Rand Fishkin posted a wheel chart on LinkedIn last week that should make every CMO uncomfortable. The inner ring shows where audiences say their opinions get shaped: podcasts, SubReddits, industry blogs, YouTube channels, even ChatGPT,
The Attention-Budget Gap Isn’t New. What’s New Is Who’s Winning It Read More »
Your leadership team is asking hard questions. Are our campaigns working? Is comms moving the needle on business goals? Are we getting ROI on this? Leave a Comment / By Katie Paine / August 5, 2026 When senior leadership
A defensive denial, an invite Google won’t accept, and what happens when four AI models are asked to do a spokesperson’s job By Greg Jarboe A Google spokesperson told The New York Times that Kevin
Can AI do the job of a Google spokesperson? We find out… Read More »
What you need to know: Last week I spent two days at Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference in Boston, absorbing all the new data on the state of Internal Communications. My headline takeaway: organizations
What PR professionals need to know about social media-first crisis communications Katie Delahaye Paine CEO at Paine Publishing April 17, 2026 When two TikTok influencers began investigating and comparing notes on allegations against Congressman Eric
Two TikTokers Took Down a Congressman. Is Your Crisis Plan Ready? Read More »
By Angela Dwyer, APR, VP of Insights at Fullintel, and Katie Paine, Founder of Paine Publishing (aka the Measurement Queen) If you can’t show how your work changed behavior, did it really make an impact?
The communications profession has spent years perfecting the art of measuring the wrong things. We built sophisticated, channel-by-channel frameworks — PR metrics for PR, social metrics for social, influencer metrics for influencers — and told
Stop Counting What You Did. Start Measuring What Changed. Read More »
In the age of artificial intelligence, visibility alone is not enough. What matters is Share of Model—the degree to which your narratives, language, and framing are repeatedly present in the content streams AI systems learn from. The biggest threat to PR from AI is the Illusory Truth Effect. Here are some thoughts on how to make it safer.
Your PR Dashboard Is Lying to You: How AI Erodes Trust in PR Read More »
Short answer: PR teams are chronically under-resourced because most organizations cannot clearly connect PR activity to business outcomes. Leadership prioritizes brand awareness and revenue, but PR delivers meaningless metrics like reach, impressions, hits and placements. As a result PR is seen as an expense instead of a strategic foundation. Without credible, agreed-upon metrics that leadership buys into, PR loses budget, influence, and trust—regardless of how much coverage or monitoring data it produces.
Why Communications Budgets Get Cut—and How to Protect Yours Read More »
Despite rapid growth in AI tools, new platforms, and more data than ever, most communications teams still cannot credibly demonstrate impact, ROI, or influence. The core problems—misaligned metrics, lack of business context, overreliance on vanity numbers, and underuse of existing tools—remain unresolved. Based on three decades of forecasting and client work, here are 10 pessimistic but realistic predictions about where PR measurement is headed in 2026.
The Barcelona Principles have been updated to reflect our new audience-first measurement age. Angela Dwyer does a great job of explaining what the latest round of updates to the Barcelona Principles means to all of
Barcelona Principles 4.0 Read More »
Quantifying The Unquantifiable: Modern PR Demands Measurable Metrics is the sort of headline that normally might compel me to click on an article, but by the end of the post, I needed to up my
No, Modern PR Does NOT demand another metric. Read More »
