The media relations game is ever-changing. While traditional media outlets remain coveted by businesses that want to be in the news, non-traditional outlets are on the rise.
Podcasts, newsletters and social media influencers now often play a key role in effective media outreach. PR pros need to ensure they’re immersed in as much client-relevant content as possible, regardless of where it comes from.
My guest, Peter Himler, founder of Flatiron Communications and veteran of agencies including Edelman and Hill & Knowlton, will join me to discuss how to reconcile clients’ desire for coverage in legacy media with the impact of a new cadre of earned media platforms.
Show summary:
In this episode of PR Explored, host Michelle Garrett, a public relations consultant, welcomes Peter Himler of Flatiron Communications to discuss evolving media trends in public relations.
Peter shares his extensive background in PR and explores the significant shifts in both traditional and non-traditional media landscapes.
The conversation delves into the importance of digital and influencer media, PR measurement metrics, the role of AI in PR, and the impact of media fragmentation and paywalls on news consumption and democracy. The discussion also covers the challenges of pay-to-play opportunities and the need for more meaningful measurement beyond impressions.
Peter offers valuable advice for PR professionals on how to effectively pitch to journalists, engage with the media, and adapt to the rapidly changing media environment.
Audience questions highlight the growing influence of non-traditional outlets like newsletters, podcasts, and social media, as well as concerns about the integrity of news sources amid increasing media deserts and bot farms.
00:00 Welcome to PR Explored
00:38 Introducing Peter Himler
01:11 Peter’s Career Journey
03:03 The Evolution of Media
03:42 Traditional vs. Nontraditional Media
08:15 Challenges in Media Relations
13:02 The Rise of Influencers
15:44 Navigating Paid Media
23:05 The Power of Podcasts
26:26 The Impact of Paywalls on Democracy
28:04 Trust Issues in Mainstream Media
28:37 Recommended Media Reporters and Podcasts
30:14 The Role of Podcasts in Media
31:17 Challenges with Trade Podcasts
33:24 Influence of Bot Farms on Social Media
35:24 The Shift of Journalists to New Platforms
38:01 Effective PR Strategies and AI Utilization
40:03 The Importance of Targeted Media Pitches
45:49 Measuring PR Success Beyond Impressions
49:33 The Future of Journalism and Media
52:02 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Show Notes:
Follow Peter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterhimler/
Flatiron Communications: https://flatironcomm.com/
Peter Himler on Medium: https://medium.com/@peterhimler
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/podcasts-jump-the-shark-bc6f1e696f1c
https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/the-mediaverse-and-the-year-ahead-c2b68e3b8419
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
How to Stay on Top of the Evolving Mediaverse
Michelle: [00:00:00] Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of PR Explored. I’m so glad you’re all here today joining us. We have a wonderful guest today who I will introduce in just a minute but I I just want to welcome everyone to PR Explored, which is a video podcast where we delve into trends and topics related to public relations.
I’m your host, Michelle Garrett. I’m a public relations consultant and writer. And today my guest is someone I have followed for a long time on social media and I’ve always appreciated his insight. And I’m so happy that Peter Himmler of Flatiron Communications is joining me today. Thank you, Peter.
Peter: Hi, Michelle.
I am delighted to be here.
Michelle: Yay! Yeah, I have been following you, I don’t know, I’m sure it started on Twitter, but I’ve always appreciated your insight, and this kind of started when I saw one of your Medium posts, but We’ll [00:01:00] get into that in just a minute. At first, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about your background because you have quite some, a lot of great experience and I’d love for you to tell us about it.
Peter: So if you look at my LinkedIn profile, you’ll see that I’m a New York agency kind of guy. I started out in the entertainment industry at a boutique firm in the city from a famous guy named Bobby Zarem and we did some really high profile entertainment, films, theater, music, et cetera. And I cut my teeth with him and then went on to the big agency.
So I went from Bobby to Hill and Knowlton, then to Conan Wolf for five years. And then the mothership. Cone and Wolf Sister Agency, Burson grabbed me and I went over there for 11 years and then off to Edelman and and then I started my own company in 2005 called Flatiron. My first client was the New York Times company because I had them at Burson as a client and they and they wanted to work with me [00:02:00] again and it was an opportunity for the hang a shingle.
And so I did that and have not looked back.
Michelle: Isn’t it great? I also work for myself and I I don’t really have a, an agency or a team necessarily. It is really nice to have that freedom to work for yourself. So
Peter: it’s nice to work with people. It’s nice to run groups. It’s nice to brainstorm, not on zoom in person, but it’s been a very rewarding. So I left the big agency world right as the gig economy was kicking in. So I have a pretty big network. I won’t tell you how many decades I’m in this gig, in this business. But and, but I have a big network and a lot of the really talented people that I knew, many of them were untethered, they were not working.
And I was able to create a model whereby Flatiron, we put together. Bespoke teams with the right skill sets and the right industry experience to service clients, and I keep about four or five clients. That’s all and but it’s worked out. It’s a great model and it’s worked out [00:03:00] really well for me.
Michelle: That’s great. I really like I said, I’ve always appreciated your insight and you have you’re you have a lot of opinions and a lot of thoughts that you share on social media and I came across one of your. Medium posts not too long ago that kind of spurred this conversation as far as where we’re going with media, because we know that things are changing.
Of course, they’re always changing. That’s not new. Change is new, but the way it’s changing is new. So we know clients really love traditional media, but they need to start paying more attention to. What we would call maybe nontraditional media. So today we’re going to be talking all about, what do we what is nontraditional media?
Why should clients care about it? And we’ll just we’ll get into all of that. So
Peter: so as much as has changed in terms of the media universe and in terms of the way in which we engage journalists, there’s [00:04:00] one thing that hasn’t changed. And that is We’re being paid to build a presence, to build a media presence for our clients, or conversely, to keep them out of the media, depending upon the situation they’re in.
I remember my very first job, my first day of work in public relations, I didn’t know what public relations was. I was whisked over to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC studios in New York, and I was the new publicist on a show called America Alive. And it was a midday talk show featuring Bruce Jenner as the host and and Jack Linkletter, et cetera.
And in on that show, it was a reunion of the Mouseketeers and I was asked to just take notes on what they were doing these days. And and so I got back to my office and typed it up on my. Manual typewriter, my boss edited it and we messengered it over to a reporter at the UPI. And then two weeks later we get in the mail a clip of his [00:05:00] story on everything that I wrote.
And I said, what? I just, where’s my byline, first of all? And second of all so this is what we did. We pitched stories, we proposed ideas and so that, so we still do that. But the media, the ecosystem, the media verse if you will, has changed considerably. You have newspapers drying up, you have media deserts in a lot of towns.
You have people not. Appointment TV changing. I realized 60 minutes and Saturday Night Live still get big audiences. Most don’t, I’m GMA and today they’re still important. I guess the point of the piece that I wanted to make that you referred to was the idea that a lot of clients are still They still want that big branded media coverage.
Now, I don’t know if it’s ego driven or what, but I started thinking about what is the impact on an ephemeral story that runs in a big newspaper and it’s there for one day and then it [00:06:00] disappears, whereas a lot of the digital. outlets and other, genres that I mentioned in the piece, whether it’s Substack or whether it’s, podcasting, et cetera, or whether it’s a TikTok video, they tend to have more legs.
They tend to be amplified across the digital across digital. And whereas, legacy media, While they have invested a lot in digital and they have repurposed their content across multiple platforms, YouTube, et cetera, they, you have to look at what it is you’re trying to accomplish, and so that was, the impetus for writing that piece on medium.
Michelle: So to be very specific, when we talk about traditional media, we mean. We’re talking about, the Washington Post, the New York Times,
Peter: NBC News,
Michelle: All the legacy
Peter: outlets. But
Michelle: when we talk about non traditional media, we’re talking about [00:07:00] newsletters, podcasts.
Peter: TikTok influencers, Instagram reels that kind of thing.
We’re also talking about what I call influential outlets and they could be paywalled or not. Most of them are paywalled. I outlets like semaphore outlets, like the information Axios talk. These are all important outlets that are read by mainstream legacy media, so they tend to catalyze coverage in in mainstream.
Yes, you could try to get the New York Times to do a story, or the Wall Street Journal to do a story, or The Economist, or get NBC Today show to do a segment, or PBS NewsHour, okay, these are all really important, NPR. It’s harder. It’s really harder. And I guess the thing that I’ve always focused on is what outlets catalyze other outlets.
It used to be, if you get a trade media story, it the beat reporter at the mainstream [00:08:00] outlets would see that and would jump on it, and so now you have some of the outlets that I recommended as well as some of the influencers on podcast, influential podcasters and that can catalyze.
Stories in mainstream and and that’s happened. So you have to be, listen, it used to be, there were a lot more journalists. There were a lot more journalists on staff at major at legacy media. They’re diminished. They’re getting fired. The size of their own newsrooms are much, much smaller.
At the same time, the end of the P. R. Industry is exploding. So you have, I think it’s at least 10 P. R. People for every journalist working today. And so it’s really hard to break through that inbox because email is all the way, to get to engage a journalist. And so you have to look at some of these other influential media and platforms to figure out okay, [00:09:00] what is the, the tech reporter, what is Kevin Root?
Roos at the New York times, what is he following, and how do we, and that’s a little bit easier to do, I don’t know if that, does that make sense?
Michelle: It does. It does. And I have a follow on question, but first we have someone who is watching, listening as a question.
So let’s answer Dominica’s question. Cause I have thoughts on this and maybe you do too. So the question is, what are your thoughts on traditional media, more specifically TV hosts that are asking for pay to play? And I think, you and I understand what pay to play is. It’s, it’s when a host asks for money to put your client in a segment.
And Dominica is saying that she’s seen a lot of that. And yeah. What? I have thoughts. What are your thoughts?
Peter: Because the advertising model at most ad driven media has been decimated through because of digital because of
Michelle: craigslist
Peter: because of all kinds of things, the mainstream media has to resort to [00:10:00] other ways to raise revenue.
A lot of them. For example, I just had a client that won fast companies, most innovative company award. And let me tell you, Yeah. It was expensive to apply to that award, and they have a big ceremony in New York in June, and it’s expensive to go to that, so a lot, they also want a time magazine invention of the year award, but it was expensive.
So a lot of mainstream outlets are looking for other ways to generate revenue. They have events, they have conferences. Semaphore has some very big conferences. Because the advertising has dried up. So long story short, Domenica, the fact is that even the network morning shows, which are part of the news divisions at the networks are you have the ability to get your product on the air by paying for it.
Now, a lot of my clients. Send me things. Oh, we just got an overture from a journalist that wants us on their podcast, but, or wants to do a video segment on us, but [00:11:00] it’s going to cost us, 5, 000 in production fees. I always advise, look, they don’t call it earned media for nothing. So I’m in the earned media space.
So I always advise my clients to avoid those pay for play.
Michelle: Yeah. Here’s my take on it. So I’m, I agree with you. I’m a purist. It’s earned media pay. But I will say, and I encourage clients if they can, if they have any of their budget that they can allocate toward paid, that is, that works really well because on the editorial side, obviously, and it’s not always discussed, but they’re probably going to pay more attention to companies that are paying to advertise or do sponsored content or something like that. So if they can, I say it’s okay. But some of these opportunities are very like, icky. And I would be really careful when you choose if you are going to spend money on.
The
Peter: lines have grayed. Between editorial [00:12:00] and business. Okay. And a lot of outlets. Okay. You’ll see, you look at Vogue, for example, and you’ll see articles and then a few pages after the articles, you’ll see an ad from that client. So it’s a necessity because again, the advertising model is broken or has been.
Decimated.
Michelle: On
Peter: the other hand, I don’t think because the media has become so fragmented that they’re, the New York Times, when I started in the business, set the national news agenda. A story in the New York Times was picked up across the country by TV by other news organizations, or an AP story.
And the It had the ability to create action, it had the ability to create regulatory change or it could spur a congressional, inquiry, and so there but not so much anymore. I will say this, though, there isn’t a panacea anymore, there isn’t one, even a giant 60 minute story is gonna, Come and go, and it’s, it may have an [00:13:00] impact, but it used to have much greater impact.
So to your point is in the, as influencers became important, social media influencers started to rise, it be a whole, cottage industry of agents. Representing A, B and C list influencers on TikTok, on Instagram, on YouTube. So if you have the budget to purchase an influencer, and by the way, it used to be, you, you pay a hundred thousand dollars for one tweet from Kim Kardashian or something, or one Instagram post, but there are all levels, there are whole levels of influencers.
It doesn’t have to cost that much. So because. I wrote a piece in Forbes some years ago called content marketing is so last year, and it was facetious because content marketing is still very valid creating original content, getting op eds, all that. But the point was that the influencers were starting to rise.
And I started to question myself [00:14:00] can influencers have more influence than a news story? Which one is going to create the greatest action? If someone you follow and you admire on, on post something on Tik TOK or an Instagram and tell them about and buy something, are you going to buy it?
As opposed to if there’s an item in Vogue saying, buy it, they’re both influential, you begin to wonder. But the influencer costs money. That’s not earned.
Michelle: So that I think that’s where some of us struggle with this, because I always feel like, okay if it’s paid, then I’m going to send it over to the person that handles paid media versus.
My domain, which is earned media. But if you look at the peso model, like the paid earned shared own model by spend sucks, then you would say of course, these all kind of, overlap each other in some ways. And again, I just, I think it hurts your credibility if you’re only doing paid, but I think the combination can be good, but I would be careful.
Cause I think in the question there, it seems [00:15:00] like some of these are just. Scams, they’re not scams. You’re right.
Peter: They’re scams and you’ve got to ask them. Where will this appear? Okay, in what context, do you have any carriage on you get a lot from oh, yes, we’re on pbs stations which ones and when you know
Yeah,
Michelle: I think there are, like I said, I think there are good, there are good, smart ways to use your budget on paid media, but some of these are not like legit.
So just be careful because I think this is growing. This kind of thing is growing. And I even had Not too long ago, a company tried to sell a client. They didn’t want money, but they wanted like access to their list of suppliers and vendors and things. And so you’ve got to look like if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
That’s always what I think. So
Peter: most of the big agencies of the holding companies have departments that deal with. Paid influencers and activations and things that you pay for, to get covered. But again, coming back to what I said very at the very beginning of the conversation, the goal is the same to [00:16:00] build a footprint.
And these days to build a digital footprint and amplify it, so that’s the goal and that has not changed
Michelle: So the word
Peter: digital probably didn’t exist when I was starting out in the business,
Michelle: And even now I feel like digital pr sometimes that’s it’s more like link building It’s not really pr people do so it’s it’s confusing.
I think pr people
Peter: You know are charged with advising their clients on how to amplify something. So there’s a mainstream News story. . What, how can you amplify it across your own social media channels? How do and if you just put it on LinkedIn, you have a lot of followers and they re they repost it.
So that’s, we do a lot of that. We do advise our clients on LinkedIn posts and, sure. Reposting, yeah.
Michelle: The follow on question I had regarding non traditional media is it’s, I think that, obviously those of us in PR and comms are understanding, there are non traditional media outlets.[00:17:00]
Yes, we do need to be paying attention to those, but sometimes do clients understand this? Do they always understand that this should be part of the media list or the plan? Do they, I’m
Peter: afraid Michelle that they don’t a lot of them here. Forbes, for example, or they hear Newsweek. Newsweek is a shadow of its former self.
Newsweek, I think is owned by the moon, by the moonies, right? I don’t know. It’s got some squirrely, ownership, Newsweek and a Newsweek and time where the Holy grails back in the day, if you had a time magazine story, a Newsweek story, that was something but they, but those brands still have a lot of clout with a lot of C suites and a lot of CMOs,
They, Oh my God, we’re in fortune, even though fortune is a great publication, they’re doing great journalism still, it doesn’t have the panache that it had.
Once I once was on, I once led a panel. I forget. And I had Andrew Ross [00:18:00] Sorkin and a bunch of people, the New York times. And I suggested as moderator that the New York times, because of fragmented media, didn’t have the same influence. Andrew went ballistic and called me out and said, what are you crazy?
And then listen, I will say that these outlets. The Economist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, CNN are still really important and they still have a lot of value and they still can catch on. They can still catalyze other interests, but and there are a lot of outlets that have, that are not, are shadows of their former self.
And the clients still want those brands to say, Oh, we were featured in Forbes or we were featured in Newsweek or we featured and, and the thing is what is getting the interest of those legacy outlets, what, how do you catalyze, what kind of outlets are they reading, what trades and what influential, what they’re reading puck, or they’re reading, semaphore Axios or Politico, [00:19:00] or, there are a lot of these.
Digital digitally native publications that are driving interest from legacy outlets. I know I’m talking too much. I’ll say that a lot of the legacy outlets don’t have the ability to create action, to create a change as they once did now. You look at CNBC, for example, CNBC is probably the most influential business.
Cable network. Okay. On its best day, maybe it has three or 400, 000 viewers, right? Not a lot compared to some of the, compared to some, a Tik TOK, a viral Tik TOK video, however. Look at the audience and if you’re trying to have a material impact on your company on your stock or whatever You know cnbc is really important bloomberg tv even smaller audience Okay, but it goes across several platforms it goes and but it reaches a very specific audience.
So I think [00:20:00] That’s another important point for PR people. It’s look at the outlet and look at the quality of the audience. And is, does it align with what you’re trying to accomplish, who you’re trying to reach?
Michelle: Oh yeah. It’s always about where the client’s audience is spending time and it’s so fragmented.
I work with B2B clients and for them, that is, that’s trade publications. And I feel like that’s a little bit less. Wild than B to C, which I mean is just, it’s, I think that’s, it would be very challenging. I know it can be challenging.
Peter: Yeah, ours is a very subtle industry.
Again, there’s no one hit. That’s going to put your client on the map. It’s working over time and it’s just, it’s blocking and tackling and finding reporters. And ultimately you build a brand for that client, especially in the startup world,
Michelle: yeah. I think that’s an excellent point that no one hit is going to put your client on the map.
And I don’t know if we really talk about that enough, but it’s I like that a lot, so I’m going to. [00:21:00]
Peter: There was some stats like, like I saw that, Substack today surpasses Legacy Media with over 35 million active subscribers, including more than 5 million paid subscribers to Substack newsletters.
Now, Substack is a phenomenon, and they got a little bit of trouble because they got political at one point, but they, Have enabled journalists a lot from legacy media who have for who have been fired or took the early package, and to actually monetize their work, their output and and it’s searchable and so you could search substack and find by subject and you can find the right reporters to try to engage on a story idea.
Same thing. Newsletters on LinkedIn from publishers have surged 150 percent with a combined 240 million followers on LinkedIn for newsletters. So you have, but then you have stats like, about half of Tik TOK users, 50%, 52 percent or 70 percent of all us adults say [00:22:00] they regularly get news on the site.
So they get their news from Tik TOK. However. News. Yeah. Many TikTokers, many TikTok users appear not to be actively following journalists or news media outlets on the platform. So you know what else? One in five Americans now get their news from social media, from influencers on social media, including 37 percent of adults under 30.
And viewers consume over 400 million hours of podcast contact per month on YouTube. So that’s wow. I, I like I like Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. I listened to their pivot podcast and Mark Zuckerberg of Mado was making all the noise about the Madoverse and putting on the goggles, et cetera.
Scott Galloway, disparaged him to no end. He was a big believer and still is the idea that these earbuds. Apple iPods, whatever they’re [00:23:00] called, are driving the future. And that’s why, that’s why podcasts have become so popular. There are some resources if you’re looking for the right podcast that I should mention.
So I wrote a piece on this other than the on medium as well.
Michelle: I’ll put that up too for people to
Peter: yeah. So to appreciate the, it’s hard to find podcasts, you could search Google and you could search Spotify for the most, the top 100 podcasts, but most of them are not relevant. So you need to be able to search podcasts.
. By subject, by size, by rating, by all that. And MuckRack, for example I like MuckRack as my CRM. They have. They’re building out a podcast database. It’s very impressive. There’s a podcast database called One Million Podcasts that I like that’s building out a searchable database of over a million podcasts.
There’s something called Raphonic, R A P H O N I C. That’s another one. And then there’s Podchasers. So I wrote about these four. I spoke to their [00:24:00] founders and more about it on social media.
Michelle: And a lot of again, I’m going to talk about trade media cause that’s my world pretty much. But a lot of those publications also now have their own podcasts.
And then if you’re, if you get your executives on their podcasts, they will repurpose some of that in other ways, perhaps in, articles and things like that. So it’s a nice way to get. multiple pieces out of one effort. So your CEO might spend an hour talking to them on the podcast, but then, there’s other things that roll out of that.
So I think that’s a really that’s a good,
Peter: yeah, a lot of the legacy media and some of those legacy media podcasts are very big, I keep. Forgetting the one that was founded by one of the presidents of fast company. That’s huge I think he partners with andreessen horowitz and they have this podcast a lot of technology.
I can’t remember the name but
There are some really popular podcasts It’s hard to find it the audience size for these other than what spotify or apple podcast releases But some of these platforms that I just mentioned do have an [00:25:00] audience screen so you can screen for the size, and geography as well.
Michelle: . I, he, Sean is saying that he, one of his major sources of US news is an influencer on YouTube, although he also watches mainstream media on YouTube. But here’s the thing, what I found out that people were getting their news from YouTube and TikTok and I was just flabbergasted it.
That’s a scary, yeah. I know people do it, but I just I think you have to be careful like what you’re doing in
Peter: the absence of, with the absence of, in these news deserts where there is no other, there’s no newspaper. Okay. And, and local TV has been bought by conglomerates that sometimes put.
The same content across many different TV stations.
It’s hard. I’ll tell you this. My wife gives me a hard time. She says, Peter, you have to listen to, Fox news and you have to see the other side of whatever. And I say to her, no, I don’t. Because I like, I only, I [00:26:00] like to consume journalism, vetted fact based journalism.
Michelle: Here’s an idea, and this is not something we planned to talk about, but I’m just gonna, I’ve been thinking about this. So the fact that so many mainstream media outlets went with paywalls, I think drove a lot of people away. And now we see Wired has taken down the paywall for certain stories.
And so I think that this is a point that we need to talk about or, so I wrote
Peter: a piece about this. Yeah, I wrote a piece about it. Do paywalls do paywalls hurt democracy or something? I forget what the piece was. This is a couple, three years ago. In fact, I was at a conference last summer with Ken Oleta and Walter Isaacson.
And I asked Ken about that, but and Ken, by the way, it was the media, guy at the New Yorker for many years. But yes, I believe that paywalls have hurt. The national discourse because most of the legitimate news organizations, legitimate journalistic enterprises are paywalled.[00:27:00]
And so when WIRED, because of the situation we’re in right now with it, with this changed administration, WIRED to its credit, Condé Nast owned WIRED,
Has agreed to open, to take down the paywall for any FOIA, freedom of information, Driven stories that they are publishing and so they have a lot of foyer requests of this administration And they apparently they have to comply So when they get information about what?
This administration is doing they’ve agreed to take down the paywall to its credit and I hope others follow that michelle. I really do
Michelle: Yeah it’s an interesting. Idea because again You know i’m all for people, obviously we all have freedom of choice where we’re going to get our news and information But just use care because obviously some people that claim to be sharing news.
It’s opinion It’s not news. So we need factual Stories. That’s what we [00:28:00] need. And I don’t know
Peter: that it stories, and yeah yeah.
Michelle: And then just the trust, the trust of the mainstream media, I think is also driven some people away to, to other sources,
Peter: So that.
The trust issue is interesting because it has been propagated by one political party that the news media is not to be trusted, for many years. They created this fabrication that the news media is liberally biased when in fact, today it’s quite the opposite. The news media is more conservatively biased, at least.
The news media that’s consumed by most Americans, and so you look at Fox News numbers, for example I’ll tell you this. I think what I would advise your viewers listeners is there are a number of reporters that have been following the change media ecosystem rather intensely, and they’re very smart, and a lot of them come out of legacy media.
So some that I follow include Oliver Darcy. Okay. He has a newsletter called status. [00:29:00] He comes, he was the CNN and reliable sources news, alongside Brian Stelter. You’ve got Peter Kafka who for many years was at the wall street journal. And he has a podcast called channels with Peter Kafka. And in fact, interviews some rather fascinating people.
So I would listen to him. He’s smart. I think he now works for business insider. I like Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. I had very smart podcast. They cover a range of issues. Dylan Byers, B Y E R S from puck. Which is another digitally native, very influential news organization. They do a lot of great reporting.
I’m going to go on. And then, and of course, Axio, Sarah Fisher from Axio, she’s the lead media reporter there. She breaks a lot of stories as the, as does. Semaphore’s Max Tani, T A N I, and the New York Times Ben Mullen. They’re breaking a lot of stories. And
So these are folks that if you want to stay on top of the mediaverse, these are folks to follow and [00:30:00] to listen to what they’re talking about.
Michelle: We have a couple of comments and questions that I want to touch on really quick. Now, to cut you off, I agree with what you’re saying there Oliver Darcy is somewhat a, I definitely have followed for a while now. On the podcast size question, and this is something I was going to bring up when you’re talking about podcasts.
It can be very small. As long as it’s hitting, the folks that you are trying to reach. And the other thing is, Christopher Penn, who was my guest a few months ago, was talking about how it doesn’t matter because all of that content is going to be ingested by the AI, by search engines and the AI based search engines too.
And You’re also going to show up more often in search So that’s going to help you in that way as well Which is what you want when someone is searching for what you do. You want to come up in that list of recommended So
Peter: so my most astute friend john lee’s comment is well taken the fact is and I mentioned this When I mentioned the CNBC example, CNBC [00:31:00] may have an audience of three or 400, 000, but look at the audience, who they are they’re investors, it’s, and that’s important.
Same thing with podcasts. It’s finding out who the audience is. And again, these platforms that are searchable for podcasts can help you with that.
Michelle: Here’s another question about. They’re talking about trade podcasts. Are they mostly paid? That’s not what I am finding in the spaces that I work in with, in the manufacturing space.
For example, I’m not seeing that as much. I think there’s always, there are always ways that they will offer you opportunities to take your money and spend money on boosting or doing, additional, whatever things with them. But I have, yeah. In a lot of cases been able to get clients on without paying for it.
I don’t know It’s a
Peter: mixed bag, but most of the legitimate Established podcasts are earned podcasts earned media. So
Michelle: Yeah, so don’t be fooled if them Don’t [00:32:00] fall for it if somebody wants thousands of dollars, but no, I know what stephanie is saying there. Yeah. Yeah. It’s I think just finding sometimes just finding the podcast.
And so that’s why I liked your medium piece with some of those sources to help you find the podcast and then also contacting them. A lot of them don’t really have a good contact. They have, they like go, they’re all produced by bigger companies and then everything leads back to this one. Email or generic, like contact, and it’s that’s not really, we need to get in front of the host or the producer or whoever it is that’s selecting the guests.
Peter: If, I don’t know if anyone’s on the, in the technology space, you have a lot of tech PR folks out there. . But there are certain podcasts that I happen to I like Ca, Casey Newton’s platform, or I like Casey Newton and Kevin Russ’s podcast, hard Fork. I like. Neelay Patel, who’s the editor of The Verge, he has a podcast called Dakota.
So Verge, TechCrunch Casey Newton’s platform. These are all really influential podcasts that, that are listened to [00:33:00] by a lot of the, a lot of journalists who write about technology. I guess the thing with me, and maybe it’s out of fear of becoming a dinosaur is I’ve always tried to stay on top of some of the trends that are happening, especially in the media.
I was with a friend the other day and we were talking a little bit about something that gave me, made me Think twice. It made me very worried. Actually. It had to do with the idea that a lot of the stuff on social tick tock or instagram, etc. You could grow organically. It could catch on and become a viral sensation.
However, right now they have bot farms. That are run by governments by the Chinese. I’m going to put something, can the people see it in the chat? So I’m going to put a picture of a bot farm. This is a Chinese run bot farm. Can I, can everyone see that? And it basically,
Michelle: you can’t see [00:34:00] it.
Peter: You can click on it’s an Instagram
Michelle: link and I’ll put it in the
Peter: link in the maybe it’s a private chatter.
Michelle: Okay. Let me see. Yeah, I’ll grab it here. Okay. See you.
Peter: So what it means is that nefarious actors, Chinese government, Russians, et cetera, can create these huge bot farms that influence the algorithm of what catches on what goes viral. And of course, obviously they have their own agendas, and it’s not news.
It’s not presenting journalism, and and by the way, because the platforms, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, they’re not regulated. They’re not. Section 230 doesn’t, they treat them as an indifferent, platform, they don’t, not as a news organization where they could be held liable.
They allow this to happen on their platforms and it’s scary because it’s growing. [00:35:00] And you’re beginning to see stuff take off that have dubious origins, if you will this scares me a little bit, listen, I was interested in influencers and back in the day and content marketing and owned media when we did consumer generated media.
And I try to stay on top of all that, but this, these bot farms are annoying. And if you think of how many bots there are. On the major platforms on Twitter, et cetera, Twitter, especially the other thing that was, it was I’m not happy about obviously is what Elon Musk has done with Twitter, not because the fact that he’s infused Twitter with his, his politics, which, But mostly because it’s scared away a lot of journalists now, I was verified on Twitter as I write up to, to, I have two publications on medium and I and, I would engage with a lot of legitimate journalists [00:36:00] on Twitter, and I got to know a lot of very well known people, and as a PR person, that was a big plus to see what the conversation was on Twitter among those you’re trying to pitch a story to, or you’re trying to get interested in your client or whatever, and a lot of the legitimate Journalists that were on Twitter have migrated to threads and subsequently to blue sky Threads as you know is owned by Meta which was Facebook and Instagram and Reds has just has decided to make it Has decided to follow to some degree in elon musk’s political footsteps, which is very disconcerting blue sky is not blue sky was founded by jack dorsey It was one of the founders of twitter.
He no longer is involved with it, but it tends to be More balanced less hysterical less biased.
Michelle: I think it’s a matter of time. I’ll be honest. I think a lot of people Are a little bit like thinking blue sky is different But I think it’s a matter of [00:37:00] time until they start having ads It’s a
Peter: matter until they change the regulations and make the platforms responsible For the content that crosses their platform,
Michelle: you know
Peter: right now they have no responsibility.
They have no liability no risk
Michelle: Yeah, I see more journalists spending time on LinkedIn and I’m on threads more. And I see journalists over there and there are still some on X quite a few actually. So you just have to know where the journalists that you need to follow are spending time.
Again, it’s very important to
Peter: me a little bit that journalists I know and and respect are still on X, I just, I don’t know, but again I’m a little biased.
Michelle: Yeah. Let’s let’s move on to something else. We’ve talked a lot about non traditional media and, how the trust, the, the various, issues with mainstream media have driven people to [00:38:00] other sources.
What what would you say What, I don’t even know which question to go to next, but what do you think about how PR pros, again, like, how do we When we’re trying to get our client, out there and get them seen and mentioned and raise their visibility and have them show up in search what are the best, what are some of your favorite tools or tips or what would you say about that?
Peter: There are three parts to engaging a journalist. One is to determine what the story is. Okay. Probing your client, sitting down with your boss and saying, okay, what’s so special about this? What are the superlatives? Is this the first time that it’s being done in the industry, et cetera. So it’s figuring out what the news hook is.
Okay. You’ve got to really be fastidious about how you engage journalists today, given the amount of. Emails that cross their desktop every day. The second thing is how do you articulate that? And what I’ve been using is [00:39:00] I like smart brevity. So I receive a lot of pitches from PR people and they are.
voluminous, they’re like three, four, five, six paragraphs. Now, if you’re familiar with smart brevity, which was created by axios, one of the digitally native news organizations, I mentioned it’s a very simple template that recognizes that recipients of your email are not going to read your whole email.
So you need a clever, you need. An opening sentence, three bullets and an ask and that’s it, and if you can’t capsulize what your pitch is in that format, you’re not doing your client a service. There’s also a there’s also a site I like called subject line tester. I forget the name of it.
I think I have it in my bookmarks and it lets you test email subject lines for their, engage ability, if you will, that’s the word and then so it’s, I guess the most [00:40:00] important part, however, is not. is recognized in the story. It’s how you articulate, how you communicate that to a journalist, but then it’s finding the right journalist, as someone who writes two for two publications and posts on my blog, et cetera, I get a lot of pitches and there are certain that some of them are so out of left field.
It’s as if they never read. What I do, I sometimes I write back and I advise them you might wanna shorten this. You might wanna read, which blog are you pitching of that I do you know, ?
So I think sometimes PR people, they’re lazy. They like to, they’ll go on, they know bake, they’ll go on one of the.
CRMs, they’ll create a list and they’ll send out the same pitch. If you create a media list, a target list, you have to know what everyone on that list does, who they are, what they write about. I know it takes time, but it’ll pay off if you’re well [00:41:00] targeted.
Michelle: Yeah the research, I talk and have written a lot about the the pray and spray the, we pull down the giant list of thousands of journalists from, a media database and we just.
Spam out, we just spray out the same, generic pitch to all of them. And, that, I don’t know if that’s ever worked and it definitely is not going to work now. And it’s only going to get you thrown in the garbage. So
Peter: please
Michelle: don’t do that
Peter: or unopened, but yeah, the other thing I would say is something I call the zeitgeist.
So when you’re sending a journalist, like we were representing one of the large port facilities on the West Coast, and it was just as the Trump administration announced tariffs. And so to send a report or a pitch on a port facility and not. Know what was being discussed or what was in the media at the time.
What was the zeitgeist, without mentioning tariffs It’s almost like you know it’s bad practice, the journalist’s gonna get it. So well, we’re you know aren’t they aware that what’s [00:42:00] going on, so you really have to have your finger on the pulse of what the journalists may be thinking about.
And that’s hard to,
Michelle: yeah, it takes a lot of time and research and it’s really, but that’s going to win the day. If that’s what you really are trying to do is get their attention and hopefully, fit into what they’re working on. So I think
Peter: There’s something else I wanna mention people, a lot of people talk about AI and pr.
I use AI a lot. I don’t use it to write ’cause I’m a pretty good writer. But I use AI to assess the journalist’s work. And for example, I’ll set up an interview with. a ceo client of mine, with let’s say the wall street journal editorial board and i’ll take every editorial every opinion everything that they’ve written about on the subject that my ceo is You know on the industry my ceo works in and i’ll throw it into a platform called notebook lm Which is owned by google Okay, it’s a, it’s [00:43:00] NotebookLM.
Now, NotebookLM is not a large language model. I wrote a piece on this, by the way. It’s what I call a smart language model or a small language model. It allows you to put in up to 50 pieces of content and then query it. So I’ll take all of those editorials. That the Wall Street Journal editorial board has written on my client’s industry, throw it into Google’s notebook LN, and I’ll say, okay, what 10 questions will the editorial board ask of my client?
Who’s come, and it’ll, and I’ll nail nine of those 10 questions, or what are the key topics that the, they’ll be interested in? And you can learn. Based on the body of work. So AI has been a very useful. That’s just one example. There are other examples that I use, but for example, I’ll take the transcript of an interview that a client did and compare it to the final story that resulted and say, okay.
What did the reporter get right and wrong from the [00:44:00] transcript, or how much did the reporter misquote the client, and,
Michelle: it’s always interesting to see what they, key in on, too. It’s you prepare you anticipate the questions, and you.
You do a lot of work and then it’s maybe just a couple soundbites make it into the finished piece or something. So
Peter: that’s another thing we try to teach our clients. So how do you become more quotable, and what, what’s going to get someone interested, and there are certain executives that maybe shouldn’t do interviews and others that are so fabulous.
You just, you don’t have to even train them,
Michelle: yeah. Yeah. Sean is talking about He’s saying internal PR teams using AI to create content, which is, yeah it’s not really going to be,
Peter: it’s not good. In fact my buddy over at the wall street journal, who used to be at PR week, whose name just flew out of my head, just did a post on one of the platforms, Twitter, et cetera.
He received an AI generated pitch and it was just. I think he posted on [00:45:00] LinkedIn. He received an AI generated pitch and I commented on it, that was really bad, but AI is good as for the examples that I gave I do have one client that says, Oh, Peter, and they’re right about internal PR teams versus agencies.
They’ll say can you do me a favor? Can you get your robot to analyze this interview or analyze this credit? Sure. I’ll get one of my robots
Michelle: I think it’s interesting that that Sean’s talking about internal PR teams because I find that agencies are often You know, misusing AI and technology and also media databases.
And they’re just, they’re basing results on how many pitches they send out or something like that. And I’m like, no, that is not, that’s not how we do this. That’s not what we should be measuring. Back
Peter: to your original question. The very first question was like, why should do clients?
Really, recognize the value of alternative media, etc. And, for years it used to be, if, in advertising, for example, you take an ad out, [00:46:00] you buy an ad or buy a 30 second spot on the Super Bowl, you have a lot of ways to measure the effectiveness of that ad. Did the ad produce product sales or whatever, and they have tangible.
results, tangible, measurement, whereas in PR, they’re still measuring based on impressions, not so much on not so much on
not so much on what the effect of the story was. And so that’s where you need to be thinking. Granted, the clients will pay you By impressions by audience by amplification and so If we’re getting paid that way, that’s fine. We’ll measure that way But the truth of matter is did the stock price go up?
Did you see more? Sales was there was you know, was it was a regulatory agency now interested in this issue and so That’s where you want to get [00:47:00] with your media relations. You want to create action. You want to create tangible results versus number of impressions, though clients are still paying by number of impressions.
Michelle: Here’s the thing though. I feel like education is so important because I think I do see like I see PR pros who really want to get away from measuring using AVEs, for example, they want to measure, more meaningful numbers but the, it’s the, it is the C suite that’s they’re not Up to speed maybe on what is actually, how to do this in a better way.
Do this in a more effective way. And so I think that there’s pressure from them while even if PR pros want to try to really bring more meaningful value and show more meaningful measurement. I think sometimes there’s pushback and there’s a lack of education and understanding. And sometimes, it’s really hard to fight that battle.
Peter: AI can be very useful. So you could take the coverage of an issue of a [00:48:00] story across multiple brands, and then ask what the quality and ask an AI Claude or one of those perplexity or open AI chat GPT ask them what the The quality do a qualitative analysis of the coverage.
So you’re right. I talked about what, what hasn’t changed in our industry. The one thing that hasn’t changed is the way we measure results. Maybe Katie Dhe may disagree, but there, we still measure by. Eyeballs, and not so much on other impacts, we’ll measure by well, what’s the story positive, negative, neutral, did it?
How many people saw it? How many social media posts were there? What was it? How many times was it reposted or liked or whatever? So there are other. There are other ways to measure again, they’re still missing. The point is, what did it do for the business? What did it do to create sales, to generate qualified leads, to open doors for prospective clients, for a [00:49:00] B2B company, to increase the stock price, et cetera.
So that’s. Where you want to go and that’s where the narrow casting that to john lee’s point is important is really segmenting what you want to do because you don’t you know You don’t need the today show to move the stock price, you might need barons, so
Yeah,
Michelle: for publicly traded companies, it’s an entirely different ball game than it is for companies that are privately held.
I have a lot of empathy for folks working with a lot of those types of clients.
Peter: Listen, I will say this about the media. We’re in a, we have some serious issues and we had serious issues in the last five years. Margaret Sullivan, in fact, I’m going to see Margaret Sullivan and Ben Smith talk at the New York historical society tonight on how to, how they’re covering the, how the media is doing covering the new Trump administration.
I said, I’m really looking forward to it. I think it’s, I think it’s webcast as well. So if you go to the New York historical society it’s going to be an interesting thing. But the fact is [00:50:00] that Margaret Sullivan has a book that talked about these media deserts. So no newspapers in a lot of markets across the country.
And then David Enrich, who’s a very well regarded investigative reporter at the New York Times, has a brand new book out talking about the campaign to eliminate. Journalism, and you just saw that the voice of America is being shut down the voice of America, NPR is going to get its public broadcasting funding pulled.
And then you have a whole campaign that’s looking to do away with times versus Sullivan, which was the landmark ruling that gave newspapers their first amendment right to call out wrongdoing by. By politicians and whatever and those protections are threatened, are being threatened. So the David Enrich book might be something.
So I guess, I’m finding that I meet a lot of PR people in my decades in this industry and a lot of them They [00:51:00] just don’t do that. They don’t have to follow. You have to have your finger on the pulse. You have to follow, thought leaders in the space to really understand it.
And by the way, if you represent clients in a certain industry, you need to know what keeps that client up at night. Okay, you need to really delve down into the trades into the beat reporters for that industry and know what the zeitgeist is, and so I find a lot of folks, especially young folks in our industry, just don’t do it.
Michelle: Yeah. That’s the thing. If you’re just if you’re getting all of your news. From tiktok and you’re not actually looking into actual news sources and following the headlines you might be at a deficit trying to Work in pr
Peter: so that’s why the demise of twitter was so is so Disconcerting because it did have a lot of news and no longer it, you know I mean you have a lot of journalists on their stems, but It was a water cooler for the news industry for the media industry and it [00:52:00] no longer is
Michelle: I am going to say on that note We are hitting our hour and I want to thank you.
So much peter for being here. Wow What an interesting discussion and we had some great questions and participations. I really appreciate everybody engaging and asking questions because that helps us
Peter: keep the ball rolling by
Michelle: the information that they need and want. So it’s given me a lot to think about.
I know that. So I. Thank you for being here.
Peter: My pleasure, Michelle. Thanks for having me. And hopefully this will gain some amplification across social and people will see it and we’ll take it from there. So anyway,
Michelle: be sure to follow Peter across social media, LinkedIn. I put his LinkedIn up. I put his website up.
His medium posts are great. If you’ll be sure to follow those and please come back for another episode of PR Explored. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks and I will be posting more about that of course on social media as well. So thanks everybody.
Peter: Okay. Have a great day, everyone. Bye, [00:53:00] Michelle.
Michelle: Bye.
