The new market for news

NO JOURNOS, ONLY INFLUENCERS Now we're arguing whether water is wet. And whether PR people are often former journos. Answer: yes, they are. That's why PR socializes with (and sides with, and even leaks to) the journos. Citations below[1], and LinkedIn will have even better data. With the record actually set straight, let's actually understand the unholy PR/journo nexus, the function PR used to perform in the old market for news, why the new market for news has rendered PR obsolete, and why you should hire creators over public relators. PR IS IMPLICIT ADVERTISING First, why did companies pay for PR? Because it was implicit advertising. Explicit advertising is when your company's name appears on a billboard with a big buy-now sign. Always, Coca Cola! But implicit advertising is when your name appears in the middle of an ostensible hard news story. "All they drank was Coca Cola." Companies can directly buy explicit ads. But they can't directly buy implicit ads. The way they indirectly buy them is by hiring PR people, often ex-journos, to pitch stories and call in favors with current journos. As a wise man said[2] almost twenty years ago: THE OLD MARKET FOR NEWS So, the PR/journo interface can be visualized as a market with sell-side and buy-side. There are today about 6 PR people (sell-side) for every journo (buy-side). The PR flack tries to sell the journo on writing about their company. The journo sometimes buys the story...spends time taking the intro...and then what happens? Until about 2013 or so, tech could often get good press from the journos. Journos can be lazy, so good PR people would essentially give them a fully wrapped story, completely with a news hook, and even sometimes a fake controversy ("we have too much traffic!"), such that the journo could just reuse what PR gave them without too much editing. But then this happened: That was the commercial disruption. Tech was coming for the jobs of the journos. It was also an ideological disruption — tech was coming for the power of the US establishment. And it was a personnel disruption — tech is just a much more international cohort than the Western nepotists like Sulzberger, Murdoch, and Newhouse that inherit media corporations. All that combined to completely annihilate the expectation of good press for tech. PR became a useless ritual where the PR flack would make an intro to a journo, see a brutal hit piece written about the company, and then blame the company for the attack. Everyone in tech saw this happen across hundreds of companies in the mid/late 2010s. In unguarded moments, the journos even admitted that no one would ever write another positive story about a tech startup again: THE NEW MARKET FOR NEWS Now we're in a new era. First, no one trusts the media anymore. Second, the establishment has lost its ability to censor Twitter, Substack, and the like. Third, the power of AI for creation and social for distribution continues to grow. So, you simply don't need legacy media outlets anymore to generate and distribute high quality content. That means the entire PR-to-journo market is obsolete. It is a waste of your money to pay public relators and a waste of your time to engage with journos. Their media corporations don't reach your customers and have also lost control over the vital center. At best getting a story in a legacy media outlet is a vanity metric — and tech companies should not be pursuing vanity metrics. THE TLDR Anyway, just like you write your own code, you need to create your own content. The TLDR as always is: - do not hire PR - do not talk to journos - build your own audience - and go direct Work with individual influencers, not irrelevant institutions. Hire AI creators, not public relators. Build your own channels, don't subsidize legacy outlets. And embrace the free Internet, don't subsidize the people fighting it.