Hey bestie,

Happy Juneteenth! 🖤 Let’s group chat. 👇

🤖 RIP Hard Fork: May I present exhibit #3023 in the case new media is media. Kevin Roose is officially leaving the New York Times to start something new with longtime podcast co-host and OG indie journalist Casey Newton. Details are sparse, but I’m just glad this hilarious duo is not breaking up.

💼 Comms owns what? Lots of discussion (from Parry Headrick, Greg Swan, and Scott Dobroski to name a few) lately about who owns what in comms. I want to hear from you: what does the comms team of 2030 look like? (And how many roles are robots?) Plz reply. 🙏

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Psst: When I was last in-house, I oversaw comms (PR, corp, internal, exec) plus a host of traditionally marketing functions (social, influencer, celebrity, brand, activations). This is the genesis for my recommending comms owns "earned attention." Yes, some is paid, but the idea is earning trust inside the scroll, not buying it on the ad margins. Reply to tell me how your team is structured, or how you wish it were.

🧚 Fable flaw: Thoughts and prayers for Anthropic's comms team. They dropped Fable 5 (basically Mythos made safe for the public) and I didn't even get to try this apparently incredibly capable new model before the US government put the kibosh on it. While the launch blog says some version of "safe" 38 times, the White House said nah. Totally not related to the ongoing “supply chain risk” fight. Anthropic did not hold back in their statement, making it worth the read. This part stands out:

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“As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.” [emphasis added]

Team Claude dialing up the spice-o-meter 🌶️

⛵ Speaking of spice: Person Familiar's Jim Prosser penned a piece ahead of Cannes calling out PR agencies for vague, unquantified AI ROI and not-so-subtly insinuating that pointed questions to agency leaders will have them pissing their white linen Cannes pants. The content we deserve. Which has me thinking: has AI given YOU any of its promised time back?

🎙 Spotlight on… me?! Thank you to Comms Bestie Day cofounder and my real comms BFF Meredith Klein for featuring me in Meredith & The Media, annnnnnd for letting me say things like "in the boardroom and to the bestie group chat” and “practical, tactical, and immediately applicable” in more places out loud.

🎉 One for the road: Happy Comms Bestie Day! Meredith and I LOVED seeing all the posts from around the world of folks tagging their besties and sharing the love. We're already scheming for 2027's edition… stay tuned!

Closed out Comms Bestie Day with an Off the Record member meetup in NYC. Thank you to our sponsor, Muck Rack!

Chat soon,
Gab Ferree
Founder & Your Comms BFF, Off the Record

PS: Last week’s most-clicked was Sarah Evans’ AI PR tools.

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