Digital PR Explained

Alex Lockie, executive editor at CCJ Digital and Overdrive Online, gets pitched constantly and reads almost none of it. In this episode, he breaks down exactly what makes him open an email (specific, casual, clearly written by someone who knows his beat) and what gets an instant delete (anything that smells like AI or PR). He also shares the pitch that used AI to analyze 8,600 Federal Register comments and landed him a story, and explains why he thinks of most PR relationships like a dating app he's trying to spend as little time in as possible.

Amanda Natividad has a theory: PR has always been zero-click marketing. You don't ask a reporter to link back; you just want the mention. In Part 2, she breaks down why AI visibility is finally putting a number on something PR people have never been able to prove, the tools she uses to track it, and why the very thing that makes PR hard to measure might be exactly what makes it valuable.

Amanda Natividad told me something she's never said publicly: good PR people could run a company. Not help run it. Run it, as CEO. She backs it up with a story from her Fitbit days: a press release, an internal team that wouldn't let a single claim slide, and a blog post that outranked the official announcement for years. Part 1 of 2.

Maria Korolov discovered fully fabricated AI-generated research on a reputable cybersecurity company's blog: fake Gartner stats, fake analyst reports, all of it. The company took it down, but the fake data is still circulating. In Part 2, Maria walks through what happened, what journalists are doing differently because of it, and what PR pros need to know about source credibility, expert quotes, and why she's done with HARO.

Maria Korolov, an award-winning technology journalist for CIO, CSO, ComputerWorld, and NetworkWorld, shares what a well-managed embargo looks like from a journalist's perspective. In next week's episode (part 2), Maria walks us through the moment she discovered a cybersecurity company's blog post was full of fabricated AI-generated statistics citing reports that don't exist. The fake data got picked up by other publications, and it's still circulating today.