Hey bestie,
It’s the one-year anniversary of the first edition of the Comms Bestie Group Chat. Thanks for making this my favorite thread. Let’s celebrate 👇
🎉 Comms Bestie Day: We're making it a holiday, besties. Wednesday, June 17 is Comms Bestie Day, the very-real-and-not-at-all-made-up holiday to celebrate the people who get you through the days in this crazy career. To celebrate I'm teaming up with my comms bestie, Meredith Klein of Meredith & The Media. Join us on LinkedIn at 11:15am ET for a live where we spill comms bestie tea.
📰 Media disillusionment: I already shared my most practical, tactical, immediately applicable takeaways from Haymaker's SF Media Summit. Here's what I left out (because it's not tactical): there's a massive media disillusionment. The room went tense when pressed on the uncomfortable truth that plenty of solo Substack writers now rival traditional print on paid subs, readers, and clicks, yet many seem unwilling to accept or pivot. Interesting times, besties.
Side note: one the thing nobody discussed is AI's impact on media. Who’s thinking about solving the problem that AI gobbles up news to spit out answers (yay, PR drives business value!!) while simultaneously guts their traffic (eek). If you know an expert solving this Catch-22, let me know.
🛠️ AI for Comms Tools: GEO baddie Sarah Evans built 23 tools for comms pros and shared some of her favorites. (Psst… the GEO/AEO GPT, morning intelligence brief, and fractional AI chief of staff ones are free.)
💻 Vibe Code Comms: Speaking of building, I shared exactly how I used Lovable to build a new Off the Record member hub. Everything that scared me about Claude Code was easy to build in Lovable. I'd love to hear what you've vibe coded recently!
🚗 Quick hits to go:
Simon Hernandez-Arthur will be the next Axios Communicators writer.
Corporate Natalie serves (as usual) with her PR for AI Founders vid.
I heard there was some WSJ article talking about comms people being better business advisors? Would you look at that!
Big thank you to Muck Rack for sponsoring the Off the Record member mixer in SF this week. No thanks to Apple "eraser” for the bad editing job.
Chat soon,
Gab Ferree
Founder & Your Comms BFF, Off the Record
PS: Last week’s most-clicked was the Off the Record manifesto.
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