The Delicate Art of Managing Reputation in the Age of AI with Featured's Brett Farmiloe

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.01:40Introduction to Featured and HARO03:46Reviving HARO: Trust and Quality in PR07:11The Role of AI in PR and Media09:55Navigating Native Advertising and Content Creation12:46The Freemium Model and Revenue Generation15:39Legacy Media vs. New Media in the Information Ecosystem17:59The Importance of Sharing KnowledgeWebsite - free episode transcriptswww.in-reality.fmAlliance for Trust in Mediaalliancefortrust.comProduced by Tom Platts at Sound Sapiensoundsapien.com