FIR #465: The Trust-News-Video Podcast PR Trifecta

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Seemingly unrelated trends paint a clear picture for PR practitioners accustomed to achieving their goals through press release distribution and media pitching. The trends: People trust each other less than ever; people define what news is based on its impact on them, becoming their own gatekeepers; and video podcasts have become so popular that media outlets are including them in their upfronts. In this short midweek FIR episode, Neville and Shel find the common thread among these trends and outline how communicators can adjust their efforts to make sure their news is received and believed.

Links from this episode:

What Is News? (Pew Research Center)
Americans’ Trust in One Another (Pew Research Center)
Video podcasts are the next big pitch at media Upfronts
News Consumption in the UK: 2024

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, May 26.

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 (00:01)
Hi everyone and welcome to Four Immediate Releases. This is episode 465. I’m Neville Hobson in the UK.

Shel Holtz (00:09)
And I’m Shel Holtz in the U.S. And if you work in communication, it’s time to tweak your media playbook. If you still treat a press release and a reporter pitch as the center of the universe, it’s time to reconsider things. We’ll talk about why and how right after this.

Let’s start with the human glue that holds any message together, that being trust. Pew released a survey on May 8th that tells us only 34 % of Americans now believe that most people can be trusted. In the Watergate era, that number was 46%. In the mid-50s, it was closer to 70%. This is a crater, not a dip. Low social trust bleeds into institutional trust. So your brand news

starts with a skepticism handicap. Now, later on this, Pew’s other study also released in May that asked what is news, and the picture starts to come into sharper focus. Americans still want information that’s factual and important, but they apply those labels through a personal filter. Does it touch my wallet, my neighborhood, my values? If yes, it’s news. If not, it’s just clutter. That’s why an election gets an automatic news stamp and a blockbuster earnings release doesn’t.

The gatekeeping power has moved from editors to individual, and each individual is now effectively their own assignment editor. Enter into this mix the video podcast boom. CNBC’s upfronts coverage reads like a love letter to long-form host-driven shows. New Heights with the Kelsey brothers, Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, LeBron and Steve Nash breaking down hoops for Amazon,

These aren’t side hustles, they’re front row inventory next to NFL rights. The numbers explain why. New Heights pulls 2.6 million YouTube subscribers. Joe Rogan’s sit down with Donald Trump chalked up 58 million views. Multiples of top 10 broadcast hits, but on demand clipped and reshared endlessly. So here’s the tripod we’re standing on. Low interpersonal trust.

a personalized definition of news, and an audience migration to host-driven video-forward channels. Shake those three together and the argument that will blast a release, cross our fingers, and call it a day feels about as modern as a fax machine. People trust people, and even though they trust people less than they used to, they do trust peers, subject matter experts, or charismatic hosts who are already populating their feeds.

That means the old CEO quote and boilerplate formula is just table stakes at best. Yes, there are still good reasons to send out a press release, but not in a vacuum. We have to surface frontline engineers, project superintendents, patient advocates, whoever the listener already sees as one of them. We also have to pitch the host and not the masthead. Video podcast bookers don’t really care about breaking the news. It’s more about a conversation that keeps their community engaged through

next week’s and the show’s next month. Study the arc of the show. Offer stories that fit that arc and bring props. If you can’t show it, demo it, or screen share it live, probably isn’t a great video podcast pitch. You need to build a video-first asset bundle. Think 16-9 aspect ratio and 9-16 b-roll. Cut down clips ready for shorts, lower third ready stats graphics,

even physical product the host can hold up. Give them the raw materials to create snackable moments. We need to consider fast-forward transparency, because low trust means listeners will Google literally while you’re talking. Make it painless. Publish the data set, the methodology, the impact dashboard the moment the podcast drops. When a host can say links in the show notes, check it yourself, you borrow their credibility instead of testing it.

You need to measure the clip life, not just the hit. An episode premiere is only inning one. Track how quotes migrate to TikTok, how a product demo GIF surfaces on Reddit, and how snippets thread their way into your earned media that you didn’t pitch. That’s the long tail. That’s the ROI. And all of this, of course, spills inward. Employees are audience segments too, and they’re consuming in the same places.

Internal comms, the should-think podcast-style video for CEO AMAs, peer-to-peer explainers, even training modules. Why write a thousand-word intranet post when a five-minute host-driven conversation between the project manager and a site safety lead will get watched and maybe shared to LinkedIn by the very people that you need to reach? So if I had to condense this new rule set into one line, it’s this. Facts open the door.

Trusted humans carry them across the threshold, visuals bolted shut. Your news still has to meet the classic criteria, timely, significant, novel, but today it also has to pass an audience sniff test delivered by someone they feel they know in a format that lets them see more than they hear. So real quick, build a credible messenger bench inside and outside the organization, package every story visually, court video podcast hosts,

Ship transparency aids and track the afterlife of clips because momentum equals mindshare. Get this mix right and you’ll do more than play stories. You’ll earn a toehold in the very channels that are shaping public perception, channels the upfront buyers just anointed as prime time.

@nevillehobson (05:57)
There’s a lot of stuff there, Shell, that you shared, I must admit. And Pew Research, which you’ve cited a bit, really is way out front with quality data that informs their reporting. I don’t think there’s anything quite like Pew anywhere else in the world with the breadth and depth of data they use to come up with a reporting conclusion. So it’s hard to find comparisons.

listening to how you were setting all this out, it made me think that, you know, what’s actually changed over the years, other than the obvious declines here and there and different numbers. It’s, it’s the defining what is media, what is news has changed, I think, that may well have influenced some of these metrics that you’re you’re quoting. Looking at Pew, for instance,

Consistent views exist on what news isn’t rather than what it is. That’s interesting, I think. Hard news stories about politics and war continue to be what people most clearly think of as news. And I suspect that’s the same here too. But it’s difficult to see some of this through any other lens than…

the radical changes we’re experiencing and we’ve been going through over the past five years or so after two decades of, you know, golden years, you might say when, when we didn’t have the worries we have today. It’s easy to blame Trump for all this, by the way, and of course, it’s not really fair to do that. Not I’m not worried about being fair to him, but generally for understanding what’s happening and the changes that are happening. There’s a wider shift happening in society on which

I would suspect Mr. Trump is one of the catalyzers behind the changes that are going on. So I find it most interesting seeing the US picture as a benchmark, if you will, for what’s happening elsewhere, purely through the lens of the sheer volume of quality data that informs opinions. We don’t have that anywhere else. I was looking at a report here in the UK to get some perspective from this side of the Atlantic on this

broad topic. The regulator here, Ofcom, has produced some really useful data. There’s a big report that came out late last year that is to do with the picture in the UK, the broad picture on news consumption across generations. There’s an interesting metric set, nothing like the depth of what you’ve got.

For instance, comparing podcasts and the new media, if you will, that isn’t really in this report to a significant depth like that. But there are some parallels without any doubt, decline of traditional media, the decline of trust, for instance. But the generational gaps are not the same, it seems to me, although probably looking in depth at them may well be quite similar.

But one thing that seems to be clear is that how people trust who they do trust is not that different here as it is in the US. It’s not quite so granular, it’s a smaller country apart from the US. So it’s hard to look at it through the same eyes as you would in the US with the vast geography you’ve got over there. But you know, I find it quite interesting, you know, here’s a kind of a leaping out statement, we kind of think, yeah, we know that traditional platforms are declining in popularity.

Yeah, that’s a finding that’s universal, I would say in Western countries, certainly. But, you know, just looking through this to see what comparisons I can draw from from the US picture, there are some interesting topics. haven’t connected them with the Pew data, but I bet you they’re similar. For instance, how teens consume news.

Teen show a preference for lighter news topics in favor of social media platforms for news consumption rather than traditional media. No surprise with that at all, I don’t think. It is interesting seeing this decline in traditional news platforms for the top 10 news sources in the UK are now social media platforms. That’s again, that’s interesting. 70 % of respondents to Ofcom survey rate TV news is accurate, while only 44 % rate social media similarly.

So inaccurate is the word for social media, accurate for TV in terms of news reporting. Public service broadcasters, BBC is one, continue to be seen as vital for delivering trusted news, this report says, despite a decline in viewership. This survey I’m referencing indicates that audiences prioritize accurate news from public service broadcasters. And that sense of trust is big here because, you know, we don’t have

cities with their own TV networks in those cities or that state. It’s not the same geographically as one reason. But the other is that the state here defined television back in the 50s. In fact, prior to that, 1930s, even before Second World War, unlike the US where the soap opera emerged in those days, it had sponsors for content that didn’t exist here. was public service broadcasting, then commercial channels arose.

It’s well trusted, even though that trust is often dented by events. For instance, all over the news the last few days is a guy called Gary Lineker, who’s very well known in the UK. He was a professional footballer. He’s been the voice of BBC Sport for two decades, but he’s very outspoken. He’s got himself into trouble. Previously, over using social media for political comment, and he dropped a big clanger recently about Israel and Gaza. basically he’s…

quit, he’s resigned and he’s not getting the big golden handshake he would have got if he had been a good boy rather than naughty boy. I’m sure he’s going to pop up somewhere. he he’s dented his own reputation in terms of trust, but it’s rubbed off on the BBC a bit. So they’re going to have to weather that for a while, I would imagine. But, you know, the the the markets are have a lot of parallels in many ways, I think. Social media platforms increasingly use for news consumption.

Facebook being the most popular source. think that reflects the picture of the US too, doesn’t it, Joe? Probably? Yeah, yeah. So perception of news accuracy and trustworthiness is a relevant metric in the context of this conversation. Search engines, news aggregators are perceived as more trustworthy and accurate compared to social media platforms. Facebook in particular scores lower on attributes like quality and trustworthiness. Yet, as the other metric shows,

Shel Holtz (11:44)
I believe so, yeah.

@nevillehobson (12:06)
Facebook’s the most popular source for news consumption. with paradox, there seems to be. And you’re looking at a couple of other things. Social media and talking with family are the most common ways teens access news. So that’s a bit different to the statistic you quoted on where teens place their trust. So social media is 55%, family 60%. TikTok’s the most used individual news source among teens. That’s 30%.

So it’s kind of interesting. you know, there’s lots of more lots of further metrics there that aren’t really relevant to this conversation. think Americans trust in one another. Would that be the same here? I’ve not found kind of direct directly comparable metrics that I could I could throw at you. So it’s hard to see the difference. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the over the general sentiment in that is not dissimilar here.

Yet there are definitely differences. Racial issues, the discrimination factors aren’t quite the same as in the US, but they exist here. They don’t tend to be skin color, if you see what I mean, it’s more origin like from the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East rather than, you know, black Americans who originated generations back coming from Africa. Those are not quite the same. Yet I would say the

the outcomes in terms of analyzing behaviors, look at the cystics aren’t that dissimilar. It just shows, I think, how similar and how different we all are wherever we are in the world. And the difference, one big one in America is you’ve got the metrics that helps you understand it all, that don’t exist into such a scale elsewhere. So I’m not sure this is going have gone off on a slight tangent to what you were talking about earlier, Shell, but I think it is useful to

contrast or compare really the data from one side Atlantic to another, not directly comparable for geographic geographies and simple sheer volume. But behaviors aren’t that different, it seems to me.

Shel Holtz (13:58)
No, I suspect not. When you look at the growth in distrust of each other here, the political divide must have a lot to do with that. People on the left just not trusting people on the right, people on the right not trusting people on the left. But I think it probably goes deeper than that. But what it leads to is it leads to people finding sources of news that are relevant to them, that affect them.

that is conveyed by people that they do trust. So if you trust Joe Rogan, you’re going to watch Joe Rogan’s show. And that’s where you’re going to get a lot of your news, since he does tend to have newsmaker type guests on. This, think, is why we have to pay attention to these video podcasts as a possible outlet for the message that we’re trying to convey.

because there are people who are gravitating to these. see the numbers. The numbers are bigger than the numbers that are being drawn to your top 10 TV shows. And this is just this confluence of the definition of news, who we trust, where we get our news and how we define news and the growth of video podcasting, which we saw played out.

in the last presidential election because Trump and his spokespeople were hitting the bro circuit of video podcasts and the Harris campaign was by and large ignoring them and playing to traditional media. I haven’t seen any analysis that has definitively said that led to victory, certainly didn’t hurt. And it was a wise strategy given the data that we’re seeing now.

So I think the people who are talking about this and thinking about it are absolutely right. You have to start thinking about where your audience is, who they trust, what do they think news is, and how can we craft our news so that it conforms to that and gets delivered through a trusted third party that they’re actually paying attention to and find credible. It’s a big shift.

But the other thing that comes out of accommodating this shift of adopting these new practices in getting the story out for our organization or our clients is that it does accommodate AI search. The interview on that video podcast is going to end up in a training model somewhere. So this

aids that effort as well as fewer and fewer people click any links that they find in a Google search, just settling for the AI overview at the top of the page, which now Google is starting to emphasize anyway, which is a whole different topic of conversation that we have addressed before and no doubt will again. you want people to hear your news, at least you get the side benefit of appearing more in AI search results.

@nevillehobson (16:49)
Yeah. Yeah, things are changing so fast, it seems to me that some of these detailed analytical reports on behaviors and trends and so forth in media, you get the sense that they’re trying hard to remain relevant in the analysis when the demographics and the markets are shifting so radically. For instance, report just the other day here in the UK that was

focused on the Daily Mail, one of the tabloids here that is definitely right leaning in a big way, were talking at a conference on the dramatic fall in click throughs since the advent of Google’s AI overviews. And they said it was alarming and it was shocking. And the volumes, I don’t have the report in front of me, but the numbers were quite significant, the drops. So what are they doing about it? And this to me, I found most interesting.

which I think instead of complaining as some media are about these changes and we got to do something, we’re not, you this is wrong and blah, blah, is do what the mail is doing, which is off, which is starting up a newsletter that you subscribe to. So that I think is definitely a trend to keep keep eyes on. I the the niche newsletter is designed to relate directly to your own interests.

So if you want to get all your news from the mail to you directly, than suffer from, if you’re searching for something or whatever, your own behavior, you’ve searched for something, it pulls up the results from the daily mail, you read it there, and it’s enough to satisfy the reason why you were searching, so no click through. So I get the logic of what they’re doing, and I think others will follow them unquestionably. And I look at my own behavior.

in a very small way. This is just me. not I don’t know if it’s a trend or mirrors anyone else or not. I subscribe now to nearly 20 newsletters. And of course, I don’t get a chance to read half of them, to be honest, show but I read the ones that interest me early in the day when I’m not at my desktop machine or even my laptop, probably my phone or tablet that I wouldn’t otherwise do. And it tends to be glancing as almost snacking on the content. And I see that is a different way I used to what I used to do.

media consumption, which would have been sitting in a desktop computer, looking at the screen reading stuff for half an hour. Don’t do it like that anymore at all. So and some of the newsletters are from new media, if I described like that, not the old media. And they’re well written, they’re entertaining, they’re storytelling, but not just a bunch of dry, factual information, they entertain as well. And so, you know, to me, one of the measures of whether I like them is if I permit the

images to come through automatically rather than be blocked by my email program. others I leave blocked. So you get a sense of how they’re approaching this, whether designing for a desktop computer, or you’ve got tons of broken image links all over the screen, you’re not going to read that. So that’s part of the shift. And I think maybe that’s generational. I don’t know. I’ve not looked into it. Do younger audiences have similar behaviors with newsletters? Well, according to the mail,

demographic they’re interested in is definitely leaning young, not old, even though my understanding of the male, and this may be based just on people I know, they’re old who read the Daily Mail and the right wing. you know, things are changing. the Pew is probably best placed to provide data on the US picture. I wish they would look at international but of course, I guess the raw data is not there. But this is part of the shifting landscape.

generational shifts as well. You know, we got Gen Alpha on our heels at the moment. What is their news consumption like? I was looking at an ad the other day for a digital camera, which I bought one actually that when we’re out looking at things and my wife and I are visiting places, instead of fumbling with my phone, I’ve got this little digital camera hanging on the strap, I could just pick up take a picture. That’s that’s why I did this. But I found one that was like 30 pounds 64 megapixel.

with they call it a vlogging camera because it’s 4k video as well aimed at teens it’s very affordable and indeed the pitching it as a gift to your youngster who’s 10 get him started it’s very simple very safe very straightforward it’s not connected to anything although there are versions with built-in wi-fi so you look at how these things are shifting into one of the tools that are available to to kids these ages now so

We are at a time of significant change. We know this. This is another manifestation of it, seems to me.

Shel Holtz (21:09)
Yeah, by the way, you mentioned newsletters and I think there’s probably a new approach to newsletters that people in communications might want to consider. And that is after an interview, after a news release, after an event to send a newsletter out that provides all of the backup information, because this is again, make it easy to.

have people see you as transparent. Make it very easy for people to confirm the information that you have shared. You also want to make it available online. But if you have people who are paying attention to what’s coming out of your organization and you deliver some remarks or make an announcement, get the backup material out there. Use whatever means are available to you. lots of new approaches in

@nevillehobson (21:58)
Yeah.

Shel Holtz (21:59)
this profession

for people to consider in order to succeed. But again, know, the press release with the CEO quote, you still need it for a variety of reasons. I mean, here in the US, compliance, you know, with SEC rules, but it won’t cut it ⁓ in getting the word out to the people you’re trying to reach.

@nevillehobson (22:10)
Yeah.

No,

it wasn’t. And I suspect that’s a similar reason here in the UK. I’ve not looked into that, listed companies have to communicate certain things. I’m just thinking, funny you mentioned that because today I got a press release from an agency that I read it. I thought, my God, this is dreadful, truly, particularly when they use the old fashioned language that we used to use back in the 70s and 80s, I think, it was so and so commented. He commented.

Shel Holtz (22:32)
Most of them.

@nevillehobson (22:42)
People don’t talk like that naturally, he said, or… Oh, you bet. You bet. Well, now we’re getting into the topic of structuring press releases, because to me, it’s like they name the company and then four paragraphs of what the position is of the company, how well they’ve been doing in the history and all that stuff, then you get to the news. So no, that’s not the way to do it.

Shel Holtz (22:45)
The one I love is, we’re excited to announce. Are you? Really? Are you bouncing around in your seat excited?

@nevillehobson (23:07)
The newsletter in the way you suggested it makes a lot of sense to me, I must admit. It’s quite a layer to add into the workflow of producing this hence there are tools that will help you. AI driven, many of them. So that’s definitely worth considering. But the newsletter generally for the example of the Daily Mail in terms of the media, I could see this going a lot. I get, for instance, alerts in the start of the day from news organizations. Here’s today’s headlines.

I used to enjoy them, but they’re all the same now. They’re reporting on the same news, just different presentation. So I’ve got to be selective in what I look at. And the ones I’ve not looked at for a couple of weeks, I’ll unsubscribe. But they are useful. And does it make me click through? No, it doesn’t actually, very, very rarely. The new media ones do, though. Some of my favorite newsletters from the tech area and in politics are well-written. They are entertaining, more so than these. These are…

kind of a shinier approach from the old media, whereas the new media tell real stories in their news and they make it something you look forward to reading and you then engage more with those. So what impact will that have on reporting by Pew, for instance, next year? I wonder. People are popping up all over the place with companies, rather, should say, offering newsletter services. So, for instance, Beehive, see a lot, you know.

Shel Holtz (24:23)
Yeah, well.

@nevillehobson (24:25)
Substack I hear less about now than alternatives to that, although Stubstack is still a pretty big player. is a great one. know a number of organizations have shifted to Ghost as a platform. I use my blog, which also has a newsletter function I use too. And that’s actually more than I’ve ever done before is growing in subscribers. I’m quite pleased that that’s not my prime purpose, but people clearly like that. So for us, we might consider some of that show. That’s a whole different topic here. So yeah.

Shel Holtz (24:50)
Well,

the other thing to consider is that if people don’t trust Entity X, they’re not going to trust Entity X’s newsletter just because they’re cranking one out. You have to build that trust through other means or get into somebody else’s newsletter. But I’m sure this is a conversation that will continue as these changes continue. But for now, that’ll be a 30 for for immediate release.

@nevillehobson (24:58)
Right.

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