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  1. 5d ago

    Your New Shadow Website

    The Economist has gone public with an experiment: it has created a shadow website featuring an AI-friendly version of its front-of-paywall content. The idea is to improve the odds of this content surfacing in AI answers and responses to AI queries. It’s based on a new standard, llms.txt, which has been described as the robot.txt of AI. What does this mean for communicators? Neville and Shel break it down in this short midweek episode. Links from this episode: The Economist tests AI-ready web pages The Economist prepares for a two‑track internet: one for humans and one for AI agents The Economist is testing content read by AI agents How The Economist is using AI to extend its global reach The next version of the web will be built for machines, not humans The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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 For Immediate Release. This is episode number 516. I’m Shel Holtz. Neville Hobson: And I’m Neville Hobson. Something quiet is happening to the web, and The Economist is one of the first major publishers to talk openly about how it’s responding. A piece published by Digiday last week describes how The Economist is building what its VP of generative AI, Josh Munker, calls two versions of the web. One version is the one we’re all familiar with: richly designed pages, feature photography, navigation, everything optimized for a human reader browsing with intent. The other version is quite different: stripped back, structured around questions and answers, designed not for you, but for an AI agent acting on your behalf. Now, if that framing sounds familiar, it should. In episode 515 last week, we spent some time on what Google announced at its developer conference in May: that searching the web will increasingly be done by AI agents rather than by humans, and that people will focus on acting on the information those agents surface rather than clicking links themselves. I made the point then that the question for communicators was shifting from, “How do we get found?” to, “How do we become part of the information environment that AI systems draw from?” What The Economist is doing is a direct practical answer to exactly that question. And here’s what makes this particularly interesting. The Economist itself published a piece last December describing this shift in precise terms: a move from a pull internet, where people initiate actions, to a push model, where agents act unprompted, setting up meetings, flagging research, handling tasks, often without a human ever typing a query. They wrote about it then as an emerging phenomenon. Now, six months later, their own team is operationally responding to it. They’re not just observers of this trend; they’re participants in it. The logic behind their approach is straightforward. A growing share of people, particularly in B2B contexts, no longer start their discovery process with a search engine or a home page. They start with ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude. They ask a question, get a synthesized answer, and may never visit the original source at all. For a publisher like The Economist, that creates an obvious problem. If your content isn’t structured in a way that an AI agent can parse and surface clearly, you effectively become invisible. Not because your content is poor, but because the intermediary can’t read it properly. So The Economist is experimenting. Right now, the focus is on content that already sits outside the paywall: marketing copy, B2B sales material, the kinds of pages where you want a potential subscriber or corporate client to find you. They’re building parallel versions: the polished human-facing page alongside a clean, agent-readable equivalent. The aim is to show up accurately and usefully in AI-generated answers. Now, why does this matter to communicators beyond the publishing world? Because what The Economist is describing isn’t a publishing problem. It’s a communication problem. And it connects to something that one researcher quoted in The Economist’s December piece put plainly: Marketers and communicators may need to pitch not to people, but to agent attention. The audience increasingly will be algorithms, and the humans will act on what these algorithms surface. Think about your own organization’s public-facing content: press releases, executive bios, policy statements, corporate FAQs, product and service descriptions. All of that content is increasingly being read and summarized by AI agents before it ever reaches a human. If that content isn’t structured to be understood accurately by an agent, you lose control of how your organization is represented in AI-generated answers. And unlike a Google snippet, you may not even know it’s happening. Alessandro DeSantis, a media consultant quoted in the Digiday piece, puts it bluntly. He calls agent optimization a defensive baseline, not a competitive advantage, but the minimum requirement to remain visible at all. There’s a deeper question sitting underneath all of this, which we’ll get into: Who do you trust in the AI-intermediated world? What does it mean for the communicator’s job when the first reader of your content isn’t a person at all? Shel, you and I discussed the Google side of this in FIR 515. Here’s a publisher responding in real time. What’s your take? Shel Holtz: I have lots of takes on this. This is, I think, a big issue. The first thing I want to point out is that, as I read the commentary of people who are talking about this, there’s an expectation that in the not-too-distant future, the AI version is all that we’re going to need to publish because we’re going to be publishing for AI as people rely on AI to get their information. I find this a troubling idea. I think people are ignoring the fact that right now, 25 to 60 percent, depending on the nature of the site, of visits to a website are direct. They are not coming from a search engine. It’s somebody who already knows the URL. As I mentioned in a post I published to LinkedIn last week, nobody going to Amazon starts at Google and says “online retail site” and waits for the URL to come up. They just type Amazon.com. There are a lot of people who know the URLs. There are URLs published in magazine articles, in advertising, in TV commercials, for example. And then there is the dark web: I send you a link by email or in our Slack channel, and you click it. There’s no search involved at all, so there is no opportunity to see that AI overview. So I think we have to keep in mind that there are still a lot of people who are coming to our websites, not through Google or some other search mechanism, or starting with Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini or what have you. They’re coming directly to your website, either because they know the URL or it has been shared with them by somebody else. So I think we do need to keep that in mind. The other reason I think we need to maintain our own websites is because we own them, and we don’t own that intermediary. You publish that Markdown version of a web page and you provide the proper router to it. Was it called LLM text, I think? They’re calling this the robots.txt of the AI era. And it’s going to share with the person who’s making the query what it shares. It may not be exactly what is on your page. So now you’re down to using a third party. Neville Hobson: Something like that. Shel Holtz: So, yeah, it’s good to have at least as a statement of record what your original content was. I have some other thoughts about this, but I’ll let you react to that first. Neville Hobson: Yeah, no, I get it totally. Yet the trend seems to be quite clear. This is the way it’s moving. And I would say that, from what I’ve been reading, not just this, but The Economist is actually a probably good signal for what other media properties may or may not be doing or might want to do, depending on the outcome of The Economist’s experimentation. Being discoverable in this new way is critical; otherwise, you are invisible. And I think the behaviors of people are gradually changing, not to the extent that it’s a groundswell. I don’t see it like that myself. Maybe it is generational, potentially, I suppose. But I think applying that kind of “it’s because of age differences in the different generations” is a bit of a tired argument nowadays, I think, as a kind of answer to everything. We’re seeing a shift in how people not only find information, but how they think about going about finding information. So the idea of thinking, “Okay, let me just type into this search box: How do I do so-and-so? Where do I go to?” or whatever words you might use. I kind of talk in literally conversational language when I’m searching for something, and I’ve had more good experiences, way more than not good, with Google Overviews as a result. And again, I sometimes stop and think, “What did I just do then?” I took Google Overview and I didn’t go any further than that because it gave me exactly what I wanted. And not only that, I’ve got a list of all the sources it looked at as well. So why am I going to spend any more time on this? I got what I need. So this is evolving fast, even though it’s still not totally clear exactly what’s happening

    22 min

  2. 6d ago

    ALP 307: What to do when a client “fires” your agency

    Losing a client is never fun, even when you saw the writing on the wall. The only question is how you choose to handle it. In this episode, Chip and Gini cover the practical and emotional side of client departures, from the moment you get the news to the lessons you take away. Gini points out that there are plenty of reasons a client could terminate the relationship, which may have nothing to do with your work. Strategy changes, budget cuts, and leadership turnover all end client relationships that were otherwise going fine. Chip’s advice is to not react immediately. Ask for a couple of days to review the agreement and put together a transition plan. That space lets you get the emotion out before you say something you’ll regret. Once you have your bearings, focus on making the exit clean. Read your actual contract, confirm the notice terms, and hand over everything the client needs: documents, passwords, contacts, work in progress. Chip is blunt about agencies that fight clients on the way out — it accomplishes nothing and just guarantees a bad final impression. Don’t burn any bridges and you just might see those clients come back or send you referrals. Finally, be honest with your team about what the loss means for the business. If there are financial implications, say so before people start drawing their own conclusions. [read the transcript] The post ALP 307: What to do when a client “fires” your agency appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    24 min

  3. May 30

    There is No Table

    Communicators long for “a seat at the table.” In this episode of “On the Same Page,” the internal communications podcast, Shel and Steve share their perspectives on this age-old aspiration and discuss the real ways to be consequential and wield influence with senior executives. Links from this episode: 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer Reveals Trust is In Peril As Society Slides from Grievance into Insularity Why Trust Matters More in 2026 (PwC’s Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey 2025) Employees Prioritize Organizational Stability Over Feeling Valued at Work for the First Time in a Decade, Perceptyx Research Finds How To Reverse New Record Decline in Employee Trust Employees seek hope, trust from workplace leaders, Gallup finds Raw Transcript Shel Holtz: So Steve, I have a request. This is something that really rubs me the wrong way. I want the internal communications community to stop asking for the seat at the freaking table. Steve Crescenzo: Hey, preach, brother, preach. Shel Holtz: Yeah, you know what they sound like? They sound like the older kids at Thanksgiving. You know, the 13-year-old who says, “Why do I have to sit at the kids’ table? I want to sit at the grown-up table.” You know what? There is no table. There’s never been a table. There’s no one in the C-suite sitting around this polished mahogany slab thinking, “You know what would really make this strategic discussion complete? Having the person who runs the intranet here.” The table has become a metaphor for a participation trophy, and chasing it has made us sound needier than an MBA candidate at a networking happy hour. What we should be asking for isn’t proximity to power, it’s consequence. It’s doing work that’s so useful that the leaders come find you because they can’t make the decision without getting your input first. That’s more important than a seat in a chair that, let’s face it, isn’t all that comfortable and that can be taken away as quickly as it was given to you. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah. You know, this table, they treat it like it’s the Knights of the Round Table and Camelot, King Arthur. There’s no table, it’s musical chairs up there. Everyone’s yanking chairs out for everybody. It just bothers me so much, Shel. And you’re right, it makes us sound pathetic—whiny, little, needy people, like we sit here in the basement and write our newsletters and ask why we can’t get up there and sit at the big table. We don’t need a table. We don’t need a seat. You know what we need? We need influence. We need access and we need respect. And you know how you get those? You earn it. You don’t earn it by doing a good newsletter, even. You don’t do it by having great tactics. You do it by speaking truth to power, by letting leadership know that you can provide counsel—that you can tell them their baby’s ugly. “You know what? Your blog is too stiff, it’s too formal, your messages aren’t landing. Why are you doing a nine-minute video when nobody’s watching a nine-minute video?” That’s how you get respect and access and influence. You don’t do it by whining for it or mooching around for it. So yeah, let’s be done with the table. Shel Holtz: So, Steve, today we’re going to look at how communicators can become consequential and influential. This fits neatly in the consultation segment of the outer ring of the On the Same Page framework. The items in the outer ring are the things that we do every day, all the time, and providing counsel is one of those things. We can provide counsel to departments, to teams, to business units. I have great examples of all of these things, but today let’s hone in on providing counsel to the company’s leadership, the C-suite. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, well, you know, Shel, that’s how you get a seat at the table—just kidding. But it is how you can get influence and access and all the stuff we’re talking about. Be a counselor, which means it’s hard work, Shel. Everyone thinks it’s easy, but it means telling people hard truths sometimes. It means being a reality check for leaders, which they don’t always like. They don’t always like being told stuff, but that’s what we have to be if we want to have that respect. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I mean, helping CEOs and leaders build trust should be at the top of the list that we’re counseling them about. Here’s a data point. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found 70% of respondents saying that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but only 44% actually do it well. That’s a 29-point leadership credibility gap. And according to a leadership presence report from Ketchum, executives are two and a half times more likely than frontline employees to trust their CEO to tell the truth about what’s happening within their organizations. So Steve, how do you counsel a CEO who wants to build trust? And how do you counsel a CEO who doesn’t think he needs to? Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, you know what, Shel, it’s a great topic, and I’m glad we’re talking about it. I think one of the biggest mistakes communicators and leadership make is assuming trust is a communications problem. Most trust problems are behavior problems, right? There are very few CEOs—or any kind of leader—who are being as transparent as possible, acting ethically, treating employees the right way, telling them the truth all the time, and explaining why when they can’t say something, and doing all the right things, and still have a trust problem because they sent the wrong email or because their blog isn’t that interesting. If they don’t have trust, it usually comes down to missteps or something that’s happened. So I would say to leaders, and I would say to communicators: where is the trust issue coming from? If the CEO or the leadership are building a culture and paying attention to their values and doing everything they should be doing, trust will flow naturally. If they’re not, it doesn’t matter how much you communicate. You’re just yelling into a well. So I would look back at behaviors—maybe do some focus groups with employees. Not a survey; I think focus groups would be much more effective. Find out where this lack of trust is coming from. It usually doesn’t come down to communication issues. It comes down to missteps, to things they’ve done in the past. It comes down to: you put out these values and this mission statement, and then everything doesn’t align with what you’re doing. You’re not walking the talk, to use a bad cliché. I just don’t think you can communicate your way out of a credibility problem. Shel Holtz: Yeah, I think one of those data points that really provides some insight into where trust might come from is the fact that executives trust the leaders in the C-suite more than the front line does. And yeah, if you think about the executives in a company, they have more visibility with those leaders. They’re meeting with them all the time. They’re seeing them in the C-suite, which is a physical place where the leadership sits. There are a lot of leaders who don’t get out and meet face-to-face with employees very often. I remember—this was years and years ago, maybe 35 or 40 years ago—it was a Ragan conference at the Fairmont in Chicago, where they all used to be in those days. They had, I think it was the CEO of Avon, the cosmetics company, as one of the keynote speakers. And he said— Steve Crescenzo: Those were a time. I remember this. Shel Holtz: You remember him? Yeah, he said that he used to get out to the factory floor at least once a month to remind himself that these folks were all grown-ups. He would chat with them, and, you know, somebody operating a film machine was also the scoutmaster of a Boy Scout troop, or ran a side business with his spouse, or was the treasurer for the local Elks organization, or whatever it might be. These are smart people, and you didn’t need to treat them like children, which was a habit executives got into. He didn’t mention this, but at the same time, employees were seeing him come out there and talk to them. You’re bound to trust somebody that you see more often than somebody who’s just up there in the C-suite, maybe doing a quarterly video or something like that. That visibility is really important. Steve Crescenzo: Yeah, I think—a tale of two leaders, I can do that. We worked about 20 years ago for a huge defense company, maybe the largest, for one of their divisions. And I interviewed all their executives for the audit, and they were all on the seventh floor, in what the employees called “rug row.” And they never left the seventh floor. Their food was up there; they never left. And employees hated them—no trust, never saw them. Saw them maybe at a town hall once a quarter or once a year, I forget what it was. And morale, we did focus groups, was in the toilet—no trust, bad culture, all that stuff. The other tale is Schreiber Foods up in Wisconsin. It’s the biggest company nobody’s ever heard of. They’re a dairy company. They make all the cheese for McDonald’s and Burger King. They are global. They’ve got manufacturing plants everywhere. The CEO there was such a fantastic guy. He was on the same floor that we were meeting with the communicators on. And every time I walked out to go to the bathroom, he was never at his desk or in his office. He was sitting at somebody else’s desk talking to them. He knew everybody. And he said to me when I interviewed him, “I try not to answer any work emails till I get home at seven o’clock. My time here in the office should be spent talking to my people. I’ve got to be in meetings, I’ve got to do strategic work, I’ve got to do all that.” But communication wasn’t an effort for him. It wasn’t a checklist item; it was just a constant part of his job. To him, the CEO not worry

    33 min

  4. May 29

    Circle of Fellows #128: The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass, Part 2

    In the second of our special Circle of Fellows discussions, Brad Whitworth moderated a panel to discuss the remaining three chapters of the book, “The 7 Cs of the New Communication Compass.” The book’s author and editor, Dianne Chase, joined Brad, along with the IABC Fellows who authored the three chapters: Zora Artis, who wrote the “Cohesion” chapter Cindy Schmieg, author of the “Collaboration” chapter Shel Holtz, who penned the “Community” chapter About the panel Dianne Chase helps organizations and leaders harness the power of strategic communication to navigate crises, build trust, and drive positive change. With over two decades of experience in journalism and corporate communications, Dianne has developed a unique approach for training and consulting clients that combines crisis management expertise with the art and science of business storytelling. Dianne is an award-winning media, journalism, and strategic communication professional with profound expertise in communication disciplines, most notably crisis communication, issues and reputation management, media training, and executive communication. She is one of two people in the world accredited in the powerful GENIUS Business Storytelling methodology, created by international communications thought leader, Gabrielle Dolan. She is former chair of the International Association of Business Communicators, and author/editor of The 7 Cs of The New Communication Compass. Although Zora Artis began her career outside the communications field, she has had an outsize impact on the profession since entering it more than 20 years ago to as an account director and then strategic planner with branding and integrated marcomms agencies. Since then, she has led her own brand and communications consultancy and served as CEO of a 20-person creative, digital, and strategic communication firm. In 2019, formed her current management consulting practice bringing together strategic alignment, brand, and communication expertise. She has received five Gold Quill awards. Her significant contributions to the profession and the body of knowledge include her original research with IABC colleague, Wayne Aspland, on strategic alignment, the role of communications and leadership – the first substantial research effort for the reconfigured IABC Foundation – and co-authoring a subsequent white paper, “The Road to Alignment,” supported by 27 senior communicators from five continents. Zora has also researched the correlation between strategic alignment and experiences and the impact on stakeholder value and brand. This has led her to develop her own proprietary Alignment Experience Framework. She has also examined gender equity, perceptions, and bias in organizations, and wrote a chapter on this topic for the Quadriga University e-reader, Women in PR. Since joining IABC a decade ago, she has impacted IABC as a volunteer, including roles as chair of the IABC Asia Pacific Region and IEB director; she currently serves as the chair of the 2022 World Conference Program Advisory Committee. A certified company director, as chair of the IABC Audit and Risk Committee she introduced proper risk oversight to the board’s processes. Zora has been honored with the 2021 and the 2015 IABC Chair’s Award for Leadership and was named IABC’s 2020 Regional Leader of the Year. She is also a Strategic Communication Management Professional, Fellow of the Australian Marketing Institute, and Certified Practising Marketer. Cindy Schmieg is an award-winning strategic communicator. Her 30+ years of corporate, agency, and consulting experience focuses on making the communications function strategic within an organization. Cindy now teaches online in the Communications Master Degree program at Southern New Hampshire. She has served in many IABC leadership roles and is today a member of the IABC Audit/Risk Committee and Pacific Plains Region Silver Quill Award Committee, as well as assisting on the IABC Minnesota Annual Convergence Summit. Shel Holtz, SCMP, ABC, is senior director of Communications at Webcor, a commercial general contractor and builder based in San Francisco. He is a member of the Global Communication Certification Council and will become vice chair of the Council in June 2026. Shel has written six communication-themed books, and his seventh, “On the Same Page,” a practical framework for implementing internal communication strategies, will be published later this year. He co-hosts the 21-year-old communication-focused podcast, “For Immediat Release.” Shel served for six years on IABC’s executive board and has also been president of the IABC Los Angeles chapter, along with other IABC roles. He has led communications at two Fortune 400 companies and had his own consultancy for more than 21 years before joining Webcor in 2017. Brad Whitworth, ABC, SCMP, IABC Fellow, is a pre-eminent thought leader, lecturer, and author in organizational communication. He has led global internal and executive communication programs at HP, Cisco, Hitachi, PeopleSoft, AAA, and MicroFocus. He holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and undergraduate degrees in journalism and speech from the University of Missouri. Brad lives in California, a wine country, and he grows Pinot Noir on his property. A former broadcaster, Brad has made more than 300 presentations to executives, communicators, and university classes worldwide. Brad is a past board chairman of the International Association of Business Communicators and a Fellow of the association. He is one of the authors of The IABC Handbook of Organizational Communication and the new IABC Guide for Practical Business Communication: A Global Standard Primer. He chaired the Global Communication Certification Counsel in 2021. Raw Transcript Speaker: Well. Greetings and welcome to our monthly Circle of Fellows. This is episode one hundred and twenty eight. That means we’ve been at this for ten and two thirds years if you’re doing the math. Um, and today we’re talking about a new book, The Seven Seas, the New Communication Compass. And this is part two of our exploration of that book. And we’ll be diving into that. My name is Brad Whitworth. I’m your moderator, and I’m filling in for Michelle Holtz, whom you just saw for a moment. Your regular host, shell, is one of the contributing authors to that book. So he’s here as a panelist instead of the moderator, and he’s joined by two other contributing authors, Cindy Schmieg and Zora Artis and the lead author, Diane Chase. And I’ll let them introduce themselves in a moment, just to set the stage for what it is that we hope to accomplish in this next hour. And don’t forget that if you’re watching, you can jump into the conversation at any time. throws your comments or questions into the chat, and we’ll put them up and talk about them with the conversation. Amongst these four great contributors, the seven seas of communication, the new communication compass, um include collaboration, connection, compassion, cohesion, community congruency, calibration. And in episode one twenty seven, we did cover the ideas behind connection, compassion, congruency, and collaboration. So today it’s chapters one, three, four, and five. And just for the record, I’m the contributing author for chapter two. So we got one, two, three, four, five, all right here on the screen. But I’m going to introduce them one at a time and let them tell you a little bit about themselves and where they’re coming to you from today. And we’ll start with chapter one. Um, Cindy. Hi, I’m Cindy Schmieg. I’m typically in the Phoenix, Arizona area, but today I’m in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Okay. And chapter three is the lead author, Diane. Hello. Hello. Diane Chase from Charlotte, North Carolina. At the moment where it’s gray and rainy, but happy to be here. We’ll bring some sunshine and Zora Artis. Well it’s good. It’s good morning from me in Melbourne, Australia. And it is almost light. And it’s definitely gray and raining as well. Chapter five is Shell Holes. I’m coming to you from Concord, California. Uh, where this morning it was great and rainy. Yeah. Since we’re doing the weather report. Yeah. And I’m in California wine country, where we’ve got some big puffy white clouds and some blue sky and a little bit of sunshine. But we had some rain this morning as well. So, um, before we dive into those chapters, I’d like at least Diane to give a little bit of an overview of the new Seven Seas, and I talk about them as being new because I can remember listening to, um, a past iabc fellow, the late doctor Don Ranley, talking about the seven seas that were designed to gain credibility in writing and included clear, concise, complete, consistent, coherent, creative, and correct. Um, but Diane, it seems to me that the, you know, you really up leveled the game for all of us. We’ve gone from sort of very tactical communication, skill set worries of writing, which is still important. But now we’re talking about communication strategy and how teams and leaders behave. So why the seven seas and how did you pick them? Well, you know, I, I have been thinking about the seven seas as, as of communication, as core leadership competencies. And in our uncertain, volatile world, uh, across many, many areas, it’s really more important to elevate and empower and lead communication in a new way. And I feel like these seven C’s underpinned, again, some of the leadership competencies that are necessary in today’s world, not just in today’s world, but in in the future. Our AI driven future. What is that doing to the way we connect as human beings? And that is more imperative than ever. Because if we can’t build relationships through our strategic, authentic, trustworthy communication, we’re going to be subject to whatever AI determines that we do. So I just feel like a new m

    59 min

  5. May 25

    ALP 306: What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms

    The SAGA Agency AI Survey results are in, and small agency owners are feeling great about AI. Maybe too great. In this episode, Chip and Gini dig into the numbers and find the gap between how owners think they’re using AI and the reality of what’s happening inside their businesses. The headline figures look impressive: 89% of respondents report regular or widespread AI use, 74% use it daily, and 88% say they’ve seen productivity gains. But Chip isn’t buying it. He questions whether the sample skews toward early adopters, or more likely, whether agency owners simply don’t have a clear enough picture of what “good” AI use looks like elsewhere. When 53% say they’re ahead of their peers but only 13% say they’re behind, the math doesn’t work. As Gini puts it, they’re probably grading themselves on usage habits, not operational depth. Next, Chip and Gini look at what agencies are actually doing with AI. Most activity falls squarely into what Chip calls “generative AI 101” — drafting emails, writing social posts, generating blog content. The more interesting stuff is largely absent. AI-assisted design work barely registers. Only 74% are even using AI to revise or edit content, a number both hosts find inexplicable given how easy and useful that is. Gini’s own example of running an article through an AP style agent before sending it to a notoriously precise editor at PR Daily illustrates exactly the kind of practical, low-friction habit that should be universal by now. Another data point they discuss is the disconnect between productivity gains and revenue. Agencies report getting faster, but their top-line numbers are flat or down. Gini’s read is that AI efficiency is getting absorbed into existing scope rather than converted into new value. Agencies are over-servicing clients at the same fees, filling freed time with more of the same work instead of building something new. On the pricing side, almost no one reported clients pushing for discounts tied to AI use. Instead of a reduction in cost, the larger enterprise clients are asking about data governance, usage policies, and procurement compliance. Chip advises unless your agency has the infrastructure to manage those requirements consistently, that’s a market best left to someone else. [read the transcript] The post ALP 306: What the Agency AI Survey results mean for PR and marketing firms appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    23 min

  6. May 25

    FIR #515: Agents Everywhere!

    Employees at the Pentagon have spun up over 100,000 AI agents. In the private sector, we’re seeing reports of 10,000 or more agents being deployed by employees at a variety of companies. The problem is that most organizations lack governance to address agents, and the problems this explosion of agents operating on employees’ behalf can cause are innumerable. In the long-form FIR episode for May 2026, Neville and Shel delve into the rise of agents, the harms they could cause, what companies should do to ensure these agents deliver benefits rather than problems, and how communicators can take a leading role in addressing the issue. Also in this episode: AI copyright lawsuits are coming for communicators Google’s search overhaul could signal a post-citation era Placing your thought newsmakers, thought leaders, and subject matter experts on podcasts is becoming a standard media relations practice “I worked all weekend” is no longer an argument for the fees you charge Short-form video clippers are creating go-to content from long-form videos — including yours Dan York outlines the big enhancements in WordPress 7.0 Links from this episode Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare AI Copyright Lawsuits Pose Growing Risk for Communicators Practical Considerations for Managing IP Risk in AI-Generated Content Best Practices for Mitigating Copyright Risks in AI-Generated Content AI in Litigation Series: An Update on AI Copyright Cases in 2026 Powered by A.I., Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years Google Search as You Know It Is Over Why Podcast Placements Are the New Press Coverage Including Podcasts in Your PR Strategy Podcast Guesting vs. Traditional PR: What Works in 2026 U.S. Newsroom Employment Has Fallen 26% Since 2008 U.S. Podcast Consumption Reaches Record High: The Infinite Dial 2025 You Can’t Beat AI. Steve Rubel on AI, Media Analytics, and the Future of PR AI and the End of Billable Hours The Clipping Economy: How Short-Form Video “Clippers” Are Overrunning the Internet How Short-Form Clips Took Over the Internet The Clipping Economy The Case for and Against Clipping Inside the “Clipping Farms” Driving Fintech’s Marketing Boom Companies Have a New AI Problem: Too Many Agents Businesses Will Have Over 150,000 AI Agents by 2028, Says Gartner AI Agents Introduce a New Class of IT Management Challenges Why Most Enterprise AI Agents Will Fail — And What Leaders Are Missing How Smart Governance Can Contain Agentic Sprawl Six Capabilities Enterprises Need to Scale Agentic AI in 2026 Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI “Agents” to Use on Unclassified Networks Links from Dan Yorik’s Tech Report Turn Your Blog Posts Into Podcast Episodes Google Search as you know it is over Google Changes Its Search Box for the First Time in 25 Years WordPress 7.0 Field Guide AVFTCN 040 – Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026 The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, June 22. 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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 the For Immediate Release podcast long-form episode 515 for May 2026. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel Holtz: And I’m Shel Holtz, and we have six really interesting reports to share with you today. And not all of them are about AI. I’m not saying most of them aren’t, but a couple are on other topics of interest to communicators. Also have a really excellent report from Dan York looking at the latest upgrade to WordPress, a massive upgrade, one of the most significant upgrades WordPress has seen in some time, and Dan’s report is fascinating as he talks about this. But we are going to start by filling you in on a new podcast on the FIR Podcast Network. We haven’t had a new show on the network in a while. You know, we started this as just FIR and we needed a place to house multiple FIR shows. Those who have been listening a long time may remember FIR book reviews and FIR speakers and speeches. And we had a number of these. And then we had some people say, hey, can my podcast live on your network? And we said, as long as it has something to do with communications, sure. So all of them have pretty much faded except a couple that Chip Griffin continues to crank out, but now we have a new one. And the reason we have a new one is because I’m doing it as a new podcast by me and my longtime friend and colleague, Steve Crescenzo. And it is called On the Same Page. It is an internal communications focused podcast. We’re recording it twice a month, about 20, 25 minutes per episode. And each episode focuses on an element of the strategic internal communications framework that I developed. It was several years ago. It was actually before I took a job in the private sector again. I’ll have been at the company I work for now nine years in October. So yeah, I developed this a long time ago. Then I wrote 28 blog posts about it. Somebody said, turn it into a book. So I did. And I have found a publisher for that book. So the podcast and the book are companion pieces and the first episode of On the Same Page is out now. You can find it on the FIR Podcast Network or wherever you get your podcasts. For me, that’s Pocket Casts. For you, it may be Apple Podcasts or any of the countless places that you can get podcasts these days, including Spotify. So we’re there. We’re on Spotify, as is this podcast For Immediate Release. And speaking of For Immediate Release, Neville, we’ve done a few episodes since the last long-form monthly episode. Neville Hobson: Yeah, we have published quite a few, four in fact, over the past month. All of them have listener comments and that’s unusual, pleasantly so, every single episode with comments. So let’s run them down. So in the long-form, episode 511 for April, on the 27th of April, our lead story was the tale of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and how in spite of AI policies, training programs and guardrails, a public document went out filled with AI-generated errors. No human in the loop, seems, as we explored what went wrong and what it means for organizations trying to operationalize AI responsibly. We also talked about new evidence that AI is not leveling the workplace, why AI is raising the bar for PR, the rise of slopaganda, and much more. Comments, Shel, on that one? Shel Holtz: Yeah, a couple, and a couple of responses to the comments. We’ll start with Wayne Asplund who said, for what it’s worth, I have a way I tend to think about this. Simpler work, smarter decisions, better customer outcomes. You should be focused on all three when working with AI. If not, you’re reducing quality and raising risk. The obvious example is what you talk about. If your only care is speeding up work and you’re not focused on the customer outcome, which describes many people, magnify the risk and reduce quality. You reduce the smart side of things too, because you’re not engaging with the content. The model works for all sorts of AI activities. And Neville, you had a response to that. You said, simpler work, smarter decisions, better outcomes is a good test of whether AI is actually adding value or just accelerating activity. The law firm example feels like a case where the first of those dominated: speed and efficiency, but the other two didn’t hold. And that’s where things break down. I particularly like your point about engagement. If people aren’t really engaging with the content, then the smarter decisions part never really happens. It just looks like it does. The balance you described feels like something organizations need to make much more explicit, not just assume. And then we had Philip Weiss who loved the word slopaganda. My thoughts on this are from an earlier post, and he shared the post that he wrote called Slopaganda, the New Rules of Narrative Warfare, and the link to that will be in the show notes. And Wayne Asplund replied to Phillips saying, “some of the creative terms coming out at the moment. One newspaper I read stoked the fear of job losses by talking about the job- the job-pocalypse. And another article I saw used the term e-idiots.” Definitely going to pinch that one. Neville Hobson: Ha Excellent. Great to have. Shel Holtz: And by the way, the idiot’s comment reminds me of a T-shirt that I saw the other day that said any fool can use a computer, many do. Neville Hobson: Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, it’s good when we see that kind of engagement, comment discussion taking place in the all on LinkedIn, of course, right? Shel Holtz: yeah, yeah, although I think I got one or two of these actually off of Facebook this month. I can’t remember which ones, but. Neville Hobson: cool. Excellent. OK. So our next show, we asked the question, when does AI stop supporting decisions and start shaping them? In episode 512, published on the 4th of May, we explored a provocative idea that AI is becoming the new executive influencer. Some research suggests leaders are already relying on AI for the majority of the decisions. But what does that really mean in practice? We have comments, right? Shel Holtz: Yeah, Vincent Brunel left a comment saying, accountability question is the one that keeps me up at night when AI shapes the outcome, who actually owns the decision? The algorithm suggested it can’t become the new, I was just following orders. And Dea

    1h 48m

  7. May 19

    FIR #514: Was Twitter A One-And-Done Phenomenon?

    There’s a concept circulating in Platformer, the Reuters Institute, and Nieman Lab: the text-based social networks that defined the last 15 years of public communication may be in irreversible decline. Apptopia reports that Bluesky’s daily users are down 96% from January 2024; Threads has lost users in seven of the past eight months (down 61% from its October 2024 peak); and X has been “culturally altered.” At its peak, was Twitter less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history? The mass audience has moved to short-form video, algorithmic feeds reward attention over the social graph, and platforms increasingly refuse to be referral engines. Text still thrives in newsletters, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, and AI chat interfaces — what’s collapsing isn’t text, but giant algorithmic public feeds. Neville and Shel look at what this means for communicators: the promise of scale is giving way to relevance, trust, and consistency — a shift that requires a different approach to brand presence on social. Get details in this not-so-short midweek FIR episode. Links from this episode: Are the Twitter clones in trouble? Pew: Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 Pew: Social Media and News Fact Sheet Reuters: Mapping news creators and influencers in social and video networks The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 25. 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 fircomments@gmail.com. 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: Hi everybody, and welcome to For Immediate Release episode 514. I’m Neville Hobson. Shel: And I’m Shel Holtz. Communicators devote a fair amount of time to social media management. It’s no different where I work. We’re a smaller team in the construction industry, so we don’t have any dedicated social media resources. But whether it’s a company like mine, where it’s part of the job that somebody does, or a global brand like Wendy’s or Starbucks with a full-blown team, everyone’s trying to make an impact on social network users. The strategy behind those efforts may need an overhaul, though, to address the decline of text-based social networks. Platformer’s Casey Newton wrote about this recently, focusing on Threads, Bluesky, and X — but I think it’s fair to throw Facebook into the mix. Depending on whose numbers you believe, Threads has lost momentum, Bluesky never became the Twitter replacement that political journalists or media folks had hoped it would be, and X is, well, shall we say, culturally altered. Meta and Bluesky dispute some of this third-party data, so I don’t want to overstate the precision of the numbers, but we shouldn’t shrug off the larger point. This isn’t about whether Threads beats X or whether Bluesky can recover, but rather about whether that old Twitter model can be rebuilt at all. And increasingly, the answer looks like probably not. Twitter at its peak was a real-time public layer for news, commentary, expert reaction, and professional visibility. Journalists, politicians, academics, CEOs, and PR people were all there reacting to each other in public. That gave communicators something we had never really had before: a live dashboard of what influential people were saying, what stories were breaking, and how publics were interpreting events in real time. The problem is that this depended on a specific set of conditions — a text-first interface, a public follow graph, a tolerance for public argument, and a shared assumption that this was where you went to see what was going on. Even with a small subscriber base compared to Facebook and a lot of other networks, Twitter was where news broke, and it was frequently cited in the mainstream media’s reporting. Well, those conditions have changed. The mass audience has moved heavily toward video. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are now the primary discovery platforms for younger users in particular. News and commentary arrive as video, personality, remix, and clip. In fact, I was talking about this recently with someone I work with who said she doesn’t watch Saturday Night Live — she watches 10 or 15 of the clips that Saturday Night Live shares on YouTube so she can catch the funniest bits. At the same time, the logic of the feed has changed. The old social feed was built around who you followed. The new algorithmic feed is built around what holds attention. A post on early Twitter spread because of the social graph. A video on TikTok spreads because the system thinks it’ll keep people watching. Now that changes the incentives. It rewards performance, emotion, personality, and visual fluency. It’s also why the link-in-the-post model is fading. Social platforms don’t want to be referral engines. They want the content consumed inside the platform. You can’t conflate social engagement and site traffic anymore. For brands, this requires a pretty significant rethink. Today, social is less about sending people somewhere else and more about creating native moments of value right there, inside the feed. The implication for communicators is that we can’t just ask, “What should we post?” We have to ask, “What role does each of these platforms play in our communication ecosystem?” Some platforms are for discovery, some for reputation, some are mostly listening posts — environmental scanning, sentiment tracking, intelligence gathering. Some platforms may not be worth the effort at all anymore. We also need more human voices. The logo account is not adequate anymore. Trust attaches to people — experts, leaders, practitioners, analysts. That doesn’t mean every executive needs to be dancing on TikTok. In fact, please, no. But organizations do have to get better at helping credible people communicate in platform-native ways. The decline of the old public square forces us to build more durable relationships. What matters? Newsletters, podcasts, owned communities. LinkedIn still matters for professional audiences. So I’d resist the lazy conclusion that text is dying. Text is everywhere — in newsletters (which, by the way, is where I latched onto this story, in Casey Newton’s Platformer), in captions, in scripts, in search results. What’s dying is something more specific: the idea that a text-first social network can serve as the default global town square. Twitter may have been less a replicable product category than a unique moment in media history. For communicators, the job is no longer to master the town square. The job is to understand the map after that square has gone to seed. Neville, is this what you’re saying? Neville: It’s a lot. There’s a lot going on here to kind of zero in on a handful of potential responses, I suppose. But one thing does seem to be quite clear from all that you’ve outlined, which I believe is the case: Twitter probably was historically unique. And I think the issue, or an issue, is that everyone doesn’t think like that. They think it’s repeatable, it’s replicable. And it’s not. I think you could also see AI maybe accelerating the decline. Content abundance — so much of it. Authenticity is getting really difficult to judge. And everywhere is noisy. And that’s not what many people want. So I guess, to crystallize it in a sense — you know, we’ve got all these elements you mentioned. The paradox of Bluesky: it hasn’t grown. Threads has got scale, but it doesn’t really have a big identity. It’s kind of part of Meta. What does it all mean for communicators? We’ll come back to that, I’m sure, in a bit. But I wonder — the thought that keeps recurring in my mind from everything I’ve read about this is that the decline may not be about text at all. That’s not to say it’s because they’ve all migrated to YouTube and video platforms. I don’t believe that’s the case either. I think, as you pointed out, and that’s obvious to all of us, the text itself isn’t disappearing. People talk about the decline of text-based social networks. But the audience hasn’t vanished. They’re just dispersed. They’re elsewhere. They’re not in a central place. There is no public square — no global public square. No matter what the likes of Silicon Valley folks seem to think, there is no global public square. Or rather, there are places online that are accessible globally, but they’re not controlled by big platforms solely. Text isn’t disappearing. It thrives in the examples you mentioned — newsletters, Reddit, LinkedIn comments, Discords, WhatsApp, AI chat interfaces — probably 20 more examples you could give. So perhaps people still want text, but they don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. I think that plays a big role in this. They don’t want the manipulation of algorithms to tell them, “This is what we think you want to read.” And that is still very strong on most big platforms today. They want to keep you on the site. They want to keep you engaged. They want you to keep doomscrolling, or whatever it might be. I think that shifts the conversation we should be having. It’s not about the decline of text — it’s that people don’t want giant algorithmic public feeds. What do they want? Well, they don’t know what they want, do they? They don’t. You mentioned LinkedIn — definitely the interesting exception. I think there are multiple reasons why it remains one of the stronger environments

    28 min

  8. May 18

    ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner

    Most agency owners know AI can write a first draft or clean up copy. Far fewer have figured out how to use it as the strategic sounding board they’ve always needed. In this episode, Chip and Gini explore how to use AI tools as a thought partner, not just a content machine. Gini’s example is a client who asked her to map what a PESO model maturity ladder would look like for an organization. She described the situation and constraints to Chat GPT, and keep pushing the conversation forward. Six weeks of iterative back-and-forth surfaced ideas she wouldn’t have reached on her own, including finding the gaps when the AI was willing to poke holes in her thinking. Chip points out that for owner-led agencies, that 8pm Friday idea you don’t want to dump on your team now has somewhere to go. The tool doesn’t care what time it is, and it has no stake in whether your idea succeeds or embarrasses you. Both hosts advise to direct the AI to ask you questions rather than just answer them. It takes some coaching to get a tool that genuinely engages rather than validates everything you propose, but once you’re there, you start getting real value. One warning they have is that these tools are not always consistent. The same AI that helped you build a strategy three weeks ago might question it today with equally compelling reasoning. Stay in the driver’s seat, and treat AI-generated recommendations as input, not conclusions. [read the transcript] The post ALP 305: How agency owners can use AI as an always-on thought partner appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

    16 min
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