FIR #469: Is Internal Communication Failing?

A growing body of research suggests employees are more disconnected than ever. What are internal communication teams getting wrong? Also in this long-form monthly episode for June 2025:

• Buzzstream interviewed over 150 digital PR pros to assess the state of digital PR. It looks a lot like it did five years ago.
• Social media has overtaken television as Americans’ primary source of news.
• Chief Communication Officers are in a precarious position, expected to anticipate and address political and societal upheaval, often sharing information executives don’t want to hear.
• Pope Leo XIV has called for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathering at the Vatican.

In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at Mastodon’s updated terms prohibiting AI model training, announcements from TwitchCon, and the impact of Texas’s mandatory age verification law on Internet privacy and security.

Links from this episode:

• State of Digital PR Report (2025)
• Social media overtakes TV as main source of news in US, analysis finds
• Study: CCOs Take On Growing Political Risk
• Pope Leo calls for an ethical AI framework in a message to tech execs gathering at the Vatican
• Pope Leo Takes on AI: Communicators Should Pay Attention
• Pope Leo Takes On AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity
• Employees lose over a month each year dealing with ineffective internal communication
• Frontline workers feel so disconnected, nearly half don’t know who their CEO is
• Gen Z is killing office small talk— with 74% of employees struggling to speak to coworkers
• Work Schedules Fail Millions of U.S. Employees
• Breaking Down the Infinite Workday
• Creators Turn to Agentic AI to Manage Fan Engagement

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report:

• Mastodon updates its terms to prohibit AI model training | TechCrunch
• Ten Years of TwitchCon: Here’s What We Announced in Rotterdam
• Age Verification Law Weakens Internet Privacy and Security

---

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, July 28.

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

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

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. 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:

@nevillehobson (00:02)
Hi everyone and welcome to episode 469 of Four Immediate Release, the monthly long form episode for June 2025. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:13)
I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California in the U.S. We’re very happy that you have joined us for our monthly review of what’s going on in the communications slash technology space. And there is always a lot going on, always. And I heard about a lot of it recently. I was at the IABC World Conference in Vancouver, small conference, only about 600 people, I think. There are…

Definitely some challenges facing the world of associations in general and IABC in particular. But as usual, the content at the conference was excellent. There were some really good sessions on things like driving AI adoption in the organization presented by ProSci, the change management research organization with some really revealing data, some very interesting stuff. For example, Neville, the

number one driver of adoption of AI in an organization is the very visible and vocal support from the most senior leadership of the organization. That’s the top factor. And in a lot of organizations, those guys don’t have a clue what this is or how it

@nevillehobson (01:18)
big surprise there.

Opportunity for communicators, would say that signifies Shell.

Shel Holtz (01:29)
It absolutely is. So we have these topics that we are going to jump into here shortly, but Neville, first, why don’t you remind everybody what we have already posted since our last monthly episode.

@nevillehobson (01:43)
Indeed, some good discussion we had on a handful of topics since the last month of show that was 466 on published on May the 26th. And we led in that one gain AI features. No surprise to anyone, I suppose, in every single episode we’ve been doing throughout this year, I think really.

But we started with the topic on AI. Not only are AI chatbots still hallucinating, we said by some accounts it’s getting worse. And we had a conversation about LLMs and hallucinating and so forth also in that episode. A handful of other topics too, including one I’ve been reading even a more about in the past week or so. So Google’s new tool for making AI videos with sound following the one with text, that’s VO3.

these seem to be coming out of the woodwork from a variety of players mid journey, most recently this past few days. So expect to hear us talking about it on FIR during the course of July, I think.

Shel Holtz (02:37)
Yeah, I don’t know if you’re aware, I was hearing about this on another podcast that these VO videos are being strung together with themes and shared on TikTok and they’re going viral. I can’t remember what the themes are, but they’re kind of silly and fun. But yeah, the VO3 has really led to this explosion of these videos being shared.

@nevillehobson (02:51)
Yeah, there’s a of that. A lot of that.

Yeah.

There’s around a dozen such tools currently, according to who was at the verge, if I recall correctly. And I’ve heard of half of them. So new things are appearing left, right and center. The mid journey one just a quick aside, I coughed up some money just so could try it. Blimey, I tell you, this is extraordinary. That you upload a static image and it creates a five second video from that you just prompted a bit.

or not as you as you prefer it’ll do something. And I’ve done a poor about half a dozen of these that I’m going to stretch together into a single video I saw a couple on LinkedIn to people doing similar things. So for 10 bucks a month, it’s worth it to discover what this can do. So expect to see lots of silly stuff out there. But there’s a great learning for what everyone else is doing. So it’s definitely another phase in these tools.

Shel Holtz (03:43)
Yeah.

I have a Mid Journey account. haven’t tried that yet, but you’ve been able to do that on PyCo, which I’ve been paying for for a while. So it’d be interesting to see how it works on Mid Journey. Yeah.

@nevillehobson (03:50)
Give it a shot.

Sure, there are a number of tools that you could do that.

This one I’m seeing in the tech press is saying, wow, over this particular one. So it’s offering something, I suppose. Go and give it a shot. So we also talked in this episode, this is a bit of a kind of a roundabout way to get to what we talked about in the last monthly. We talked about a new global alliance report on lack of strategic leadership about AI’s ethical use. AI again.

Shel Holtz (04:01)
Yeah, I’ll have to go give it a try.

@nevillehobson (04:18)
and a few other topics, plus Dan York’s tech report about a number of services online shutting down and other new ones starting up. So pretty full episode that came in at 104 minutes. No, wait, one hour 43. What’s that? Yeah, 100 and whatever. Anyway, one hour 43. So nearly an hour and three quarters. Yeah. No, it’s not an hour and three quarters almost. So that’s a hefty but good one, Donna. Thank you for that. So

Shel Holtz (04:33)
Yeah. We’re communicators. Math is not our strong suit.

@nevillehobson (04:45)
But that was that one. Since then, we talked in 467, June the 5th, that was Mary Meeker’s Trends Report on AI. Mary Meeker, many of you will know this, venture capitalist, and former Wall Street securities analyst, best known for the annual Internet Trends Reports that she used to publish a decade ago and going back into the 2000s. Serious credibility. But she released a new one.

dedicated entirely to AI, 304 slides, not the most slides she’s had as a deck. One of her internet ones was 600 slides, substantial content. But this is worth a read. We talked about it. She has credibility, as we said in the show, credibility as strong as hers is likely that this report will become the defining source of truth about the state of AI. So it’s definitely worth taking a look at the report and

listen to that episode to get our take in what she had to say. And then finally, 468 published June 17th, new threats to reputation. We said, while a company’s reputation doesn’t appear as a line item on a profit and loss statement on a balance sheet, it is nevertheless a critical intangible asset that significantly influences financial performance and long term success. So in this episode, we looked at some recent research.

and reports to zero in on the newest reputation challenges and how communicators should face them. So you’re up to date now with that little wrap up.

Shel Holtz (06:12)
We also had an interview drop.

@nevillehobson (06:15)
We did. Yes, we did. That was a really good conversation we had with Craig Silverman. We’ve interviewed Craig twice before on this episode, but you’ve got to go back to 2008, 2012 to get those interviews. So well over a decade ago. And here’s Craig. We talked to him about Indicator, his new venture that is all to do with fighting digital deception.

and he explains how he does all that. He explained how indicator came to be the challenge of launching a media startup and what kind of impact he hopes to achieve. He also shares practical insights for communicators facing the growing threat of coordinated inauthentic behavior, fake reviews, and AI generated information very timely. That was a good conversation. Almost three quarters of an hour, we talked to Craig about that and it was some really good insights he shared. So very much worth a listen.

Shel Holtz (07:10)
could have gone on longer. I had questions when we wrapped up. But yeah, Craig is a journalist, trained journalist, and had spent five years at ProPublica reporting on disinformation and misinformation. So was a logical step to move into this independent journalism that he’s doing with his partner. So yeah, definitely worth a listen.

@nevillehobson (07:12)
It could have. Me too.

Right. And you might,

if you know of Craig, you might remember back 15 years ago, he published a website that was called Regret the Error, pointing out errors made in media reporting that led to a book deal. And I’ve got the book. It’s nice, a nice look back in time to see what that was all about. But that was a good conversation we have with Craig, must admit.

Shel Holtz (07:47)
Me too.

Yeah

Also published since last month is episode 117 of Circle of Fellows, the monthly panel discussion with IABC fellows and a moderator, also a fellow, usually me, sometimes Brad Whitworth, talking about a topic of interest to communicators. This one was different. We did this one live at the IABC World Conference. We had…

three of the five new fellows up on stage. The other two weren’t able to make it. And then we had eight fellows in the front row of the audience. So we had a camera aimed at the stage. I was at the lectern and the three fellows in chairs. And then Brad was out in the audience with a microphone and his wife, Peg Champion, was following him around with a camera.

And all of this was feeding into StreamYard, which we used to do Circle of Fellows. And I was able to do the camera switching seamlessly. And this was all questions from the audience. So it wasn’t on a single topic. We went an hour talking about issues that were on the minds of communicators. It’s really interesting episodes. So that’s available both as a podcast and a YouTube video.

We’re also preparing for episode number 118, returning to the usual format. This one’s on communication leadership. The panelists include one of our brand new fellows, Mike Klein, along with Robin McCaslin, Sue Heumann, and Russell Grossman. This will be at noon Eastern time on Thursday, July 17th. So if you’re interested in hearing the perspectives of some senior communicators on leadership and communication,

Tune into that or catch the video or audio replay later. And with that, it’s time to turn to our reports as soon as we pay these bills.

There was a time when digital was something you bolted on to your PR efforts. Neville, you undoubtedly remember those times where should we do something digital? Should we have a website to go with this? I remember when TV commercials had URLs appearing at the bottom and it was, wow, look at that. They’re showing their URL on a TV commercial. PR now is digital. mean, calling it digital PR is almost ridiculous.

It’s just at the center of how we communicate. And BuzzStream’s latest state of digital PR survey is out. And if you’re wondering where the industry is headed, this year’s survey pulled in answers from 150 digital PR pros across the globe. I guess that means there are PR pros who are not digital PR pros, which is a little worrisome, but there’s a lot of food for thought here. So let’s start with the basics.

What’s working in digital PR these days? The clear winners are data-driven hero campaigns and good old fashioned expert commentary. It turns out about 95 % of the professionals out there lean on these two tactics. You need both the big attention grabbing home run campaigns and the steady reliable singles. And Neville, I apologize for the baseball metaphors. I don’t know the equivalence in cricket. ⁓

@nevillehobson (11:14)
No, that’s okay still because I probably don’t either, so that’s fine.

Shel Holtz (11:18)
Okay, I should have gone for football so you could have done rugby, right? It’s always nice though to see that stats back up what so many of us already are doing and just feel intuitively is the approach that works. Almost half of respondents say digital PR is actually more effective than it was a year ago. More links, more visibility, better results. But, there’s always a but.

72 % also say it’s gotten more challenging at the same time. If that feels like a paradox, it is. Blame it on everything from industry layoffs to Google’s never-ending algorithm updates to the growing army of competitors in the digital space. Basically, the pressure cooker has been turned up to 11. Now, what about budgets? It’s not exactly a free-spending landscape. Most digital PR teams are working with less than $10,000 a month and

Only a handful, about 4%, have more than $20,000 to play with. The cost per link, which is how a lot of these teams still measure value, typically stays under $750. Here’s something interesting. A full quarter of respondents are generating 40 or more links per month. If you’re into link building, that’s a pretty solid haul for your money. And interestingly,

link building is still at the heart of most of these digital PR campaigns. So what does success look like in digital PR? It is still all about the links. Not just any links, quality links are more important than they’ve ever been with 87 % of PR pros saying that’s their number one metric. Tools like RF’s domain rating and Moz’s domain authority are the go-to yardsticks for measuring those links.

And when it comes to relevance, two thirds of practitioners say they check the page title when the link appears. Little detail, sure, but one that says a lot about the evolution of the craft. Patience remains a virtue. Around half of those surveyed say it takes three to six months to see meaningful results from a digital PR campaign. For some, it’s even longer, think six to eight months before you really start to notice the uptick in authority or referral traffic. If you’re in a hurry,

Digital PR probably isn’t for you. Follow-up emails deserve a quick mention here. A massive 98 % of respondents say they send at least one follow-up, and the data shows that it pays off. Sending a follow-up boosts your reply rate by 85%. So consider that a best practice. The best results come when you follow up within a day. Open and reply rates both peak right after the first message. Now here’s why all this matters.

Digital PR isn’t just about backlinks anymore. It’s about driving organic traffic, raising brand visibility, sparking social buzz, and even helping organizations weather a crisis. Done right, digital PR delivers a kind of surround sound effect for your organization. One campaign, multiple touch points. The big takeaway in 2025 is that digital PR is harder than ever, but also more rewarding.

It’s also about mixing hero campaigns and expert commentary, following up quickly, measuring what matters and above all, being patient. Because if there’s one thing this year survey makes clear, it’s that digital PR is a marathon. It’s not a sprint. The other thing that occurs to me, Neville, and I think where we’re probably going to end up talking, is it’s all still about referral traffic to drive folks to a website. And we know that’s on the decline because of AI. And I was…

really struck that they’re still talking about success in terms of backlinks and not a word about showing up in AI search results. So Neville, what was your take on this study?

@nevillehobson (15:15)
probably mirrors much of what you’ve said, although I have to say I got really down a rabbit hole at the very start where it’s saying where I’m saying, why are we calling it digital PR, particularly if the definition that I’ve seen all over the place, including an organization called Digital Marketing Institute, that

It’s PR, right? And you talk about digital channels, isn’t that a bit of a misnomer now, because everything’s digital. If it’s defined by the channel, that makes less sense to me, even more so. So I think in the report early on, they asked, they have a little section called expert opinions, a little drop down, where one of the questions at the start was, how does digital PR compare to traditional PR?

And the quote I liked, and you’ll understand why in a second, is from Will Hobson, hi Will, US VP of PR, Rise at Seven. He says, the lines are getting more blurred, but in my opinion, digital PR is just PR. Our activity needs to be brand relevant, but also culturally relevant while being closely tied to business objectives. Now, you can apply that to PR, and I agree. So we haven’t moved on from…

not calling it digital PR, which emerged when all this was kind of new about 15 or so years ago, where we had digital PR. And I always had a problem as well with digital marketing, where you slap the word digital in front of a job description or a job title or some kind of activity, and it sounds super cool and new and fresh and amazing. We need to stop doing that, because if you then look at these definitions, so the Digital Marketing Institute says,

Digital public relations is a strategy used to increase awareness and visibility of your brand using online channels. That’s the first part of it, to which I would say, but isn’t that what PR does? Let’s call it traditional PR for differentiation. Isn’t that what PR does? Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, they say, but it offers the opportunity to reach more people in a measurable and targeted way. I don’t know what that means, but that doesn’t make sense to me either.

I’m not going hang up on this because I’m not, but it just struck me is that we’ve to stop calling it digital PR. I think your point, though, to kind of focus on this major issue is that exact one about links driving traffic to websites and so forth. I did think that they had the report show some interesting aspects related to SEO that are very much in the the dane of

domain of this is how we’ve always been doing this. This is not new. So that makes sense to me. The syndication, no follow, I found interesting. But I guess the main point is, though, if we’re going to call it Digital PR for the purposes of this article, I’m OK with that. When you get into some of the kind of slicing and dicing of what they came up with, which teams do you work with more closely if you’re in Digital PR?

And that I didn’t find surprising that the number one by huge number was SEO, the folks who do SEO, followed by marketing and then PR. So traditional PR is third on your list of people you work closely with. Surprised me a bit to see in this result that strategy was way down the list. And I would have thought that if you’re gonna, know, surely we’re talking about being strategic.

to, well, not to coin a phrase, of course, but I hear that all the time. But I would have thought that would have been higher. And it, you know, I could slice and dice this, but I don’t think that would add to our conversation. I think there are things we can learn from this survey, without doubt. But to me, it was obscured by this thing about digital marketing. And I think things are moving so fast that the kind of feeling I get from some of this

is that this is not on top of these changes that are moving fast. And I’m thinking in particular about what you and I have talked about in a variety of episodes of this podcast over the course of this year on things like Google Overviews, the role of AI in all of this that is going to interfere with all of these traditional sounding plans, it seems to me. So the future, according to this, to my mind, doesn’t look very rosy as changes upon us. And this doesn’t look like it’s addressing change.

Shel Holtz (19:18)
Yeah, I don’t see them making any pivots here to get ahead of this. And one of the things that one of the speakers at the IABC conference said, I mean, it’s an old line. He just sort of changed the words. He said, when change is coming at you, the best companies start running. And you don’t have to be faster than the change. You just have to be faster than your competitors.

The old line being when the bear is coming at you, you run, you don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the other campers, right? ⁓ But as I think about the term digital PR, I guess I can see the distinction in the respect of PR as being a reputation management and relationship building activity.

@nevillehobson (19:47)
Ha ha ha ha.

Shel Holtz (20:06)
I spend a lot of time on the phone with people, which is not digital. There are PR people, chief communication officers, for example, executive communicators who are coaching their leaders to prepare them for delivering testimony before Congress or preparing them to make a pitch to a city council or a zoning board. There’s a lot of PR that goes on that isn’t digital.

I think what we’re talking about with this is outreach, right? And when we’re trying to get our message out, so PR messaging is all digital these days, but there’s a lot of relationship building and reputation building that doesn’t happen online. It happens over the phone, it happens face to face. So I guess we could say that’s the distinction.

@nevillehobson (20:57)
Yeah, but you got to bear in mind one thing. So if you’re a smartphone, which is digital, then this digital PR, okay, digital outreach is what you’re doing. No, I mean, seriously, this one of the numbers here, again, not to belabor this point, because this could be a whole separate discussion all by itself. But the number one tactic in the in the in the report that we’re discussing, which of the following tactics you consider to be part of digital PR?

Shel Holtz (21:03)
Yeah

@nevillehobson (21:21)
The number one, 99.4 % of people said, pitching data-led content. So it got me thinking. But that to me is crazy because whatever you’re doing in public relations, when you slap a word like traditional or digital in front of it, you are invariably going to be pitching data-led content or data-driven content, whatever. You’ve used data, or rather you have data, and you have used tools to extract meaning from that data.

leaves your pitch. So these kind of narrow definitions to me are obscuring the value of these activities and dressing them up with a word that is wholly unnecessary. So Will Hobson’s got my vote where he says he doesn’t think this is, we should not call it that, we just call it PR.

Shel Holtz (22:05)
Yeah,

I don’t disagree. I am thinking back to an old, old case study. This was when, I can’t remember who was behind it, but there was a call to boycott the tuna industry, the canned tuna, because of the inadvertent dolphin catch that was happening. were scooping up dolphins in the nets and dolphins were dying.

@nevillehobson (22:10)
Ha ha ha!

Shel Holtz (22:30)
and they were just throwing them overboard because all they wanted was the tuna. And StarKissed objected, and I think it was Burson Marsteller that they hired. And Burson Marsteller got the StarKissed people together with the people who were behind the boycott. And StarKissed said, look, we’re already doing all kinds of things to prevent dolphins from being caught up.

in the sweep of tuna. Look at our numbers, look at our tactics, the things that we have implemented as procedures to avoid this. And the group came back and said, okay, yeah. And they went out and said, boycott tuna, except StarKiss, they’re already good guys. That was negotiation. That was getting people at the table. So today, communicating the outcome of that would clearly be digital, but the actual effort

@nevillehobson (23:12)
You

Shel Holtz (23:21)
was getting people together at a table to hash things out. That’s still PR.

@nevillehobson (23:27)
So you just defined why we shouldn’t be differentiating it, because that sounds totally confusion to the activity. It’s all just PR, it’s relationship building. These are methods you use to get your message out or engage with someone or whatever it might be. It doesn’t define the activity itself. Indeed, it talks about which channel. it channel if you wanted to say it’s that?

Shel Holtz (23:33)
It’s all just PR.

@nevillehobson (23:51)
But it doesn’t help any at all, in my opinion. I would argue that you could apply the digital advertising, digital marketing, digital whatever. It is not helpful. So I’m we agree on that, Shell. And I thank Will Hobson for prompting this part of our discussion on this podcast. Hope you’re a listener, So let’s see. This is a good digital story, this one, Shell Ethic.

Social media overtakes TV as the main source of news in the US.

Shel Holtz (24:16)
Do we need to call

it social media? It’s all just media. ⁓ just…

@nevillehobson (24:19)
Well, this is another conversation,

right? I I’m as guilty as everyone for calling it social media. Indeed, I often talk about social media marketing. So, is it just marketing? mean, it’s okay. my God. Yes, absolutely. So this story I’m going to share is actually kind of a subset of a huge report from the Reuters Institute, the latest global report that was published actually just literally a week or so ago.

Shel Holtz (24:30)
Every company is a media company.

@nevillehobson (24:47)
in June. But one of the clearest signs of how radically the news ecosystem is changing comes from that report. And that’s a bit I want to talk about. For the first time, social media has overtaken television as the main source of news in the US. And by the way, there we have to use the word social to differentiate it from just general media, right? According to Reuters, 54 % of Americans now get their news from platforms like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram.

compared to 50 % who still rely on TV. Now, I’ve been hearing for a long time that, you know, more Americans get the news online than anywhere else. This seems to provide clear evidence of that perspective. And it comes from a highly credible source at the Reuters Institute. I found the reporting, which I’m referencing by the Guardian was really good at summarizing the whole thing in a way that helps me discuss it with you rather than all the huge chunks of data that’s in Reuters report.

But this isn’t just a shift in platforms, it’s a shift in power, according to The Guardian. Influencers and podcasters, not journalists, are increasingly shaping what news gets seen and heard. Joe Rogan, the famous American podcaster, alone reached more than a fifth of Americans in the days after Trump’s reelection. mean, a fifth of Americans? That’s got to be in the least, what, close to 100 million, if not more, people.

especially among younger men, a demographic traditional media often fails to reach. That shift brings both opportunities and deep concerns. Trust and transparency are now front and center, as news increasingly comes from personalities rather than publications. AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini are starting to become news sources themselves, particularly among under 35s, yet users are already questioning their accuracy and reliability. There’s also a darker undercurrent.

Globally, news avoidance is rising fast. In the UK, nearly half the population say they sometimes or often avoid the news altogether. And I tell you, I’m in that group. It’s the highest figure in the study, that UK statistic. Many feel overwhelmed by negativity or simply tune out from what they see as repetitive or irrelevant coverage. In my case, it’s both in this context.

So as a center of gravity shifts from institutions to individuals and from owned newsrooms to algorithm driven feeds, what does this mean for trust, for civic awareness and for the role that communicators like us still have to place to play? What do you reckon, Cheryl?

Shel Holtz (27:16)
there

is so much to unpack here. Let’s start with the fact that people are avoiding the news. I just heard an interview Kara Swisher interviewed Nicole Wallace on her podcast, On with Kara Swisher. For those who don’t know Nicole Wallace, she was the press secretary for President George W. Bush. She worked in the upper echelon of the John McCain presidential campaign.

@nevillehobson (27:18)
Mmm. ⁓

Shel Holtz (27:41)
She grew disillusioned with the Republican Party and has voted with the Democrats in the last couple of elections. And she is the host of Deadline White House, which is a two hour Monday through Friday news program on MSNBC. And she told Kara Swisher that she understands why people are avoiding the news. It’s relentless. You watch an hour block.

of news on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, wherever you prefer to go. And it’s an assault of nonstop distressing stuff. She has, Nicole Wallace, started a new podcast through MSNBC. And it’s not 100 % news. It’s interviews with A-listers just about whatever they want to talk about. She said it always…

finds its way to some news, but it’s not news from beginning to end. And people are hungry for that. And that’s one of the reasons they’re turning off the relentless assault of news and opting for either something that has less of it, is more entertaining and soothing and comforting, or presents the news through a filter that is equally comforting in their bubble.

Interestingly, as you mentioned, a fifth of Americans listen to or watch Joe Rogan. I was reading that he is turning away from Trump lately in his commentary in the episodes where he is political because he’s not always, but that’s going to be an interesting thing to watch to see if he wields the kind of influence that can sink the poll numbers even lower than they are.

But you mentioned using AI tools for the news. I do that, not exclusively, but ChatGPT has the ability to set up tasks. And I have set up tasks to get the latest news on trends in elements of the industry where I work. And every day I check and every now and then I find something really, really interesting and good out of that.

@nevillehobson (29:48)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (29:51)
It supplements my other monitoring of the media environment. So it’s just one more source and occasionally it reveals something that I wasn’t aware of. But fundamentally what worries me most about this is the selectivity that people may not be aware they’re being subjected to if they…

go to these other sources for news. And frankly, know, watching MSNBC or CNN or Fox is the same. The only way I find out what’s going on in the rest of the world is to watch the BBC. That’s where I find out what’s going on in the Sudan, for example, or in Colombia, because they don’t cover that on the cable news stations in the US. They’re laser focused on

the four or five stories that are going to gin up the most outrage among the audience right now. So it’s all the current politics and that’s what’s turning people off. And I think if the media wants to maintain an audience, they’ve got to figure out how to bring people back, how to make these more palatable because what’s missing is the gatekeeper. And I understand that people don’t like the idea of the gatekeeper. I can pick for myself what I’m interested in.

But if somebody isn’t saying this is important and you need to know about this, this is what was great about reading a newspaper, the old fashioned newspaper is even if you weren’t that interested in the story, you saw the headline and you knew what was going on. Maybe you read the lead and now you knew what was happening in that part of the world that could have an influence on you and your life at some point in the future. Because when you are curating the news,

by following the TikToker who presents the stuff in a style that entertains you, what aren’t you hearing about that you should be hearing about? And somehow we need to get back to having somebody who can curate what’s important. So at least you have a superficial knowledge of what’s going on beyond what’s in that bubble.

@nevillehobson (31:54)
Yeah, that makes sense. Although I argue you could say that particularly the younger generations who are getting the news at such a TikTok, they it’s like they don’t care what they don’t know. And they don’t want someone telling them you should know this. that that that’s a trend without any doubt. In which case, the way you address that, then, is to find a gatekeeper if you like a source that would be trustworthy enough for them to pay attention to. And that’s what needs to happen.

Shel Holtz (32:07)
And that’s worrisome.

Well, exactly.

@nevillehobson (32:20)
I mean, there’s some other metrics that pop out of the kind of a big picture we’ve just kind of discussed that I think, yeah, we need to be really cognizant of what the changes are that are happening here. So the rise of news influencers, we touched on that. And we’ve talked about this a lot in recent episodes. We podcasts, there’s YouTube, there’s TikTok creators. I hear the word creator a lot, influencer a lot in this context as well, particularly among the younger demographics.

So Joe Rogan, as I mentioned, according to this report, he reached 22 % of Americans that week, as I mentioned after Trump’s inauguration. But I’ve read also separately, he himself has been critical of some of the people out there who are so-called sharing news and stuff like that. So is this a generational thing that I say to myself? I suspect it is largely. But the challenge for

or for all of us, I suppose, are the shifts in the platforms. So there’s some statistics from Reuters, YouTube at 30%, Instagram and WhatsApp at around 20%, TikTok 16 % are major players in news dissemination. X is losing liberal users and gaining right leaning ones. There’s no surprise there. But that again, that that has a big impact on this big picture. The challenges of publishers, according to Reuters,

struggling to adapt to video-driven and personality-led content, struggling to adapt to it, not dismissing it or combating it. They’re really struggling with that. Losing commercial value and visibility on platforms they don’t control. Facing a bypass of scrutiny as populist politicians speak directly to people through influencers. Now, that is definitely something that we’re seeing a lot happening over here in Europe, certainly.

News avoidance, we just discussed that, is rising. 40 % globally, at least sometimes, are avoiding it. That’s up from 29 % in 2017. So in five years, 29 % to 40%. That’s a big rise. So the interesting thing I find about the emerging role of AI, to your point, you mentioned that younger users are turning to chat bots like GPT, chat, GPT, Gemini, forgetting the news, not setting up a program that delivers a news to you.

but actually getting the news from those chatbots. I do that occasionally, but I don’t say, I’m done, I’ve got my newsfeed. No, no, no, I’ll do it for something specific where I want the benefit of either perplexity, which was good at this, or I’m not using that so much anymore. Gemini’s most interesting how it’s doing this is finding stuff that I know enough about my own use of those platforms that generally speaking, and this is a very general comment,

I trust what chat GPD tells me, not blindly. Let me tell you that I check most things, not every single thing. But if I’m getting something that I’m going to make use of in some form, I will double check it myself. And I have encountered recently a couple of things where it’s made a mistake. So what do we call that hallucination or whatever? And I’ve challenged it and said, you’re absolutely right. Thank you for pointing that out. I made a mistake. I get that just like a human being might do. So that’s how I tend to regard it.

But this is something that…

Shel Holtz (35:26)
Well, the data says that these days they’re making

fewer mistakes than humans undertaking the same task would make. They’re not perfect, but they’re better than we are.

@nevillehobson (35:35)
But

well, that’s probably true. So I think that’s a that’s a good way to approach it that many of the critics I see about chat GPT notably don’t seem to do it this way, which is to be literally you think of your AI assistant as a person as a colleague you’re working with, and you’re asking it to do a task as you would a colleague to do or a hired contract or whatever it is that you’re doing. Don’t just say to yourself, this is just a program doing stuff. Think of it that way.

And when you challenge it, don’t worry too much about, you know, working for hours on getting a prompt, talk to it conversationally. I do that all the time. And it works well, I find. But this is, this is a useful report. And the reporting I’ve seen not just in the Guardian, but elsewhere that zero in on particular aspects of this are worth paying attention to. And I think the one thing I would say that

you could argue is not emerging anymore. It’s kind of with us. There’s concerns that persist about the accuracy, trust, and transparency in AI-generated news. And that’s something we need to pay close attention to, not to circumvent it or think, now, no, it’s there. That is part of the landscape. So if the younger users, according to surveys like this one, are turning to this, we’ve got to understand that.

and make changes according to our planning and be part of the changes that are happening and the shifts that we are seeing right in front of our eyes. That’s what we need to do.

Shel Holtz (37:01)
Yeah, so there’s two angles on this. One is the mainstream media, the TV news media needs to figure out a way to bring people back, those who are avoiding the news to make it desirable to want to watch this. I don’t know if it’s changes in formats or what. We as communicators need to understand how to get the news into the heads of the people who we want to hear this.

And that means identifying the influencers, the podcasters, getting stuff on YouTube so that people will find it, making it easier for people to find. And getting into those AI-generated search results. Interestingly, I’ve heard recently that the AI-generated search results, particularly the Gemini overviews or the Google overviews, are heavily dependent on Reddit and Quora.

both of which are other sources that people are going to for news. And these are not places where you can just post your news. You have to go in there and engage. So another opportunity for a strategic shift in the communications department.

@nevillehobson (38:10)
Lots to pay attention to I think.

Shel Holtz (38:12)
Yep. Well, there’s another major shift happening right before our eyes in the role of the chief communication officer, a shift that’s only accelerating as political risk becomes business risk. A new study by United Minds that was reported on Provoke Media shows that CEOs, I’m sorry, CCOs are no longer merely putting out fires, providing executive counsel and developing…

basic PR strategies, they’re expected to anticipate political and cultural turbulence and shape organizational strategy accordingly. The study makes it clear that CCOs are now business drivers, not just messengers. In volatile contexts, think fractured politics, rising cultural tensions, corporate affairs leaders are being brought into the room to offer strategic counsel. They’re expected to flag risk.

convene cross-functional war rooms and guide public positions. As Ben Kalovich from United Mains puts it, with an audience of one in DC that can and will quickly strike, CCOs need to lead their organizations to make the right decisions. That’s a weighty responsibility and one that requires a shift from reactive communications to proactive leadership.

In companies that embrace this new model, the CCO serves as a kind of stabilizing board voice, a steady hand while other leaders overreact to daily political noise. Interestingly, that’s kind of what the Melbourne mandate called for, what, 13 years ago from the Global Alliance. They called for PR to be at the center of maintaining that steady guidance through political turbulence and social turbulence.

Anyway, the organizations set up frameworks, monitoring political signals, introducing decision protocols, and convening diverse teams early. And the result of this is anticipation of contentious issues like DEI or AI regulation and the ability to respond with unity and credibility rather than scrambling under pressure.

Not every organization is embracing this shift, though. In more traditional companies, communications is still seen as downstream messaging. Boards and CEOs may say they want early risk warning, but when the CCO raises a flag, they end up getting marginalized. As Dave Tovar of Grubhub noted, CCOs are caught between expectations, knowing they should warn but lacking authority to influence outcomes. Picture it.

telling the company the winds are shifting but not being allowed to change course. This tension between leadership resistance and expectations creates a double bind. Leaders may resist expanding CCOs remit, preferring to keep them in a PR silo, but then when political or reputational risk escalates, they demand answers.