Episode description:

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.

 

Transcript

Eric (00:01.464)
Brett Farmiloe, welcome to In Reality.

Brett Farmiloe (00:03.933)
Thanks for having me.

Eric (00:06.274)
Brett, you’re the founder and CEO of Featured, which is a PR firm, and you recently acquired the decades-old, fondly remembered Help a Reporter Out. All of us journalists remember that sort of two-sided marketplace for matching experts with journalists. So tell us what Featured does and how Help a Reporter Out, HERO, adds to the company’s mission.

Brett Farmiloe (00:30.579)
Yep. So Featured is an AI for PR platform. So we help users essentially find media opportunities and submit pitches. So that’s for podcasts, byline articles, journalist requests, or just pitching journalists. And HARO is a three times a day email newsletter that connects journalists with sources. So a journalist puts out a request. Three times a day, we’ll group all those requests into an email newsletter, send that out to subscribers, and then if people could be helpful, they could get in touch with the journalist directly.

Eric (00:59.726)
Okay, all right, good. Let’s talk about Harrow first, just because it is something that everyone in my profession remembers. It failed. So you sort of bought it from it in a sort of distressed state because it had a collapse in trust. It didn’t really survive the AI era. Both sides were flooded with AI-generated spam. Journalists’ requests came from…

SEO enthusiasts and replies came from spam and AI generated pitches. So that seems like a structural problem. AI has not gone away. Why do you think you’ve solved that?

Brett Farmiloe (01:43.751)
Yeah, I think it’s just taking a different approach. So one, it’s actually putting the resources behind it to manage it. So I think that, you know, not to to paint a picture, but I think that just the economics of Harrow and a company that’s a, know, multi-billion dollar company, it just wasn’t on the radar to really put resources behind it, which is why, you know, we ended up with it. So in terms of the

Eric (02:07.394)
And that multi-billion dollar company that owned it before was Cision, correct?

Brett Farmiloe (02:11.089)
Yep, that’s correct. in terms of why it worked originally, it was a one-man show and it was economically important and then it got acquired and then it got acquired again and ultimately just didn’t become something of importance. So for us, when we acquired it and revived it, was, you’re right, trust and quality is everything for Harrow to work out. It’s an email to a journalist inbox from a source who could be helpful.

There’s a lot of things that go wrong there. And so the approach that we’ve taken to restore quality and trust is really three things. It’s AI detection. So we run AI detection on every single pitch. It’s community reporting. So journalists and sources could both flag bad actors in the platform. And then there’s a lot of different stuff in the middle that we’ve implemented to detect any kind of activity that wouldn’t be welcome or helpful for both sides.

Eric (03:04.75)
Is there some kind of penalty for misbehaving on heroin?

Brett Farmiloe (03:08.227)
Yeah, so the business model is great because it’s newsletter ad supported. So if there’s any sort of bad acting that happens on the platform, it’s just a one-click ban forever. We’ve banned over 3,000 accounts since we’ve revived it. So it’s not like we’ve got money on the line to keep people happy and slap them on the wrist. It’s literally just banned. And we have a lot of apology emails in our inbox.

which aren’t very helpful.

Eric (03:39.406)
You mentioned that you use AI detection, presumably to check to make sure the pitches are not AI generated or other kinds of slop. But journalists still have to vet the experts, right? So are you pushing the problem onto a profession, a resource that is now strained in a way it wasn’t in the early days of Arrow? Newsrooms are all shrunk. Every sort of institution you can think of from

Local news to national news is the newsrooms are terribly shrunk. How do you handle that?

Brett Farmiloe (04:16.787)
Yeah, so there’s a couple things. So I’ll throw out a couple of stats in terms of painting the picture of how AI is happening on Harrow. So number one, 21 % of all pitches that we receive via Harrow are completely AI generated. On the other side, with journalists, about 35 % of journalists opt out of receiving AI pitches entirely. So we’ve got a little checkbox that’s not checked by default that journalists are able to check. And then we will not send those 100 % AI generated pitches over to their inbox.

And so on both sides, we’re seeing hyperactivity of AI usage and then journalists actively opting out from that. So that’s interesting because to your question of like, okay, now are you pushing even more work onto the journalists at a time where they need to do more with less, that first filter is a really good baseline to now spare them from some work. So beyond that, it’s doing stuff like profile verification because we own featured and opting

and have operated that for a number of years. We’ve got a pretty good footprint in terms of expert sources and how that cross-matches to things like LinkedIn. So there’s a lot of different things that we could do to try to make it so that when a journalist does get a harrow pitch, it’s something that’s actually gonna be helpful.

Eric (05:30.785)
Okay, all right, let’s talk about featured as well. And my interest here is in your perspective as a player in today’s information ecosystem and how it looks to you. We’ve covered it in reality a lot of how it looks from the point of view of the profession or academics who study the information ecosystem. But PR has always been a player and I’m just curious about the motivations

on either side of the equation and how they’ve changed because of social media, because of AI. So the tagline it featured is that everyone’s an expert at something, which is hard to argue with, I suppose. And the business is connecting paying clients with media placement. How do you define an expert in your ecosystem? Is it someone with genuine knowledge or someone with a PR budget?

Brett Farmiloe (06:27.219)
Yeah, so just to correct, the model, it’s a freemium model. So about 95 % of all of our experts who are on the platform submitting queries and submitting answers to journalists’ questions aren’t paying us. So the model is for the other 5 % PR agencies, in-house marketing teams, kind of do-it-yourself small business owners, those are the folks who pay us subscriptions to submit more. And in terms of the motivations, it’s a really interesting time in 2026 where

AI visibility is probably the utmost importance for a lot of PR agencies is how do you get featured in LLMs. And so because media, media is essentially one of those signals that helps develop that visibility, that’s why we’re seeing a big push to featured and usage of our platform.

Eric (07:12.928)
OK. I am curious about that. One of the motivations for becoming an expert on Harrow or on Featured was backlinks. so you would, if you’re quoted, your name would be linked or your website would be linked or your institution, whatever. That would improve your credibility on search engines and build your business.

the sort of Google search flywheel would start to operate in your, to your advantage. Now, when so many people are using AI for search, it’s a different model. How does that change your business and how things work?

Brett Farmiloe (08:00.635)
Yeah, so I think that to your point, AI is the new front page. PR used to get you on the front page of newspapers. Backlinks used to get you on the front page of Google. And now you have a variety of ways to get you on the front page of AI. The variety of ways is confusing. It is so confusing for your standard small business owner that knows they want to be in front of customers. They have no idea how to do it. And so I think that the thing that we’re out to really

demystify or make easier for those folks is to your point, we believe everyone is an expert in something. Everyone’s got meaningful knowledge to share. What’s the platform and opportunity that you can connect someone to so that they could share their knowledge in meaningful ways? And so for us, it’s about how do we now take all of these different media opportunities, whether that’s being on a podcast, whether that’s submitting an answer to a journalist request, and how do we make that really easy for experts and streamlined? And so

The time that’s being spent is really around the identification of that. So if you go a couple levels deeper from PR agencies to the actual source that wants to share knowledge, that person’s really confused. That person is really confused about what’s the right opportunity for them. And so it’s about putting it in front of them, making it really easy for them to submit. And that’s how we can essentially unlock more knowledge for journalists who need it.

Eric (09:26.006)
OK. I want to talk about native advertising, custom content, however you want to define that term, which is part of featured business and was part of what we did at Inc. and Fast Company as well. But I remember the rise of that earlier in my career. And there was considerable effort, well, I should say variable effort, depending on the institution, to

make it clear that content was labeled differently from editorially produced content. The research shows, that people tend to look past those labels. And sometimes, frankly, the labels are generically named enough that they could be misleading. In your opinion, what do readers think they’re reading when they look at that kind of content?

Brett Farmiloe (10:23.175)
Think big.

Eric (10:23.434)
And just to be clear for definition, the native advertising custom content we’re talked about is content that is basically paid for placement. it comes from someone who has particular expertise or a company that has particular expertise that’s assumed to be of interest to the readers of that newsroom.

Brett Farmiloe (10:41.681)
Yeah, I think that we’ve tried out sponsored content in the past. It’s something that we don’t engage with anymore because of that label that readers see and they’re like, this is sponsored content. I’m going to just skip over this. I think it works for a number of different publications because obviously there’s a viable business there and it’s about if you do get that placement sponsored or not, what do you do with it to amplify it? And I think a lot of businesses are great of amplifying that and sales efforts and you

included in the logo on their about page, things like that. But for us, think that readers didn’t really gravitate to it. We didn’t see a great ROI from it. So it’s not something that we typically engage with.

Eric (11:23.862)
I see. OK, and so what takes its place?

Brett Farmiloe (11:26.555)
So what takes its place is getting journalists to make requests. What stories are they working on? The other big trend that we’re seeing is that publications are more open than ever for experts to contribute content. And so that opens the door for someone like us to essentially say, hey, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of experts across a variety of different beats. What are the topics that your readers are most interested in? And then how can we connect those topics with content that our community can create?

And so then it’s entering into the door and saying, okay, earning the editor’s trust to say, okay, here’s this different source. Here’s a full length article that that source has written. Is this a good fit according to all of those editorial requirements? So that’s kind of what’s taken its place. And that’s a pretty cool shift in my opinion.

Eric (12:12.718)
You’ve noted earlier on that most of the people who using your platform are using it for free. So you can upgrade. It’s a freemium model and you can upgrade to sort of more exposure. In the kind of connection that you’ve just described, what is the source of revenue for featured?

Brett Farmiloe (12:35.143)
So it’s basically making a limited number of opportunities available. So if they want to author one article a month, great. We’re happy to facilitate that connection. But if you want to submit four articles a month, then great. We have a $19 a month subscription that you could subscribe to. And that’s the economic model. So people are essentially paying for access to more and more opportunities.

Eric (12:59.138)
That’s it, okay. You mentioned earlier sort of in the evolution of placement that you used PR to get on the front page of a newspaper. And it is true definitely that PR firms traditionally focused on legacy media to get their customers recognized. And the more clout you could give the clients the better for your business. Now that

legacy media is losing its luster, judging from the levels of trust it has with the public and levels of business success or failure, and competition from social media and influencers and everything is all well known. From your point of view, what’s the role of legacy media in the information ecosystem seen from your point of view as a way to build

expertise or recognition for your clients and how do you judge that against new media, independent social media influencers and so on.

Brett Farmiloe (14:06.321)
This is where it gets really nuanced. think that some of the things that I’ve seen in regards to LLMs is like, what’s really hard to replicate? That’s why backlinks worked for 25 years because it was really hard to replicate. with traditional media, these are powerful outlets that it’s still relatively hard to get cited in. So I think it depends on the business. If you’re going to go out and essentially do a strategy creation or an audit,

of what LLMs are citing in your space. Are tier one outlets part of that mix? Or is it really like Reddit sub threads or sub communities and they’re citing those things? So I think it really depends on who the business is, what the objective is, but certainly, tier one outlets, because they’re so hard to replicate that brand authority, I think that you’re gonna see those looked upon favorably within LLMs.

Eric (14:37.624)
Mm-hmm.

Brett Farmiloe (15:02.257)
depending on what’s going on behind the scenes and what LLMs are knowing. Behind the scenes is, do they have a deal with the LLM? Is there a direct monetary relationship between the two and things like that?

Eric (15:16.206)
Is that a factor in LLM’s, you know, recommending clients or regular outlets?

Brett Farmiloe (15:22.131)
I would say absolutely. You got to follow the money. You look at why is Reddit the most cited site on chat GBT? Follow the money. They’ve got a direct deal. to have a good ROI on that partnership, you got to be able to display that and test that credibility to see if it’s worth renewing that partnership.

Eric (15:25.944)
Mm-hmm.

Eric (15:47.765)
interesting. And is that an association you’re making just because it seems to make sense, or is there evidence that actually that that is built into the algorithms?

Brett Farmiloe (15:58.612)
A little both. I’m an auditor by nature, so former accountant looking at the numbers. I’ve read the 10K of Reddit and looked at the monetary stream when they went public. And that’s a pretty significant deal for them. And then you just look at, what are all these reports citing? And it’s like Reddit’s the number one cited site on a chat GPT. It’s not too hard to put.

Eric (16:02.904)
Uh-huh.

Brett Farmiloe (16:27.965)
put those two together.

Eric (16:29.632)
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. The art of search engine optimization was always trying to penetrate these opaque algorithms that drove prioritization on SEO. Is artificial intelligence a harder algorithm to penetrate?

Brett Farmiloe (16:50.513)
Yeah, it’s like almost an impossible algorithm at this point to penetrate where you listen to some of these people who are building these models and even they’re admitting that they have no idea how it’s working and what’s going on. You add that to the complexity of it, to the personalization of how content’s being displayed on these LLMs. Everything from…

an applied AI company to the actual model builders to now some of these news organizations that are adopting personalized content, it’s getting more more fragmented and more and more nuanced. It’s not as simple as matching a keyword and then having content to match that keyword. In hindsight, that’s a really, really simple way of going about it. Whereas now it’s like, how is a marketer even supposed to measure any kind of analytics of what’s happening within these platforms?

Eric (17:44.61)
What do you tell your clients about that?

Brett Farmiloe (17:48.166)
It’s, mean, I think that what I’m hearing in the, in the space and what I’m seeing a lot of marketers talk about is, look, we’re giving this a six month thing. We’re trying stuff. We’re seeing what works. We’re doubling down on the stuff that does work and we’re going to see if it continues to work in the next six months. So, the, the mantra that I hear over and over and over in the space is that it’s early. It really is. And I think that a marketer, the best thing that they could do is just get into the game and, and see what works.

Eric (18:18.99)
huh. Interesting. Well, there is a lot to be learned in the years ahead before we are all working for the AI agents ourselves. You’re in the business of shaping how people and companies show up and how they’re perceived by consumers and media. So let’s ask to turn it around on you. What’s the story that you want told?

about Featured and Harrow for a broad-based media audience. How would you like the readers of, the listeners and audience for in reality to understand the work you’re doing and the role you’re playing in this new ecosystem?

Brett Farmiloe (19:03.879)
Yeah, I think it’s different for Featured and from Herro. And the singular thread is that it’s really important to share knowledge. And the more knowledge that you share, the more visibility that you can get online and the more visible that you are ultimately to your customers. So that’s the important thing of why share knowledge and why you should do it. For me, this origin story goes all the way back to when I was just exiting college and didn’t know that auto-dating was the path for me. And I hopped in an RV and I…

I cruised around the country for four months with a couple buddies and interviewed 300 people about their career paths and documented all those stories on the Career Education website for other college students to learn from. That was like 17 years ago. The thing that I learned from 300 interviews is that everyone needs a meaningful outlet to share their expertise. Why else would 300 people sit down with four crazy college kids in an RV and talk with them for an hour? It’s because people want the microphone. They can’t all be on the…

in reality podcast and I think it’s really important to have a meaningful outlet to share and featured in her are great outlets to share that knowledge.

Eric (20:05.302)
So you’re catering to people’s desire to be seen, as well as the need of people in the journalistic profession to fill those pages to feed the beast.

Brett Farmiloe (20:16.401)
Yeah. And it’s, it’s also just, you need customers, like you need to be visible in front of your customers. And I think that’s probably one of the more interesting storylines of, all of this is that AI is making it easier than ever to, build and launch products and businesses. And you’re seeing this trend of, of entrepreneurs now have many different micro businesses. Now that just means there’s more competition online. Like how do you ultimately get your dot AI website to have traffic and have people sign up and things like that.

Really sometimes the best asset that you have working for your business is yourself.

Eric (20:51.726)
Well, let’s leave it there. Brett, thank you for joining us on In Reality and helping us understand the role that you’re playing in this fast-changing media ecosystem.

Brett Farmiloe (21:02.419)
Yeah, thanks for having me on, Eric.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: May 29 2026

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