Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

When we talk about the information ecosystem on this podcast, you tend to focus on its public-facing parts, so journalists, social media platforms, influencers. But there is another player, one that acts behind the scenes: public relations.

Now, PR has always been kind of a wholesaler of information, connecting clients who can pay the PR firm to make them visible with journalists who need the content. Like everything else, PR has been turned upside down first by social media and now by AI. Today's guest is Brett Farmiloe, co-founder and CEO of Featured, which uses AI to help do what PR associates used to do and still do to some extent.

Full disclosure, what brought Brett to my attention is that Featured is also the company that brought back Help A Reporter Out, known by its acronym HARO, the service that journalists of Eric's generation used religiously. Brett operates at a fascinating point in the evolution of the attention economy, where reputation once built by journalists and PR, then shaped by algorithms, is now increasingly at the mercy of what AI models say.

01:40
Introduction to Featured and HARO

03:46
Reviving HARO: Trust and Quality in PR

07:11
The Role of AI in PR and Media

09:55
Navigating Native Advertising and Content Creation

12:46
The Freemium Model and Revenue Generation

15:39
Legacy Media vs. New Media in the Information Ecosystem

17:59
The Importance of Sharing Knowledge

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

What happened to truth in the digital age and how will AI challenge it even further? Those are the questions at the heart of today's conversation. Steve Rosenbaum, Emmy award-winning filmmaker, founder of the Sustainable Media Center, and the author of the new book, The Future of Truth.

The book runs through just about every institution that was once a pillar of what Jonathan Rauch calls the reality-based community. That is media, law, science, economics, medicine, and how AI is already reshaping it.

Eric and Steve talk about why those institutions lost their authority and what fills the vacuum. They'll talk about a generation raised inside the social media feed on whom we've been conducting a society level experiment whose outcome we can't predict. And we'll talk about whether there is any path back to truth as we once knew it through regulation or technology or just old fashioned media literacy.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

If you want to understand how we got to this moment, a moment in which most Americans say they can't tell what's true online anymore, when loud minorities can manufacture the appearance of mass consensus, when we have retreated from a shared sense of facts to our own bespoke realities, let me introduce you to Renée DiResta. Renée has been a warrior for truth in these polarized times longer than almost anyone.

She mapped anti-vaccine networks on Facebook in 2013. At the Stanford Internet Observatory, she exposed state-sponsored influence operations and for her trouble, she has been slandered before Congress, subpoenaed and doxed and harassed. Her book, Invisible Rulers, is an encyclopedic account of what happened to us all when the ancient human rumor mill met the modern machinery of networked propaganda. She's now a professor at Georgetown's McCourt School of Public Policy and she's still very much in the fight.

Renée and Eric talk about how ordinary people get pulled into false narratives, how it feels to be targeted by powerful people living out fake and cynical narratives, and how AI is rewriting the rules of influence. And why, despite everything, Renée hasn't given up the fight. And now here's Renée de Resta.

Website - free episode transcripts
www.in-reality.fm

Alliance for Trust in Media
alliancefortrust.com

Produced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapien
soundsapien.com