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Multiple studies confirm that Americans (like most of the rest of the world) have lost their trust in the media. But people get their news and information from somewhere — or, as a Gallup/Knight Foundation study finds — someone. “Public individuals” attract followers who turn to them for news and information based on a number of qualities, ranging from likability to subject matter expertise. Many of these public individuals host shows on mainstream media outlets. What does this mean for PR professionals looking for the right outlet to pitch? Neville and Shel break down the study in this short midweek FIR episode.
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BBC Verify is the venerable broadcaster’s latest effort to combat disinformation. With a staff of 60 journalists, Verify will provide details about the BBC’s own reporting and debunk disinformation it finds online (as it has already done with a photo purportedly of a Pentagon bombing that was, in fact, AI-generated). Are there lessons in the BBC’s approach that communicators can apply to their companies’ online activities? And will other media outlets follow suit, even as they slash budgets and newsrooms?
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The number of change initiatives companies impose upon employees has skyrocketed from two per year in 2016 to 10 in 2022. That has left employees with a serious case of change fatigue, increasing the likelihood that these initiatives will fail. Shel and Neville look at data from Gartner and advice on how to better handle the surge of change programs, many of which companies are undertaking in response to challenges resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Also in this episode:

• Web3 has never captured the public’s imagination. The lingo of Web3 may be partly to blame.
• Over half of public relations practitioners lack confidence in their data literacy skills. That’s a problem when the simple but useless AVE metric is no longer the communicator’s fall-back metric.
• The pandemic influenced the ways companies communicated with employees, leading to a shift in the elements of communication that lift organizations’ internal brands.
• A quarter of Twitter users don’t expect they’ll be using the platform within a year.
• The uproar over perceived or real copyright violations inherent in the Large Language Models used by generative AI tools is poised to find its way into laws and regulations.

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“Disclosure and transparency are the currency of the internet,” wrote journalist and author Evan Osnos. That has proven to be true time and again. It undoubtedly will be true of using generative AI in marketing and communication. But will it be true every time we use AI? Even when we’re just using it as a tool, like a calculator? The challenge of establishing guidelines for disclosing the use of AI is the subject of this short midweek episode.
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