Welcome to The Rebooting, Mohonk edition. I traveled up the Hudson to speak today with the team at IEEE Spectrum, a leading technical magazine focused on tech and engineering. A few quick observations:
Mohonk is a blast from the past, seemingly frozen in time in the 1950s and a good setting for a remake of The Shining. There’s even a labyrinth and ghost legends.
The essential challenge for all publishers is becoming an indispensable resource and habit for a specific audience. That’s the simple but hard task that sometimes gets lost in the swirl of threats that are beyond the control of anyone creating content.
A reminder: Check out The Rebooting’s recent total-monetization research project, conducted in collaboration with Piano.
Today, some thoughts about why communications is rising in importance as business navigates the Information Space.
Why smaller lists win
Bigger lists don’t always mean better results. In fact, bloated databases can hurt deliverability, dilute engagement, and hide your most valuable readers. Smaller Lists, Bigger Wins shares how two publishers strategically cut their lists — and saw higher engagement, stronger advertiser value, and better ROI. You’ll learn the steps they took, how they got internal buy-in, and how you can make the shift without losing revenue. If you’re ready to rethink list strategy and focus on the audience that truly moves the needle, this guide is your roadmap.
The rise of comms
You had to feel for Tylenol. It was no surprise a word like acetaminophen would trip up Trump, so he switched to the genericized Tylenol to repeatedly tell the American public that Tylenol causes autism. Not one for subtlety, Trump repeated the message again and again.
The brand damage to Tylenol will be measured in the billions. It’s a rerun of a crisis in 1982 when a maniac tampered with Tylenol and poisoned several people and led to a national panic.
Then-CEO James Burke is credited with steering the company through the crisis with a deft media strategy that leaned on transparency and openness to the press and regulators. It’s not a playbook that Tylenol can easily use now, as it confronts a vastly different and more fractured media environment, where a medical and scientific issue enters the Information Space maw.
This is an increasing challenge for businesses more accustomed to a centralized media environment. Starbucks has somehow become a minor character in the Charlie Kirk psychodrama. It was falsely accused of refusing to write Kirk’s name on orders of Kirk’s favorite drink. (An X post based off the original TikTok was still viewed 9.5 million times, and it’s highly unlikely most saw the subsequent anonymous Starbucks press statement.) If that meant enough, it sparked a real incident when one of its 360,000-odd baristas did write an offensive message on the now viral order of mint majesty tea with two honeys.
These communications nightmares are more common and will likely lead companies to emphasize their comms strategy. Crisis is now the norm, and it’s less taking out insurance but assuming you will get sucked into some drama that threatens your reputation and influence. This is a far trickier environment for businesses to navigate.
I’m lately fascinated with the comms function at businesses. It’s often thought synonymous with PR but is actually far more strategic and critical to corporate strategy. Silicon Valley sets the pace for most things business, and comms is now as important or more important than marketing. Tech is a herd industry or pattern matchers. Elon Musk has used comms over marketing because in his formulation he is the media, with 226 million X followers.
Variations on that playbook that’s now far common, being a communicator is essential to the job. It’s like knowing your way around a P&L. The notion of outsourcing that will increasingly look antiquated and a massive liability.
Most of the leading CEOs in tech are media figures of sorts. It’s now seen as natural for Stripe’s CEO to devote time to hosting a podcast while also running a company that boasts it handles 3% of global GDP.
This reflects how politics are done now. Trump’s administration is filled with content creator types, whether a former cable news host in charge of the Pentagon or a podcasters running the FBI or a homeland security secretary who is akin to an influencer.
David Sacks joined the government and has turned the All-In podcast into an administration mouthpiece. It’s hard to describe it as anything other than regime media, complete with a fawning tour of the gold leaf overhaul of the Oval Office. Sadly Jason’s invitation was again lost.
In a previous time, say five years ago, Sacks would need to pick a lane. No longer. His media operation is leverage not a liability.
Kirk himself understood this, as his media operation was the heart of his political operation. That was on display as his massive memorial service combined a remembrance with a religious revival and a red meat political rally. Media figures like Benny Johnson and Tucker Carlson participated along with several media focused officials. Erika Kirk herself is a podcaster who also runs a faith-based streetwear brand. She was comforted by a former reality TV star turned president who ran the beauty pageant operation that awarded Kirk the title of Miss Arizona. The gathering itself was less memorial and more live media activation, complete with pyrotechnics and a guy hauling a giant wooden cross on training wheels. It all calls to mind the meme that the European mind cannot comprehend.
I see the go-direct strategy as a critical facet of how companies navigate the Information Space. In 1982, Burke could go on 20/20 and reach 20 million Americans, a broad swathe of what was then a population of only 230 million, through the trusted voices of Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters. Now, it’s better to have your own media than to rely on intermediaries that have diminished influence.
Lulu Meservey is a leading proponent of this critical shift to modernize communications strategy. In many ways, this is a shift in power from marketing to communications, as comms is more human and marketing is more institutional.
Tech is also seeing the development of friendly platforms, aka safe spaces, that are reliable outlets to get an unmediated message across. Meta turned to TBPN to amplify its glitchy rollout of new augmented reality glasses, for instance. The entire vibe of TBPN, and I don’t mean this derisively, is optimistic and pro-tech. They’re not going to harp repeatedly on privacy.
This gets particularly important in dealing with government officials and “influentials.” The rapid growth of the DC media market is largely on the back of public affairs budgets. Politico, Axios, Semafor, Puck and others are all jockeying for these budgets. Axios CRO Jacqueline Cameron and I recorded a podcast this week that dug into this market that should continue to grow in importance as business and government become even more entwined as America adopts French-style state-directed capitalism.
Some of this is likely unique to the Trump era. He’s a singular figure who has melds the sensibilities of tabloids with WWE and the more modern social media knife fights. But not all. The openness of the Information Space means businesses will devote more resources to proactively managing their images and reputations ahead of getting pulled into some kind of fracas. That will involve a web of owned media, friendly outlets and constant messaging that isn’t intermediated by institutional media, which remains important but is now alongside other Information Space power centers.
Send me a note with feedback by hitting reply.
For partnership information, see how we work with partners.