built In reported workslop now affects roughly 40% of employees and costs about $186 per worker per month. And there was a more recent study—BetterUp sourced this figure—that found that 66% of workers are spending six-plus hours every week fixing AI errors. So this is serious stuff.

And by the—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—way, nearly every recent report on workslop ties this to layoffs associated with AI. Workers and outlets are connecting 2026 tech job cuts to premature AI-driven headcount reduction. And the workers who are left behind are absorbing that workslop rework burden. So we cut people to use AI; now the survivors are—

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

—cleaning up after it. That’s an important framing to look at.

And one last thing I’ll mention from some research—this was just from June of this year. They found that the errors in workslop go beyond the work that somebody else needs to do to correct it. It moves downstream through teams and into the organization’s collective knowledge base. And that knowledge base just deteriorates.

So it’s not just individual wasted hours, but this slow erosion of what the organization actually knows to be true. This is a very serious problem, and I don’t see a lot being said about measures that organizations are taking to address it. I think some measures need to be taken pretty soon, or this is going to get out of control.

Neville Hobson

Yeah. The Harvard Business Review article does have some suggestions about what organizations can do to address it, which I’ll mention in a minute. But they also include some examples. I found these rather interesting. Not a whole lot—three only—but nevertheless, they talk about the toxic effect workslop can have on workplace dynamics, breeding mistrust and leading team members to think less of the sender’s intelligence and trustworthiness, among other traits.

They talk about their ongoing research, where they’ve heard a number of examples of workslop seeding ill will, eroding trust, and generally having a corrosive effect on workplace morale.

There’s one where I thought, I can imagine this. One example they give is an employee at a technology company who told the Harvard Business Review that he’d noticed the tone in his performance review was unlike his manager, and that the document recycled content from his self-evaluation. The experience made him feel unvalued and underappreciated, and he gave up all hope that he would ever be promoted.

So, reading between the lines, what happened? Whoever did that grabbed some of the employee’s self-evaluation and had an AI produce the review. I bet that’s what happened there.

We don’t know the details behind that, but that’s a really good example of what you could see happening in an environment where there is a lack of clarity, all those things the Harvard Business Review points out, and the pressure to deliver in some form or another.

So, for instance, doing an employee evaluation would come into that area where the manager has cut corners and used AI to do it. And I could imagine that is happening a lot.

And in relation to the examples that the Harvard Business Review piece includes, they say something quite interesting. Many of the responses focused on the productivity costs—the time people wasted dealing with each instance of workslop that crossed their desks. But they note that what should really worry leaders is the impact workslop can have on human relationships.

And I think that’s a point to hammer home. It’s a kind of soft thing. You don’t necessarily see it, but it’s there. And some of these examples make that very clear indeed. So that’s a manifestation of the management failure behind all of this, Shel, don’t you think?

Shel Holtz

I do. And I think it’s because we’ve been rushing headlong into this rather than pausing to strategize it.

And I think we’ve talked about that deterioration of human relationships once before. The situation is that people are not picking up the phone or sending an email off to the local subject-matter expert because Claude has the answer. ChatGPT has the answer. So you’re getting less of that interaction within the organization.

This is causing people to assume some of the work that is outside their area of expertise, outside their lane, if you will, instead of reaching out to the people in the organization who actually have that expertise so they can do the work that previously was part of their job.

Another interesting thing you noted was that somebody felt this was leading to a lack of promotion opportunity.

Neville Hobson

Mm.

Shel Holtz

I’m reading a book right now, an excellent book. We were talking about it before we started recording. It’s called Robot-Proof. And one of the things she talks about is this economic phenomenon of deprofessionalization, where AI takes on a certain amount of the work, and therefore you, as the professional, don’t need to know or do as much as you did before.

And it lowers your overall value. It pushes the wage down for people who are doing that. The author, Vivienne Ming, uses an analogy of Jiffy Lube, which in the U.S. is a place where people take their cars to have their oil changed.

And she says, “What if colonoscopies worked that way?” You don’t need a doctor to do a lot of this work because a lot of the work in a colonoscopy is pretty routine and AI can do that. Now you need just the Jiffy Lube guy there to take the hose and do—

Neville Hobson

Yeah.

Shel Holtz

—the insertion, looking at the camera to make sure it’s right. But that’s more of a technical skill than a deep medical skill that is taught in medical school and then honed over years of experience and practice.

And this is the road I think we’re headed down if we don’t take some steps to fix it. The people who were brought into an organization based on education and years of experience and subject-matter expertise, and perhaps even thought leadership, no longer need all that stuff. They just need to do the base-level effort that is required by a human following the instructions of the AI.

So I think organizations need to look at this very seriously: how this work gets done, what is required of the outputs, and having guardrails in place to make sure that people aren’t skirting around it.

Because let’s face it, if the cost of producing this stuff continues to drop, there’s an incentive on the part of the organization to go ahead and use this because the cost is lower. It’s hard to see the impact of that on sales and reputation in the short term. In the long term, I think it absolutely will have that impact.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I’d say you’re right. I mean, one thing that I’ve been talking about all year in everything I’ve written or said about artificial intelligence in organizations is that it’s about the people, not the technology.

If we’re implementing AI or doing a rollout or planning it, or telling people, “Use AI,” as a leader, you have the responsibility to make that as crystal clear as possible and focus on the people.

So one of the things I did like about the Harvard piece was the concluding remarks they make, starting with this: “The greatest irony of all is, to make AI work at work, we need to get better at being human.”

Absolutely spot on.

Leaders need to make space for the unpolished, slower but more rewarding work of human collaboration. Without organizational changes that enable agency and trust rather than AI mandates for overburdened teams, we’ll all drown in the sludge of workslop.

A very well-put concluding statement, I think. But the serious element of that is something that, in my opinion, I’m amazed that leaders don’t seem to get at all.

They talk about efficiencies. They talk about cost savings. They talk about all these things, and yet there’s nothing about: How do we help employees become more productive themselves and develop themselves, too? How do we help them, in a sense, augment their skills using AI?

Now, that’s not to say—and I’m not suggesting for a second—that AI leaders generally just don’t think about that at all. I believe they do, but it’s way down the priority list in terms of how they communicate this. They need to get that to the top of the priority list.

But more than just talk about it, they need to put these things in place. And there are many things they can do. There’s, in a sense, rebuilding trust with people.

We’ve talked about examples in recent episodes of layoffs that are very clear to see. People are talking about them all the time, and that is happening. We talked about a really great one a few episodes back about what Ford Motor Company is doing with the graybeards. Lovely name. We’ll pass on the age—

Shel Holtz

Mm-hmm.

Neville Hobson

—thing on that. But it’s about the organizational collective memory people have of how things are done and what worked in the past, among people who were laid off and are gone.

So they rehired a whole bunch, and they’ve benefited hugely, as the articles we cited go into in some detail, including, I believe, if I recall, Shel, they were the number-one automaker for a particular reason that they attribute directly to rehiring all these graybeards.

So that is a great way of doing it. But it’s just one example. There are undoubtedly more fundamental things organizationally that people can do to rebuild this connection between the organization and the people who make up that organization—the employees, mostly.

So there’s a lot of work to be done. And yet none of this is rocket science to leaders at all, I don’t believe. Just because we’ve got this newfangled technology on the scene, you’re telling people to start using it without giving them the proper guidance.

So these, to me, are Leadership 101 things. And if no one’s doing this, then communicators, let’s step up to the plate and help. That’s what I think we should be doing.

Shel Holtz

Yeah, absolutely. And I have been reading more and more research that talks about what happens when you delegate your thinking to AI.

Rather than doing the research yourself and the writing yourself, which helps you think through the issue, it actually has an impact on your ability to think and to learn. So there are a lot of reasons I think that we need to take this seriously.

I think the first thing communicators need to do inside their organizations is raise the alarm. Because I think this may be an issue where everybody’s heard “slop” and everybody’s heard “workslop,” but I don’t know that everybody in the organization—especially the decision-makers—is up to speed on what the research is saying about all of this and the deleterious impact it can have on our organizations and the outputs that we produce.

So, yeah, I think sharing this data—and we will have links to the research in the show notes—and making the people who make the decisions aware of what this could mean to the future reputation and earnings of the organization is the place to start.

Neville Hobson

Yeah, I agree.

So, simply, there are good tips in this discussion. The links to the articles—please read them. They’re really, really useful. You’ll find a lot of insights in all the ones that we’ll have in the show notes. So there you’ve got your route map, I would say.

Shel Holtz

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

The post FIR #525: The Consequences Businesses Will Face from Work Slop appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most agency owners probably haven’t thought much about shadow AI (the name for when employees use their personal ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini accounts to do work). In fact, owners may be doing it as well. In this episode, Chip and Gini walk through what the risks are and how to respond without overreacting.

The instinct to crack down is understandable but wrong. Employees are going to use their own tools regardless, often because personal accounts are better trained or more accessible than whatever the company has set up. The goal should be education, not elimination. Most employees don’t know that personal accounts default to feeding data into training sets, or that a single toggle can turn that off. That one fix alone is worth a conversation with your team.

Vibe coding and a plain-language AI policy get discussed, in addition to educating your team. Gini’s team runs weekly micro-learning sessions to help people use AI as a thinking partner, not just a drafting tool. Both Chip and Gini advise that owners and employees who aren’t using AI meaningfully within the next year or two are putting their careers and businesses at risk. [read the transcript]

The post ALP 312: Managing “Shadow AI” at your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Veteran communications leader Mark Dollins joins “On The Same Page” as co-host. Mark and Shel address the “voice” leadership applies internally, as opposed to (or consistent with) the voice they employ with external stakeholders. Should it be the same? How different? What considerations drive the inside-the-company voice? And why does it matter?

Leave comments below, or send them to https://[email protected], where you can attach up to a 3-minute audio file. (You can create that audio file right here — look for the “Send Voicemail” tab on the right side of this page.)

Learn more about Mark at his LinkedIn profile and at the website of his consulting firm, Northstar Communications.

Links from this episode:

• A Message from Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO Brian Chesky
• Better.com CEO to take time off after firing hundreds of employees over Zoom

Raw transcript:

Shel Holtz: So, Mark, an executive’s voice. I’m curious: In your experience, do you find that executives use the same voice with internal stakeholders as they do with external stakeholders?

Mark Dollins: I think in most cases, they do not, and that’s actually a great point for us to talk about—why that is. Because when an executive uses one voice on the outside and changes it on the inside, people know, and they want to know why. It sounds incongruous to them.

So I don’t think executives do it all the time. Sometimes it happens naturally, and sometimes I think it’s intentional, so we should talk about that.

Shel: When I’m talking to my wife, it’s a different tone of voice than when I’m talking to, say, my accountant. Is it inappropriate to talk differently to investors than to employees?

Mark: Is it inappropriate? Probably not. But you have to really think about the nuance of the tone, because people know when they’re being “messaged,” and internal stakeholders don’t want to feel like they’re being messaged. They also want it straight.

They’re going to hear a lot of the financial implications from the external stakeholder version of the story. What I find is that often those things aren’t included in the internal communication. There’s almost an assumption that internal stakeholders aren’t listening to or aware of what’s happening externally. That’s a problem.

Shel: Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 5 of On The Same Page. I am Shel Holtz. I’m Senior Director of Communications at Webcor. We’re a commercial general contractor operating in California and headquartered in San Francisco.

And I would like to introduce you all to the new co-host of On The Same Page, Mark Dollins. Mark, it is awesome to have you here.

Mark: Shel, thank you. I feel like there should be confetti and a marching band, but thank you for that introduction. I am honored to co-host this with you. I’m really excited about it.

Shel: I think we’re going to have a great time and cover a lot.

I want people to get to know you a bit before we jump into this topic of finding your leader’s voice—and, in fact, even your own voice—for internal stakeholders.

You and I met—I can’t remember how long ago this was—but it was in Chicago at what was then Quaker, which was owned by Pepsi. You were VP of internal communications at Pepsi. That’s where we got to know each other. It was through Sharon McIntosh, who brought me in at the time.

But tell people about yourself. What has been your career trajectory?

Mark: The big picture is that I started as a journalist. I worked for ABC News in Washington and then went to the Midwest as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years. I couldn’t make enough of a living to support myself, so that’s what brought me to the world of corporate communications.

I spent 10 years in gas and electric utilities—a lot of fires, gas explosions, power outages. After all that, it was a lot more fun talking about Cap’n Crunch and Rice-A-Roni, so that’s what brought me to the world of consumer packaged goods, with Quaker Oats Company in Chicago.

I loved working at Quaker. Quaker became part of PepsiCo in 2001, and I did a couple of stints back and forth. I ended up being their chief communication officer for food, so Frito-Lay in addition to all the Quaker and other food products in the portfolio. Then I was their chief communication officer for the beverage division as well.

From there, I began my consultancy. I got pulled back into the corporate world and ran executive and global employee communications for DuPont as it went through a $130 billion merger with Dow in 2017.

So there was a lot of change communication, which we’ll talk about at some point in this series. Then I went back to consulting. Now I’m doing work in employee and change communications, and employee engagement is really where I’ve found my sweet spot. I have a great love, passion, and expertise in this area, and there’s nobody better than you to partner with to talk about it.

Shel: It’s going to be great. You’ve also written a book that I really enjoyed.

Mark: You mean these?

Shel: Yeah, the ones on the wall behind you.

Mark: Yes. I partnered with John Stemmle at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. I’m an adjunct there as well these days and have been teaching a class based on this book, Engaging Employees Through Strategic Communication.

The first edition came out in 2021, and the second edition just came out a few months ago this year. I’m really excited to have added new case studies and a few new chapters, including one on artificial intelligence and how employee communicators are beginning to use it in lots of different ways, and another new chapter on crisis communication.

So there are lots of new things. It’s constantly evolving, and I think we’ll be doing a third edition before you know it.

Shel: And I know that you also do a survey on the use of AI for internal communications.

Mark: We’re about to release our fourth consecutive annual study on AI and communications, specifically looking at it through the lens of employee communicators: how we’re using it both for productivity and for more strategic applications, and what our attitudes are toward it.

There have been lots of changes in four years, as you might imagine, so I’m excited to talk a little bit about that at some point as well.

Shel: In fact, for listeners to this podcast who also listen to For Immediate Release, Mark is going to be talking about that survey on an FIR interview coming up in, I think, just a couple of weeks.

Mark: I think we’re recording it next week, Shel, so I can’t wait to talk about it.

Shel: I know Neville and I are both looking forward to that as well.

One more thing about you personally before we start talking business. In your personal life, I know that you’re into wrestling.

Mark: I am. They have Masters tennis and Masters swimming, and they actually have Masters wrestling as well. I’ve been active in that space for about the last 10 years or so. I wrestled in high school and college. I coach. I also just got my Gold Level certification from USA Wrestling.

It’s their highest level of coaching certification. I went with the Under-23 national team to the Pan American Championships a couple of months ago, and then helped run a development camp at the Olympic Training Center for under-18-year-olds.

So my coaching journey continues, as does my athletic and competition journey in wrestling. I love it. It’s a lot of fun.

Shel: Great. People should get to know you better as we carry on with this podcast over the months.

But let’s talk about this idea of voice. In my framework, I think it fits very nicely in a couple of places. One is consultation, as we work with executives to help them become better communicators. I also think it fits really well with the channels we use. If executives are a channel for communicating, they have to do that effectively, and we need to manage that channel.

Mark: And we need to help other communicators. If you work in executive communications, there are ways now to accelerate your drafting process and put content more into a comfortable voice that works both for you as the counselor and coach, and for your executive, who needs to find his or her voice and stick to it.

I’ve spent some time working with CEO types on how to do exactly that. Anything we can do to help our colleagues advance their productivity, become more efficient, and get better at supporting their executives—while still preserving their role as coach—I think would be helpful.

Shel: I went looking for examples of an executive employing a great voice with internal stakeholders and then an example of executives not doing it so well.

The positive example I found is Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. This is not an obscure example.

This was around a layoff in 2020. It was really awful news that he was delivering. They were eliminating nearly 2,000 jobs, about 25 percent of the company.

His May 5 employee message was very human. It didn’t sound like somebody had crafted it. He explained what the business circumstances were. He talked about the uncomfortable truths concerning the future of travel. This was just as COVID was sending people home.

He explained how the company decided which jobs they were going to eliminate. He laid out the principles that guided the cuts, and then he gave an extraordinary amount of detail about severance, equity, healthcare, and job assistance.

And he was willing to say that he felt real emotion—a real connection to the people with whom they were having to part ways.

That could have sounded mawkish in some other CEO’s remarks. But in the context of their culture and everything else in the message, it sounded like him. It was very authentic.

Authenticity, I think, matters a lot in how an executive talks to employees.

Mark: I agree, Shel. The thing is, a lot of executives don’t have that authenticity naturally when they’re communicating to large audiences.

If you’re talking to them one-on-one, they’re as authentic as they can be. But you put a couple more people in front of them, or they’re talking in front of thousands, and all of a sudden—if they’re shy or struggle to find a tone that fits the situation—it becomes more than apparent. You think, “Okay, this person is either not telling the truth, or they’re just a crappy communicator.”

That’s where the role of an executive communications coach comes in. We’re the ones helping them by saying, “Gosh, that feels a little stiff. Let’s use this technique to help you come across more naturally.”

There’s the tone—making sure it’s transparent—and then there’s the content, to your point. Are we actually moving the needle with content that’s believable and transparent?

Or are we sugarcoating it? Are we telling one thing to shareholders—“Hey, we’re taking a $130 million charge. We’re going to cut 13,000 jobs,” or whatever it’s going to be—and then the internal message is, “We’re going to try to save as many jobs as possible”?

It’s incongruous, and employees pick up on that very quickly. That’s not transparent. It’s just bad practice.

Shel: It’s funny. I met somebody who was in a room with Hillary Clinton—just a small group of three or four people and Hillary Clinton—and this person said she was absolutely shocked at what a great communicator she was, how warm she was, how conversational and authentic.

She said, “I’ve seen her speak so many times. I was expecting this distant, cold, on-message sort of person.” But that’s not what she was like in person.

So it is important to work with executives so that they can convey what they’re like in front of one person or a small group when they’re talking to hundreds or thousands.

Mark: Yes. And I’ll tell you someplace where I see this popping up more. There are examples where that authenticity and care for internal stakeholders are brought into an external environment.

You and I both know that employees today are getting information from their companies and their leaders on channels like LinkedIn as much as they are on their internal channels. They’re watching. They’re listening. They’re reading that kind of stuff.

A couple of examples: I’ve been working with Pittsburgh International Airport. Their CEO makes it a point, every time she’s talking about what’s happening at the airport, to acknowledge the hard work of her team members and internal teams. They just built and opened a beautiful $1.8 billion terminal there, but every time she’s out talking to stakeholders, she acknowledges the hard work her team members have done to make that happen.

Another example is Signet Jewelers. They own Jared, Kay, and Zales. Their CEO, J.K. Symancyk, when he’s doing quarterly earnings, talking to CNBC, or doing something on LinkedIn, invariably talks about the contributions of their team members.

That’s authentic. Our job in helping and coaching executives is to say, “Make sure you don’t forget that,” because in the heat of the moment—maybe it’s live broadcast TV—putting a little note or even a sticky note that says “team members” is a great way to help them bring that authentic voice forward so it doesn’t come across as scripted and unbelievable.

It sends a huge message of authenticity to internal stakeholders: “Yeah, you had a great quarter. Yay, shareholders. But don’t forget who actually made that happen. That’s us—the people behind the scenes doing the work.”

So I’m a big believer in not forgetting the channels that cross over, and in providing that kind of coaching to an executive leader to ensure his or her voice comes across as appreciative of the hard work of the company—but more importantly, the people behind it.

Shel: Do you remember Jacques Nasser by any chance?

He was with Ford Motor Company, and he would send an email to employees—I think it was monthly. I read about this in a Fortune magazine article. It had to be 20 or 25 years ago.

He would not let anybody review it. Not his communicators, not his lawyers, not HR. He said, “I want this to be me, unfiltered, straight to the employees. I don’t care if there are typos. I don’t care if I say something you don’t want me to say. I’m willing to risk that in order to be completely unfiltered and authentic.”

They told a story about one of these emails where he said, “I know there’s a lot going on in the company, and I should be talking about what’s happening at work. My daughter is graduating from high school this afternoon, and that’s all I can think about. So I want to tell you all about my daughter and everything she’s done in her school career.”

He got notes of congratulations from union shop stewards.

But I think he is an exception to the rule. I don’t think being unfiltered and being authentic are necessarily the same thing.

I think executive voice is disciplined authenticity.

Mark: I agree.

I’m going to jump a little bit to a different topic: how you find that voice.

I worked with the CEO of a major company in the last 12 months who couldn’t really describe his voice. I said, “Tell me what you think your voice is.”

I went through a lot of things that were publicly available, and I ran them through some reviews using what we’ll call artificial intelligence. It was able to help me identify things like tone, pacing, timbre, word choice, and things like that.

Then I was able to go back to the CEO and say, “Is this how you would describe your voice? Does that feel right?” And I had specific examples pulled forward.

“Yeah, that sounds like me. That sounds like me. That doesn’t really sound like me.”

So it was interesting to arrive at a definition of what that voice was.

The purpose was, first, to get alignment with him, but also to help the executive communications professionals working with him. They were having a really tough time getting him a first draft that was close to his voice.

The content was roughly okay, but the voice was all wrong.

So there are ways of doing this. It’s about helping executives recognize and reflect on what their voice is and what works for them. Then sometimes you have to say, “Yeah, it might work for you in some cases, but it’s not so great in others. You’re pretty stiff, so let’s come up with some agreements about how we can fix this.”

You still retain what works for them and their voice, but add some nuances that let you polish it and make it work for other stakeholders.

Shel: One of the problems is that we tend to try to label an executive’s voice with adjectives, right?

“You’re approachable. You’re conversational.”

I think you need to get more detailed than that. You need to ask questions like: Does this executive explain why before saying what? Do they use stories or evidence? Do they acknowledge uncertainty? Are they funny or self-deprecating? How do they sound when they’re taking responsibility for things?

Mark: How often do they say “team”?

Shel: Exactly. What would they never say?

Then you bring all of that together and ask, “Is this your voice?”

If you’re going to use AI to help with this, those are the kinds of things you have to feed it. These are words they use all the time. These are words they never use. These are the approaches they take to supporting a point they’re making.

Mark: And the world is changing constantly.

It could be a new CEO who comes from outside the company. It could be a very senior-level person who has moved into a CEO role and needs to refine that voice because maybe what worked in the previous role doesn’t work as a CEO.

We have to keep those things in mind as we provide that counsel and coaching: “Okay, you have a great voice for this, but you know what? You’ve got a whole new world here that you have to work with. Let’s talk about how we can refine that and make it work for all the stakeholders, including internal employees, whom we have to reach and who have to believe in us.”

Shel: One thought before we wrap this episode up: It doesn’t matter what the executive’s voice is if what they say does not align with what they do.

They can be heartfelt, and they can get choked up when they’re talking to employees. But if their behavior is inconsistent with that, that is a failure of integrity.

That creates a say-do gap.

Mark: We’ve seen examples of that, right? People who want you to believe, “I’m open, transparent, and a decent human being,” and yet they do conference calls or send out a blanket email to fire 35,000 people at once.

I’m not really seeing the connection there.

You’re right. Their actions have to be consistent with how they want to be seen.

Shel: By the way, you mentioned bad layoffs. I had said I found an example of an executive doing this badly.

Vishal Garg, with Better.com, laid off 900 people at the same time. He invited them all to a Zoom call—this was in December 2021—and told them they were part of the unlucky group whose employment was being terminated.

Then he accused some of the terminated employees of stealing from the company by being unproductive.

There was considerable backlash, so much so that he had to apologize for failing to show respect and appreciation. The board actually announced a leadership and cultural assessment as a result.

That’s what executive voice looks like when it goes badly wrong.

Mark: Not a lot of love shown there.

I think a lot of people are familiar with that story, but it’s good to be reminded that this is real stuff that happens. It makes you wonder: Was there an internal or executive communication person even there in the room?

And if so, was he or she ignored?

There’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking about that stuff, but you just wonder: How the heck does that happen?

Shel: You have to believe either there was no communications perspective in the room or it wasn’t listened to.

This is why I think we have to talk about the “seat at the table,” even though I get really sick of that conversation.

Mark: Me too, Shel. We definitely have to talk about that.

AI is a great example of where people are saying, “Yeah, we never get a seat at the table.”

And I’m thinking, “You have no idea the opportunity that is in front of you right now, this very second.”

Shel: We’ll definitely do an episode on that.

But that’ll do it for this episode. I hope listeners will send us your comments and questions. Just head over to firpodcastnetwork.com and find the show. You’ll get all the information on how to comment.

And until next time, Mark, this has been great. I’m really looking forward to continuing this.

Mark: I’m loving it. What a great partner. Thanks, y’all. I look forward to continuing this journey with you.

The post OTSP #5: Finding Your Leader’s Voice for Internal Stakeholders appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Episode 132 of IABC’s Circle of Fellows examines what the newly released Reimagining Tomorrow 2026 report from the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management means for the profession. The report surveyed 536 communication professionals across six global regions and found a profession that has embraced AI in practice but not yet claimed AI governance in leadership: 95.9% of organizations now permit AI, yet only 8.6% have communication professionals leading the formal governance structure. One in four organizations discloses AI use to no one at all.

Joining moderator Shel Holtz are Bonnie Caver and Adrian Cropley OAM, both Global Alliance board directors and the research partners behind the survey, along with Theomary Karamanis and Mike Klein. Together, they dig into what the data means for the profession, what it will take to move from adoption to accountability, and what it takes to be a leader in the AI era.

About the panel:

Bonnie Caver, SCMP, is the Founder and CEO of Reputation Lighthouse, a global change management and reputation consultancy with offices in Denver, Colorado, and Austin, Texas. The firm, which is 20 years old, focuses on leading companies to create, accelerate, and protect their corporate value. She has achieved the highest professional certification for a communication professional, the Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), a distinction at the ANSI/ISO level. She is also a certified strategic change management professional (Kellogg School of Management), a certified crisis manager (Institute of Crisis Management). She holds an advanced certification for reputation through the Reputation Institute (now the RepTrak Company). She is a past chair of the global executive board for the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC). She currently serves on the board of directors for the Global Alliance for Public Relations and Communication Management, where she leads the North American Regional Council and is the New Technology Responsibility/AI Director. Caver is the Vice Chair for the Global Communication Certification Council (GCCC) and leads the IABC Change Management Special Interest Group, which has more than 1,300 members. In addition, she is heavily involved in the global conversation around ethical and responsible AI implementation and led the Global Alliance’s efforts in creating Ethical and Responsible AI Guidelines for the global profession.

Adrian Cropley is the founder and director of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence, a global training and development organization. For over thirty years, Adrian has worked with clients worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies, on major change communication initiatives, internal communication reviews and strategies, professional development programs, and executive leadership and coaching. He is a non-executive director on several boards and advises some of the top CEOs and executives globally.

Adrian is a past global chair of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC), where he implemented the IABC Career Road Map, kick-started a global ISO certification for the profession, and developed the IABC Academy. Adrian pioneered the Melcrum Internal Communication Black Belt program in Asia Pacific and is a sought-after facilitator, speaker, and thought leader. He has been a keynote speaker and workshop leader on strategic and change communication at international conferences in Canada, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, Malaysia, Singapore, China, India, Hong Kong, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia. He has received numerous awards, including IABC Gold Quill Awards for communication excellence, and his Agency received Boutique Agency of the Year 6 years running.

Adrian is the Chair of the Industry Advisory Committee for the RMIT School of Media and Communication and a Fellow of the IABC and RSA. In 2017, he was awarded the Medal of Order of Australia for his contribution to the field of communication.

 

Dr. Theomary Karamanis is a multiple award-winning communication professor and consultant with 25 years of global experience. She is currently a full-time senior lecturer in Management Communication at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business and regularly delivers executive education programs in leadership communication, crisis communication, and strategic communication. She has held several professional leadership positions, including Chair of the GCCC (Global Communication Certification Council), Chair of the IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) Academy, and Chair of the IABC Awards committee.

Her academic background includes a PhD in communication studies, a Master of Arts in mass communication, and a postgraduate certificate in telecommunications, all from Northwestern University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Athens University of Economics and Business. She also holds professional certifications as a Strategic Communication Management Professional (SCMP), online facilitator, and executive program instructor. She has received 40 professional communication awards, including 12 Platinum MarCom awards, 7 Gold Quill awards, 4 Silver Quill awards, and a Comm Prix award. In 2020, she received the Award for Excellence in Communication Consulting by APCC (Association of Professional Communication Consultants) and ABC (Association for Business Communication). She is the author of several books and academic papers on communication, and she also regularly delivers presentations at international conferences and other business forums.

Mike Klein is the Editor-in-Chief of Strategic Magazine, Founder of #WeLeadComms, and a communication consultant specializing in internal and social communication based in Reykjavik, Iceland. A former US political consultant, Mike shifted direction toward internal communication while pursuing his MBA at London Business School.  Since then, Mike has been one of the leading voices for empowering communication professionals, and advocating a focus on internal influence and social connection as drivers of communication, integration and performance. His 2011 book, From Lincoln to LinkedIn remains relevant as organizations recognize that personal credibility and connection are critical to communication success in a world where content volumes are increasing and instability flourishes. Raised in Chicago, Mike has lived and worked in seven different countries, and is also a Fellow of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and the Institute of Internal Communication.

The post IABC Fellows Explore AI and the Leadership Moment for The Communication Profession appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Most companies are experiencing some level of turmoil over their adoption of Artificial Intelligence. They should be able to lean on their managers to interpret these issues at the ground level. Research, however, finds that training has left managers out. They may be getting some of the same training all employees are getting, but nothing to help them guide their teams. That will become more and more problematic as challenges continue to mount—like the two issues that have emerged recently: companies shifting the models they’re using, and employees stepping out of their areas of expertise because AI can give them information they would normally turn to internal subject matter experts for.

Links from this episode:

• ‘Tokenmaxxing’ hits limits as workplaces look for cheaper artificial intelligence
• Workers are crossing job boundaries with AI, OpenAI research shows
• Managers say they don’t feel ready to lead an AI-fluent workforce

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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:

When companies change something they’ve been extolling for the last six months, managers are expected to support that change. When employees step outside their lane, managers are supposed to manage that. But can managers do these things when they haven’t been prepared?

That’s the case with some of the fallout from the introduction of artificial intelligence in organizations. The details are coming up in this short midweek episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode 524 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz, and you’ve got just me again this week.

I have three artificial intelligence stories to share with you. Organizational communicators are going to have to live at the intersection of all three of these issues, whether we’re ready or not, so let’s tackle them as parts of a bigger whole.

I’ll dive into these stories right after this.

Let’s start with the whiplash.

For the past year or so, companies have been in what some have come to call the “token-maxing era”: Throw AI at everything, reward employees for burning through as many tokens as possible, and worry about the ROI later.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang was quoted as saying that if your half-million-dollar engineer isn’t burning $250,000 in tokens, something’s amiss. Meta reportedly ran an internal competition rewarding token usage.

That was the mood last spring.

Summer’s mood is different.

The Associated Press—and, by the way, this same reporting ran in The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and elsewhere—describes companies now hitting a wall. Costs went up, productivity didn’t keep pace, and the bill is coming due.

We covered this in episode 517 back in early June, but just as a reminder: Uber blew through its entire annual AI budget in four months, according to its CTO, and has since rolled out spending tiers starting at $1,500 a month per employee.

Some companies aren’t just tightening budgets; they’re switching platforms entirely. One AI startup called Lindy moved 100% of its traffic off Claude and onto DeepSeek, the cheaper Chinese alternative. Its CEO told CNBC that the cost curve “crashed to the ground.”

Multiply that kind of switch across every company currently having the same conversation, and you’ve got a specific communication problem: How do you explain to a workforce that, after spending months enthusiastically evangelizing one tool, you’re now moving employees to a different one—possibly overnight—for reasons that are mostly financial and don’t actually involve the employees who have been building things on the original tool?

That’s problem number one.

Problem number two is going to make problem number one look simple, because it’s not just about which tool people use. It’s about what people are allowed to do with it.

Axios got an exclusive look at new OpenAI research drawn from more than 800,000 work-related ChatGPT messages from business users. The finding is that workers are routinely doing other people’s jobs.

Roughly 44% of occupation-specific requests involve tasks typically associated with a different profession. After stripping out generic activities such as drafting emails, customer service employees, designers, and HR professionals are the biggest boundary crossers. Something like three-quarters of their profession-specific prompts touch work that belongs to somebody else’s job title.

People are using ChatGPT to draft marketing materials, troubleshoot software, run financial calculations, and interpret regulations—jobs that used to require reaching out to a specialist for help.

OpenAI’s chief economist told Axios that the boundaries between jobs are already becoming more flexible because of this.

Now, if you’re in communications, you can probably already hear the governance questions stacking up.

Who’s accountable when a well-meaning employee uses AI to draft something that touches legal, financial, or regulatory territory in which they have no training?

What happens to your carefully built subject-matter-expert review process when everyone feels like a generalist?

And when something goes wrong because of bad advice, off-brand sentiment, or a compliance miss, who owns that failure? Is it the employee, the tool, or the manager for not seeing it coming?

That brings us to the third piece, and honestly, it’s the one that worries me most.

HR Dive reported on new research from Indeed and YouGov. The headline number is that 43% of managers say they feel poorly equipped—or not equipped at all—to lead a workforce that’s fluent in AI.

More than half of workers say they’re not getting the AI training they need. Employer expectations for what workers should be doing with AI are running two or three times ahead of what workers actually feel comfortable doing.

Indeed pointed out that companies have spent two years building AI-ready workforces. The next challenge—and arguably the harder one—is building AI-ready leaders.

Now, put these three stories together and you get a pretty clear picture.

Companies are going to keep switching models and vendors as the economics shift. Employees are going to keep wandering across job boundaries because the tools make that easy and, honestly, tempting.

The people standing in the middle of both trends—the frontline managers who must explain the switch, catch the boundary problems, and answer the “Wait, am I even allowed to do this?” questions in real time—are the group companies have prepared the least.

That is a communication problem, and it’s ours to fix.

If managers don’t understand why the company moved off the model they spent six months championing, they can’t credibly explain it to their teams. They’ll either go silent, which breeds suspicion, or they’ll improvise, which is worse.

If managers don’t have clear guardrails explaining what kinds of AI-assisted work outside someone’s lane are acceptable and what kinds require a specialist’s involvement, they’ll either rubber-stamp everything or block everything. Neither option serves the business.

And if leadership training lags this far behind workforce adoption, managers become the bottleneck at exactly the moment the company needs them to be the translators and interpreters.

Here are three things I’d be pushing for internally right now:

First, build the change narrative for platform and model switches before you need it. Develop a plain-language explanation of why these decisions happen that managers can use without having to invent their own justification on the spot.

Second, give managers an actual decision framework for cross-boundary AI use. Provide a simple test for determining when an employee’s AI-assisted work needs specialist review so managers aren’t left guessing.

Third, take the Indeed numbers to leadership. Make the case that you can’t roll out AI training for the frontline while skipping the people who manage the frontline.

It’s the difference between an AI rollout that sticks and one that quietly falls apart at the manager layer.

Thanks for putting up with a lone voice again this week. With luck, Neville will be back in the saddle next week.

As I mentioned last week, Neville and I are set to have lunch in San Francisco on Thursday. It’s the first time we’ll have seen each other face-to-face in almost seven years, if I’m remembering correctly. I’m looking forward to that. Watch for photos.

And that’s a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #524: Are Managers Ready to Lead an AI-Fluent Workforce? appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates.

xx

Links from this episode:

• How Marketers Should Rethink Thought Leadership
• Treat Thought Leadership as a Lasting Asset, Not a One-Off Campaign
• A 5-Step Framework for Genuine Thought Leadership
• Why thought leadership is no longer optional for tech companies
• The ROI of Thought Leadership
• CEO thought leadership can drive $367M in value
• Why Thought Leadership Is Failing — and How to Solve It
• Reclaiming Brand Sovereignty In The AI Era
• The paid brand mention problem in GEO
• Can Hedging Make You a Better Communicator?
• Effectively communicating uncertainty: The persuasive impact of different types of hedges
• The Role of Different Markers of Linguistic Powerlessness in Persuasion
• Hedges, Tag Questions, Message Processing, and Persuasion

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

• Bluesky’s AI assistant Attie expands into an open social research tool
• Attie: AI for the Atmosphere
• Instagram will charge for AI access
• Newsletter platform Beehiiv now lets subscribers chat with each other, adds AI
• Roadmap to 7.1
• Investigation into TikTok’s compliance with duties to protect children from encountering harmful content under section 12

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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

It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment.

Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it?

And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing.

That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own.

You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record.

He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support.

It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients.

Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host.

But today, you get just me.

At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes.

Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs.

There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody.

It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.”

Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it.

Tim Sutton left a comment saying:

“Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.”

Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs.

Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts.

The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually.

Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying:

“They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.”

Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new set of protocols Adam Curry is working on with an engineering colleague named Dave Jones.

We talked about whether this would be good for podcasting and podcast listeners, the likelihood of widespread adoption, and some of the obstacles standing in its way.

Vincent Bruneau wrote:

“The slower-than-hoped-for adoption is the most interesting part of the Podcasting 2.0 story. Richer metadata, transcripts, chapters, and better accessibility are genuinely useful features. So why hasn’t it moved faster? That gap between good technology and actual adoption is always where the real communication lesson lives.”

Juraj Schaefer, a podcast producer and editor, wrote:

“Interesting perspective. As podcasting evolves, ownership, discoverability, and meaningful connections will become even more important.”

And Dakshina Senadheera, a podcast editor and manager, shared this thought:

“Interesting conversation, especially around keeping podcasting open while improving the listener experience.”

Thanks to everybody who commented on our previous episodes. You are always welcome to comment.

You can leave comments on LinkedIn, where we announce the episodes, as everybody whose comment I read today did.

You can also send us an audio or text comment by email at [email protected]. You can record a comment directly from the FIR website, FIRPodcastNetwork.com, by clicking the “Send Voicemail” button on the right-hand side of the screen.

Or you can leave a comment in our show notes. There are all kinds of ways you can comment and participate in the show.

I also want to let you know that the interview we did with Pete Blackshaw about the Answer Economy is now available.

It has been getting some really good reactions. People have found real value in this discussion about how AI answers are now the answers people are getting about your product, regardless of where the information the frontier models accumulated came from.

You can find that in FIR Interviews.

The latest episode of Circle of Fellows is also available. Episode 131 is about the evolving media landscape and what it means for media relations.

Our panelists included Diana Degan, a new IABC Fellow from the 2026 class of Fellows, along with Ned Lundquist, Martha Muzychka, and Jennifer Wah.

They talked about whom we reach out to when there are fewer reporters available to tell our stories through the mainstream and trade press we have been accustomed to.

The next episode, coming up on the third Thursday in August at 6 p.m. Eastern, is about AI and the kinds of pivots communicators will have to make as AI becomes a more widely used tool in the communication toolkit.

The panelists will be Bonnie Caver, Adrian Cropley, Theomary Karamanis, and Mike Klein. I’m looking forward to that.

Now I have three reports, as I usually do in the monthly long-form episode of FIR. You just don’t get three from Neville.

As I mentioned earlier, this is going to be a shorter episode than usual.

Two pieces landed in the search press recently that I think belong together, even though they were written a few weeks apart by people who probably weren’t talking to each other.

The first is by Bill Hunt at Search Engine Journal. Search Engine Journal has been around a long time and has been a great source of information about search and adjacent topics.

Hunt points out that, for 20 years, digital strategy meant driving people to webpages. We deliberately fragmented our information across dozens of pages, each optimized for a different stage of consideration.

The example Hunt uses is Ford and its F-150 pickup truck.

The homepage sells the lifestyle. Model pages introduce the trim levels. A configurator lets you picture yourself owning it. Feature pages handle towing and off-road performance. Specifications live even deeper in the site, next to regional offers and financing.

For a human being, that architecture is beautiful. Every page does a job.

For a machine, it’s just friction.

When an AI can’t find a dense, complete answer on your own domain, it doesn’t give up. It assembles the best answer it can from whatever is easiest to retrieve.

Consider the story that broke last week about an OpenAI model escaping from its sandbox and hacking its way into Hugging Face.

What was it looking for? It was looking for the answer sheet—the cheat sheet for the test it had been told to solve.

Rather than do the work to solve the test, it went hunting for the cheat sheet that had all the answers in one place.

That’s no different from this.

Hunt searched for the gas mileage of an F-150 Raptor. The AI Overview built its answer from Reddit, an automotive publisher, and a local dealership. It never touched the Ford website.

Ford has that number. Ford has every number.

Gemini just found it easier to assemble an answer from somewhere else where all that information was in one place.

Hunt calls the thing you’re trying to protect “brand sovereignty”: your ability to remain the authoritative source about your own products, services, and expertise, no matter where the answer eventually gets delivered.

He is emphatic that this is not a search engine optimization problem. It is a governance problem, because no single team owns the whole picture.

Product information, documentation, customer support, legal policy, and commerce are all owned by different parts of the organization. All of them shape how your organization gets represented, and they have been evolving independently for years.

His summary line is one I would hang on my wall: Your website is no longer your digital asset. Your knowledge is.

Communicators have spent 30 years arguing that the corporate website is the front door.

Hunt’s case is that the front door is now a machine reading whatever knowledge it can find. If yours is scattered across content management systems, PDFs, and support portals, the machine will find the gaps—and it will fill them from Reddit.

Meanwhile, Gaetano DiNardi, writing in Search Engine Land—not Search Engine Journal, but another great, longstanding search-focused publication—looked at what is being sold to companies that want to fix exactly this problem.

Once the industry decided that off-site brand mentions drive AI visibility, a market miraculously appeared to sell them. He audited several highly rated vendors selling brand-mention services.

What they are selling turns out to be variations on one thing: renting space on websites nobody reads.

Some of it involves placement on what the SEO world calls private blog networks. These are clusters of sites that exist for no purpose except to sell mentions and links to whoever is willing to pay for them.

DiNardi found those going for 10 to 15 times what a comparable link cost in the old SEO market.

Some of it involves placement on sites with no actual subject-matter focus.

One example he cites has a page about learning-management software sitting alongside listicles ranking the best crypto wallets. That is basically a billboard that will print anything.

Some of it is Reddit astroturfing.

Agencies use what are called aged accounts—profiles built up over months so they look like real community members—and use them to post brand mentions in subreddits that have nothing to do with the brand.

Those posts are frequently removed within 30 days for violating community rules, which tells you exactly what the communities make of them.

Then there are the mechanics.

There is a Slack workflow. The agency generates a placement opportunity. A junior marketing assistant with no way to evaluate whether the publisher is legitimate approves a fee.

In DiNardi’s example, that fee is $250 to add the mention. The agency pays the publisher and then invoices the client to recover it, on top of the retainer.

The Federal Trade Commission’s endorsement guides—and that is a U.S. agency, so these are applicable only in the U.S.—require clear disclosure of paid placements.

These pages generally are not updated to say that the mention was purchased.

Lily Ray, who is quoted in the piece, says this is another evolution of spammy link-building. We have seen this movie before, going back to Google’s first Penguin update in 2012.

The reason it appears to work right now is that large language model citation systems are still immature compared with Google’s spam detection.

Volume from low-quality sources may be rewarded in ways it would not be in old-school search.

DiNardi puts that window at perhaps one to two years before the platforms build countermeasures. He also notes that marketers chasing volume may be confusing the models about their own entities in the process.

Here is why I mashed these two stories together: They are the legitimate and illegitimate answers to exactly the same question.

Who controls what the machine says about us?

One answer says: Organize your knowledge so you are the most useful source available.

The other says: Pay strangers to say your name.

The first is a governance project, and it is the one you should be focusing on rather than waiting to be invited to participate.

Nobody else in the building has responsibility for how the organization is represented as a whole. That is within the purview of the communication function.

The second is going to show up on your desk as a pitch or proposal, probably coming from the marketing department, probably with a persuasive percentage attached to it, along with a deadline.

When it does, the questions you should ask are the old ones.

Is it disclosed?

Would we be comfortable if a reporter published the invoice?

Are we buying a spot on a page that also sells spots to our competitors?

We spent a couple of decades getting pay-for-play out of media relations. I would hate to watch us import it into AI visibility just because the metric is new.

Dan York

Greetings, Shel, Neville, and FIR listeners all around the world. It’s Dan York coming at you from Vienna, Austria, where I’ve been attending the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force, or IETF.

These are the engineers and others who make the internet work through all the various protocols—HTTP, email, and all those kinds of things.

One of the big topics this week, of course, was AI. There were a number of sessions looking at what kind of work needs to be done.

For instance, in a world where everybody talks about “agentic, agentic, agentic, agentic,” do we need new protocols for communicating when an agent goes to book airfare and interact with all sorts of systems? Are new protocols needed?

Part of the genius of the internet is that it is built from small building blocks that can be used to do things and then reused in many different ways.

One of the things people are finding is that many of the existing protocols work well. But we are still trying to figure out, in this new world, what is happening and what new things are needed.

One thing happening in the standards world is the same thing we are seeing throughout the rest of the communication world: a lot of slop.

There is a positive side to this. The IETF conducts all of its work and develops all of its standards in English. If you are not an English speaker, or English is not your primary language, it can be challenging to help create new standards.

Back in the early 2000s, before we had all these new tools, I helped some people for whom English was not their primary language. It was painful because they were trying to create standards and describe how they worked, but their English was difficult to read. I helped them improve it.

Now, with these tools, people can contribute in English. They can put their material into the large language model of their choice and get good English back in the format of an internet draft or standard.

That is the positive side. Suddenly, millions or billions more people around the world are able to participate in the standards process in English.

The negative side, of course, is that people are generating so many contributions that they take a long time to triage. This creates a tremendous amount of work for reviewers, leaders within the IETF, and others. Everything is taking much longer.

We have seen this in many other areas. Put up a job advertisement and you get a bazillion applications. Publish a blog post and you get a ton of comments. All these things are happening.

One thing I had not paid as much attention to was the fact that all these email tools now have a feature that says, essentially, “Write a better email.”

People are using that feature, turning what might have been short, not particularly well-worded emails into big, voluminously long messages. That is generating a lot more traffic on the email lists people use within the IETF.

It gets us back to the situation we have seen many times: You have five bullets, feed them into an LLM, and it generates a long block of text. Then the text is too long for someone to read, so they use another LLM to turn it back into five bullets.

There we are, with the snake eating its tail.

There have been a lot of interesting conversations. We’ll see where all this goes.

Speaking of AI, a couple of other things have happened in the broader industry.

First, you may or may not have noticed that Bluesky announced Attie—A-T-T-I-E—its AI assistant. It started as something you could use to build social feeds within the Atmosphere, the broader AT Protocol ecosystem.

You could use Attie to create these feeds. Bluesky has now announced that it is expanding Attie into more of a chatbot that you can ask for information and news from across the broader Bluesky network—the Atmosphere, as it is called.

I don’t have access yet. I’m on the waiting list.

They say these are not chats. They are “quests.” Yes, you heard that right. They are quests—a new way to explore the Atmosphere.

You could ask questions such as, “What’s trending in my network today?” “Who’s worth following in climate tech?” or “Put together a daily briefing on indie game development.”

We will have to see what this looks like, how it works, and all those kinds of things. But it is another example of AI coming into the Bluesky space.

AI systems, of course, cost money to operate. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has said this is really expensive and that the company will eventually have to throttle people or ask them to pay.

If you are a communicator who has been using Instagram’s built-in AI to generate campaign content, create images, or perform similar tasks, casual use is still free right now.

At some point, however, if you use it at high volume, you will probably wind up being charged for credits or have to take those costs into account.

Stay tuned on that.

Switching to newsletters—but remaining on the subject of AI—Beehiiv, B-E-E-H-I-I-V, one of Substack’s competitors, had a major release this month.

It rolled out something called Communities, which lets you create a community around your newsletter that people can join, where they can chat with one another and do those kinds of things.

At the same time, Beehiiv added AI components, including an AI assistant that can help you examine your content and subscribers, particularly on the administrative side.

Again, we are seeing more AI appearing in different places.

Speaking of AI—as that seems to be the theme of my report this month—I’ll also tell you that WordPress 7.1 is currently scheduled to arrive on August 19, before my next report. The timing aligns with WordCamp US here in the States.

The release will bring a number of new features, including more of the collaboration functionality that was part of the original plan for WordPress 7.0.

It will include notes and other features, along with more collaboration and AI elements. That is coming on August 19.

Finally, let me close with a policy topic.

The U.K.’s Ofcom is pursuing two different initiatives. It has announced a forthcoming ban on anyone under 16 using social media. I’m not entirely sure what that means in practice.

It has also announced that it is investigating TikTok’s compliance because it does not believe the platform did enough to prevent people under 13 from using it.

This will be a test of the U.K.’s law, so we will see where it goes when it reaches the courts.

There is also a proposal under which people younger than 16 would be banned from social media, while 16- and 17-year-olds would somehow magically be blocked from using social media between midnight and 6 a.m.

It remains to be seen how any of that can be turned into reality.

The other problem people have pointed out is that all you are doing is blocking children from seeing some of the harmful material. You are not actually getting rid of the terrible content on the internet.

Everybody else is still exposed to it, including seniors and others who may have as many issues and challenges with it—if not more—than some of the young people in that space.

Anyway, that’s all from here, Shel. I think I’ll go get some Wiener schnitzel and a beer.

Until next month, that’s all. Back to you.

Bye for now.

Shel Holtz

Thanks, Dan. I really enjoyed that report. I was particularly struck by two of the items that you reported on. The first was Addy for Blue Sky. I just really like the idea of using AI this way within social networks. That would come in so handy if I could do that with, say, LinkedIn, rather than use the current search tool, which is fundamentally worthless unless I’m just looking for a person.

Or a company, but if I’m looking for threads around certain topics, it’s really tough, and something like that would be very useful. I’m not on Bluesky enough to really make a difference, but you know, on LinkedIn, maybe even Facebook, that would be awesome. Maybe they’ll pay attention to this and follow suit. Also, beehive with the communities, I think, is terrific because building a community around a newsletter can be tough.

And I think this might signal a way that Substack and Ghost and the others might be able to play in that space. So it was all interesting, Dan, but those were the two that stood out for me.

We talk about thought leadership from time to time on FIR. It has been a tried-and-true content marketing tool for a long time.

It has also been a source of some cynicism.

A stack of research has landed over the past few months that says two things at once: Thought leadership is producing measurable financial value, and most of what organizations are publishing under the label of thought leadership is utterly worthless.

Since two things can be true at the same time, both of those things are true.

The gap between them is where the opportunity lies for those of us who do this kind of work.

Let me start with the number from Axios that got my attention in the first place.

In April, Axios reported on a study from a firm called Cardinal 40 that found high-quality CEO thought leadership was associated with an average of $367 million in shareholder value in a single week.

Here is how the researchers got to that number.

They analyzed more than 1,000 examples of CEO thought leadership from S&P 500 companies and measured each against abnormal stock returns, deliberately excluding anything tied to market-moving news or disclosures.

They were trying to isolate the effect of the words themselves.

Then they did something really interesting.

They tested more than 60 common writing traits—tone, readability, and the kinds of things we all obsess over when we are editing copy.

They found nothing that explained why some pieces outperformed.

So they used AI, because of course they did.

They compared each document with a curated canon of genuinely standout thought leadership and found that communications that sat semantically closer to that canon were associated with stronger returns.

The gap between top-tier and bottom-tier thought leadership worked out to about a nine-tenths-of-a-percentage-point swing in stock performance the following week.

For the biggest companies, that is not a rounding error.

The report estimates as much as $25 billion across the Magnificent Seven—the seven megacap U.S. technology companies: Nvidia, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla.

The research also found that more thought leadership does not produce more value.

Weak or low-quality communications correlated with neutral or negative outcomes. In the age of AI slop, volume is not merely useless. It can cost you.

Compare that with The Harris Poll’s research on the ROI of thought leadership.

Nine in 10 executives say thought leadership is critical to building authority, and only 20 percent say theirs is actually effective.

Executives in that study estimated a 14-times return on investment, and Fortune 100 executives put the annual value at about $3.6 million.

I need to hedge here a little.

The Harris fieldwork was conducted in May 2022 among 500 U.S. employees at the director level or above. It is still being cited in 2026 as though it is fresh, and it is not.

Second—and this applies across the board—nearly every organization publishing research on the value of thought leadership sells thought leadership.

Harris has a thought-leadership practice. IBM’s Institute for Business Value is a thought-leadership shop. Cardinal 40 evaluates thought leadership for a living.

That does not invalidate the work, but it should temper any enthusiasm you feel about the research.

For what it is worth, IBM’s research is the most consistent of the batch.

Eighty-eight percent of executives consume thought leadership, 87 percent say it shaped a purchase decision within the previous 90 days, and about half of C-suite leaders credit it with driving revenue growth.

One more data point from the Axios piece is something I cannot stop thinking about.

Mentions of “storytelling,” “narrative,” and “storyteller” on corporate earnings and investor calls are up 65 percent since 2020, according to AlphaSense.

The language of our discipline has migrated into the language of capital markets.

It is important to treat the dollar figures as directional rather than literal. Correlation is doing a lot of work in these studies.

Coherent, original executive communication may well be a proxy for a well-run company rather than a cause of its performance.

But the through line across all this research is consistent, and it is the one you can actually act on: Quality is doing the work, and quantity is doing damage.

If the value is real, why is only 20 percent of it working?

The Content Marketing Institute brought together a group of practitioners in July to work through exactly that question: Jill Roberson from Dataweavers, Andrea Ames from Eaton, Lindsey Hagen from Conductor, and the Content Marketing Institute’s own Robert Rose, one of my favorite people to read and listen to.

I love This Old Marketing with Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi.

Jill Roberson made a point that stood out for me: We have to reset expectations for what thought leadership even is.

Hagen’s point was that the bar has simply risen.

You have to be useful and unique now, and the standard for what qualifies as valuable is much higher than it was.

Roberson recommended putting the hypothesis at the beginning of a thought-leadership piece and making it unmistakable, then delivering on it immediately.

If people are not getting the insight they came for, and getting it quickly, they are gone.

But delivering quickly is not the same as creating quickly.

Ames’s advice was to slow down and be genuinely intentional about the topic.

Robert Rose made the observation that I suspect a lot of you have been waiting for someone senior to say out loud: Our industry has convinced itself that speed is its foundational value, and it just isn’t.

Then there is gating.

Ames said Eaton does not require contact information for its content. There are no forms you have to fill out before you get the download link.

Her reasoning is the reasoning of 2026: She wants large language models to be able to include Eaton’s thought-leadership pieces in the results they produce.

Being exclusionary, she argues, mostly hurts you.

That means the lead-capture form—which has always been a tax on distribution—is now also a tax on being cited by the systems your buyers are querying before they ever contact you.

The Content Marketing Institute also ran a piece in the fall by Abid Rahman, written with Kate Houston, who runs executive thought leadership at Amazon Web Services.

Their diagnosis is pretty blunt.

AI can draft, polish, and structure this content with remarkable efficiency, but it cannot supply credibility, lived experience, or judgment.

It reads as though anyone could have prompted it because anyone could have prompted it.

They offer three ingredients for the real thing.

The first is credible experience.

I talk about “genuine lived experience” somewhat derisively because I read people on LinkedIn saying, “AI has no lived experience,” and then I look at the kinds of things they are writing, which required absolutely no lived experience.

But in the case of thought leadership, it really does matter.

You have to have credible experience to support your ability to make these proclamations.

You also need a genuine audience need and an insight that not many other people can provide.

Then you apply a five-step framework: Define the goal. Choose the focus. Shape between one and three core themes. Build a voice ecosystem of leaders, customers, and advocates who actually have some standing. And map the stories to the right channels.

Their measurement point is one I would like to tattoo on a few people’s foreheads: Thought leadership is not an engine for marketing-qualified leads.

In one of their programs, they do not blast out content at all. They put a CEO in credible venues.

Under those circumstances, brand awareness among the ideal customer profile rose from 17 percent to 51 percent in one year, and request-for-proposal volume increased three-and-a-half times.

Could they attribute a single article to a single lead?

Of course not.

That is the honest answer most of us should be giving.

Now, a different angle.

Yogesh Shah, writing in Entrepreneur—and this goes back to January—argues that the problem is not the thinking. It is the container.

We are in a zero-click world. Audiences do not leave the platform they are on.

Roughly 90 percent of decision-makers say they are more receptive to companies producing high-quality thought leadership, yet engagement keeps declining anyway.

His question is: If a report can be summarized in ChatGPT in seconds, why would anyone read it?

His answer is what he calls experiential thought leadership.

Turn the insight into something people are in rather than something they open.

Think of a live discussion, a workshop-style webinar, a tightly curated roundtable, or a podcast that puts listeners inside a recognizable scenario instead of offering an expert monologue.

He is emphatic that this does not require a large budget. It requires one well-designed moment in which attention is protected.

You can see the tension between these two pieces of advice.

The Content Marketing Institute says to slow down and do the deep work. Entrepreneur says the document is the wrong delivery mechanism.

I do not think those ideas conflict.

There is a line in a Savanta piece from June that I think captures the entire argument in 12 words: You can replicate a product, but you can’t copy a point of view.

The case study from the author of that piece, Matthew Mott, is aimed at technology companies, but I think it applies elsewhere.

A competitor can reverse-engineer your features, match your pricing, copy your positioning, and even hire your people.

What it cannot copy is a track record of saying interesting things that turned out to be correct.

That builds slowly, and it compounds.

His second observation is that buyers cannot really evaluate an AI product.

The technology is opaque, and every vendor’s claims sound alike. Buyers stop assessing the product and start assessing the people behind it, looking for evidence of judgment.

They are conducting that assessment before they ever talk to you.

The sales conversation does not start from zero. It starts from whatever reputation you have already built.

He also argues that relatively few companies are publishing practical, original research on AI right now.

Most of what exists is either so hedged that it is useless or so optimistic that it is not credible.

In a few years, everyone will have a program, and standing out will cost far more.

So, if you are already publishing thought leadership or planning to, what does all this mean for you?

I have a list.

Of course I have a list.

First, audit your top pieces from last quarter and apply the swap test.

If a competitor could have published the same piece with its logo on it, you did not produce thought leadership. You just cranked out content.

Second, find your proprietary data.

This is where I think communicators sell themselves short.

You have more than you think: your own operational data, customer-service logs, field observations, and the ability to conduct surveys.

Survey your employees. Survey your customers. Survey the industry.

The Content Marketing Institute’s Jasmine Williams makes the case for treating thought leadership as a platform rather than a campaign.

One flagship study becomes the hub, and articles, webinars, sales enablement, and employee advocacy become the spokes.

That is a repeatable model.

Third, put the thesis in the first 60 seconds.

Not the context. Not the setup.

Put the claim in the first 60 seconds.

Fourth, reopen the gating conversation and reframe it.

It is no longer lead capture versus reach. It is lead capture versus being cited by the machines your buyers consult first.

Segment your library.

Some assets should stay gated because a download genuinely signals buying intent. But your flagship research probably should not be among them.

Fifth, take one asset you published this year and turn it into an experience: a roundtable, a working session, or a recorded session with someone who disagrees with you.

I think we call that a debate.

Sixth, change what you are measuring—and change it before someone asks you to defend it.

Measure speaking invitations. Measure journalists citing your framework. Measure analysts referencing your numbers. Measure employees sharing the work without being asked.

Denise Brosseau of the Thought Leadership Lab calls the underlying discipline “stick-to-itiveness”: the willingness to keep showing up long enough for any of that to accumulate.

Seventh, protect the executive’s actual voice.

This is the piece only we can do.

AI is a genuinely useful accelerant. It can turn an interview into an article, sharpen the structure, and catch the flabby paragraph.

What it cannot do is have a point of view.

If your CEO’s byline reads like a competent prompt response, you put your CEO’s and your company’s credibility at risk.

Let me end this segment with a little history.

The term “thought leader” is generally credited to a fellow named Joel Kurtzman, who was editing Strategy+Business back in 1994.

He meant something specific: someone addressing the questions senior executives were actually wrestling with.

More than 30 years later, the term has become a punchline.

It became one because we industrialized it. We turned a description of rare people into a content category with a production quota.

The research that came out this year is essentially the market telling us it can still tell the difference—and that it is willing to pay for the real thing.

That is not a bad position for communicators to be in, is it?

Now for another awkward transition to my final report.

I’m going to end with something a little lighter, although there is a real point buried in it.

Knowledge at Wharton wrote up a new research study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology titled “Effectively Communicating Uncertainty: The Persuasive Impact of Different Types of Hedges.”

You know hedges: “That could work.” “That might be a good approach.”

We all hedge.

Yet most communication training treats hedging as a bug to be trained out of us.

Jonah Berger’s research team ran seven studies and split hedging into two dimensions.

The first is likelihood.

Is your hedge low-probability—“might,” “could,” or “it feels like”—or higher-probability—“likely,” “should,” or “arguably”?

The second is perspective.

Is the hedge floating free, as in, “It sounds like”? Or is it attached to a human being, as in, “In my opinion,” or “It sounds likely to me”?

All seven studies agreed: Higher-likelihood hedges and personal-perspective hedges are more persuasive because they make the speaker seem more confident.

Berger’s example is a mechanic saying, “The repair might work,” versus, “I believe this repair will solve the problem.”

Both statements convey uncertainty, but they have a completely different effect.

The personal version means someone is taking ownership.

Berger describes this as a communication sweet spot. You get the protection of not overclaiming without paying the credibility tax.

It is important to point out that the effect weakened when the communicator was a brand rather than a person, because confidence mattered less.

That is one more argument for having actual humans deliver your message.

I went looking for research that either supports or contradicts this, and it turns out the findings land right between two camps that do not agree.

On one side are decades of work on what is called powerless language: hedges, hesitations, and tag questions.

This research suggested that hedges may be the most damaging of all the powerless markers.

Researchers found something genuinely alarming: When a topic mattered to people, powerless markers did not merely make the speaker less appealing. They flattened the arguments.

Strong arguments performed no better than weak ones once the hedges were added.

On the other side are the uncertainty-communication researchers.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Winton Centre have spent years studying how to convey uncertainty in facts and numbers.

Another study involving more than 10,000 participants found that putting a numeric uncertainty range around COVID statistics slightly reduced trust in the number itself but had no effect whatsoever on trust in the source.

Being candid cost the communicator nothing.

A meta-analysis published this year finds the overall effect small and highly dependent on how uncertainty is expressed, with verbal hedges doing more damage than numbers.

Put all of this together, and here is my take: The problem was never uncertainty. It is vagueness.

Saying, “Here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and here is what would change my mind,” reads as confidence.

Mumbling, “It could go sort of either way,” reads as evasion.

It is the same actual state of knowledge, but the way it is expressed produces the opposite effect.

I would argue that this matters more for us now than it has in years, because the machines drafting our first drafts hedge constantly—and they hedge in the weak way: low likelihood, no perspective, and nobody’s name attached.

You may have noticed that Neville and I hedge our way through every episode of this podcast.

We say things like, “This is correlation, and correlation is not causation.” We say that you should treat a figure as directional.

We note, as I did just a few minutes ago, that a survey being cited is four years old.

It turns out that hedging might have been the right call.

Or let me try that again.

In my view, that was almost certainly the right call.

I would love to tell you when the next monthly episode will be, but Neville and I have not settled on that yet.

Nor do I know when he will be up for recording a short midweek episode.

I may do one solo. We’ll see how it goes. We’ll see what kind of news or research crosses the transom.

Until I get answers to all those questions, that will be a 30 for this episode of For Immediate Release.

The post FIR #523: No Brand Is An Island 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 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.

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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.