A PR Case Study in Using AI to Find the Story Faster

In this episode, Nick Huber walks through his five tips for pitching national media, and none of them involve AI. He covers why pitching a follow-up to a reporter’s old story can beat your product news, what to do about clients who hand over crumbs and expect a banquet, and how a single freedom of information request can turn into an exclusive.

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.

If you've noticed that getting people to your website feels harder than it used to, you're not imagining it. More than two-thirds of searches now end without a click, and that number is only going up as AI answers replace the ones people used to find on your site.Rand Fishkin, CEO of SparkToro and co-author of the upcoming book Zero Click Marketing, joined the show to talk about what this shift actually means for PR pros. Spoiler: it's not bad news.We get into why the channels and tactics PR has always relied on are exactly what brands need right now, and how to think about building influence when traffic is no longer the goal.

Want to know what journalists actually think about your pitches? Spoiler: 72% say fewer than a quarter of what lands in their inbox is relevant to them. Cision surveyed 1,800+ journalists and the results are worth your attention. I break down the key takeaways from their 2026 State of the Media report and share what I'm seeing play out in real life.

A niche regulation. Thousands of public comments. One skeptical editor. In this solo episode, Britt walks through a real campaign where AI did the heavy lifting by making sense of a mountain of public record data fast enough to matter. She breaks down the strategy, the journalist response, and what it actually means to use AI well in PR.

Barron's recently found one sentence construction showing up across thousands of corporate documents, earnings calls, and press releases and it is a phrase that barely existed two years ago. It's called the Great Flattening, and PR pitches are not immune. In this solo episode, Britt breaks down why AI-assisted pitches are increasingly blending together and introduces the POINT Check, a five-question framework you can run any pitch through before you hit send.