FIR #444: Preparing for Trump 2.0

The FIR Podcast Network Everything Feed

Media outlets around the world — and in particular in the U.S. — are strategizing how to cover the incoming Trump Administration. Some are even planning to shift their focus to more soft news in order to retain readers and avoid drawing the president’s ire. We look at the implications for the media relations industry in this short midweek episode.

Links from this episode:

• How publishers are strategizing for a second Trump administration: softer news and more social media
• The Trump to-do list: How communicators are getting ready for the MAGA takeover
• Communicating Successfully Amid Political and Social Dissent

---

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR will drop on Monday, January 27.

We host a Communicators Zoom Chat most Thursdays at 1 p.m. ET. To obtain the credentials needed to participate, contact Shel or Neville directly, request them in our Facebook group, or email [e-mail].

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

You can find the stories from which Shel’s FIR content is selected at Shel’s Link Blog. Shel has started a metaverse-focused Flipboard magazine. You can catch up with both co-hosts on Neville’s blog and Shel’s blog.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this podcast are Shel’s and Neville’s and do not reflect the views of their employers and/or clients.

---

Raw transcript:

Hi everybody, and welcome to episode number 444 4 4 4 of four immediate release. I’m Shell Holtz. And I’m Neville Hobson As we record this episode on the 8th of January. It’s just under two weeks until Donald Trump prepare assumes the US presidency. That’s 20th of January is the inauguration day.
That’ll be a second term for him. We’ve got a story about news publishers that face the challenges of unpredictability and polarization. These realities necessitate strategic shifts to adapt to a fast-paced, erratic political environment for US-based news publishers. The challenges of covering Trump’s second term are particularly acute.
The fast-paced, unpredictable nature of his administration will require editorial agility as well as innovative strategies to sustain engagement in a politically charged environment. However, the implications of a second Trump [00:01:00] administration extend far beyond US borders capturing the attention of publishers and communicators worldwide.
We’ll explore this topic right after this message.
From Europe to Asia, global audiences are deeply invested in the ripple effects of American policies and political rhetoric on international markets, diplomacy and cultural trends. International publishers such as the BBC and the Independent, are recalibrating their strategies to engage North American audiences.
While communicators and multinational corporations are preparing for how Trump’s leadership might shape global narratives. Requiring alignment across diverse regions and stakeholders for publishers. According to a report by Digiday this week, the focus is twofold, balancing hard news coverage with softer lifestyle oriented content and engaging audiences more deeply through social media and interactive platforms.
Publishers like Newsweek and the Independent are prioritizing lifestyle content, not [00:02:00] only to attract diverse audiences, but also to create safer advertising spaces amidst a politically charged landscape. Enhanced social media monitoring and staffing changes reflect the need to keep pace with Trump’s activity patterns, particularly on platforms like Truth, social, and X tools like polls.
Ask me anything. Sessions and comment management are being deployed to foster community interaction while gathering valuable first party data. At the same time, publishers are grappling with the toll of covering a Trump led news cycle. The relentless nature of his previous term was described as a gushing river of news prompting concerns about staff burnout and long-term sustainability.
Despite these challenges, the potential for increased readership and revenue from a busy news cycle remains a motivating factor with publishers seeing opportunities in the heightened public attention that Trump presidency typically generates. On the other side of the communications fence, the emphasis for corporate communicators lies in preparing for Trump’s hallmark [00:03:00] unpredictability now amplified by the controversial team he’s assembling.
Notably, Elon Musk’s significant influence within this new administration has already introduced an unprecedented dynamic. Musk is known for his polarizing public persona and unfiltered approach to communication and his involvement as a layer of complexity that communicators have never faced in a government context.
This combination of leadership styles demands rapid response capabilities, and scenario planning At an unparalleled level, teams must ensure messaging, clarity, and internet. Sorry. An internal alignment to navigate sudden shifts in public discourse with misinformation, polarizing policies and unconventional decision making, likely to dominate the agenda, proactive communication strategies and robust risk mitigation plans.
Are essential to maintain credibility and public trust in this uncharted environment. The shared challenges of unpredictability and audience polarization highlight the importance of adaptability [00:04:00] across both sectors. For publishers, this means finding a balance between hard news and softer content to attract readers and advertisers alike.
For communicators, it involves crafting agile strategies that enable swift. Pivots while maintaining coherence and transparency. Both sectors must also address the human cost of this rapid pace, safeguarding the wellbeing of staff as they navigate the demands of a divisive and volatile political landscape.
To restate what I said earlier, this is the global picture. In essence, the coming months will test the resilience and creativity of publishers and communicators alike. Success will depend on their ability to stay nimble, engage their audiences meaningfully, and weather the unique pressures of covering and responding to a Trump presidency.
And let’s also mention the news this week about meta and its fact-checking overhaul on its social networks to replace content moderators with community notes similar to X. None of this is a stroll in the park shell for anybody. Absolutely not. And I think the move by [00:05:00] and Mark Zuckerberg is emblematic of what we’re seeing.
From a number of different types of media that are, let’s face it, running scared. On the newspaper side, you have the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post refusing to make presidential endorsements. Their editorial teams wanted to, the publishers, the owners, and that includes Jeff Bezos Amazon’s founder.
Chairman of the board, who’s the owner of the Washington Post said, we’re not going to make a presidential endorsement because clearly they were gonna invoice endorse Kamala Harris. And you also had the Washington Post recently experienced the departure of a very popular political cartoonist. When the editor in chief declined to run one of her cartoons, for the first time ever, the cartoon showed Jeff Bezos kneeling at the feet of.
Donald Trump and she said that kind of, I don’t remember her exact words, but the [00:06:00] spirit of it was that the cowardice displayed here is something she didn’t wanna be part of. Now the editor said, no, it wasn’t about that. It was the fact that we’ve done two reports on this and another one coming up and we just didn’t wanna overdo it.
But that’s suspicious. To me. So I think you have a lot of media that are proactively capitulating and abdicating their responsibility to report accurately or as they would with any other president in office. The other side of this is that you have Trump suing media. And this is a way to get around the First Amendment if somebody says something you don’t like.
The first real experience we had with that wasn’t Trump, it was Peter Thiel suing Gawker out of existence over, I remember that, their publication. But now you have Trump just got a $15 million settlement from A, B, CA, B. C can afford it. But now he has filed a lawsuit against the Des Moines Register [00:07:00] over the.
Poll that they ran. This is a highly lauded poll. In fact, when they talk about this particular presidential poll, they say it is one of the most highly regarded in the entire country. It was wrong. Most of the polls were wrong. Most of the polls were wrong four years ago. There are reasons that the polls are not as accurate as they used to be, that we could get into another time if we ever do an episode about polling and research.
But he’s suing over the fact that it. Reported that Harris was going to win in Iowa. She did not. So you have this ability to sue media out of existence and put an end to that kind of reporting. Now you consider the fact that what you’re seeing out of Trump and his followers in the Republican party.
Is an effort to rewrite history, and this gets to be very dangerous. When I talk about rewriting history, the most obvious example is recasting. What happened on January 6th, [00:08:00] 2020 as a Day of love, and. Shoving to the side and trying to eliminate from the public consciousness the fact that 20 police officers were, I think that number may be wrong, but a lot of the Capitol police were injured, five died.
Yeah. This was a violent assault that a lot of those people were carrying weapons and they’re rewriting that history. And if we don’t have the newspapers to report the facts and the other media. There’s going to be some serious issues that will follow. Yeah I think therein lies one of the big issues, frankly, which is the facts according to who.
The, you know the phrase, there’s never a single version of the truth. Whose version of the truth are you gonna listen to? There are now in light of these changes with this president coming in the social network he owns plus the one that Musk owns really causing interference with that.
But there’s some interesting aspects to this. According to Dig Day’s report in terms of how some of the mainstream [00:09:00] media are planning to report the news and engage with their audiences. And this I found most interesting. For instance, they give an analysis here from one of the publications that talks about.
The tension they give to Trump on social networks, they’re noting he’s typically active when the journalists are not. Night journalists are not there. The people who are monitoring according to Digiday tend to be the more junior, less experienced people. So they need to shift that around to, to be able to respond or plan for how to respond to Trump when he is up at 2:00 AM.
Ranting that is part of the landscape. The guy, this is what the guy does. And I would imagine others will be doing similar. Newsweek is quoted as saying that what they’re planning to do with Trump being elected is I. Have more interactivity with their readership on social networks and in the comments to their site.
They’ve been building that up a bit. They talk that they say they’ve expanded their social team. They hired a community manager in October to oversee onsite [00:10:00] engagement, to manage comments and to conduct reader polls. So that kind of thing is being ramped up quite significantly. They say Newsweek receives an average of eight to 10,000 comments.
Every single day across all its content. So they’re gonna leverage the engagement with those commenters more than they have done in the past. So that’s I guess to me that means that’s one way of building better connections with your audience and maybe they’ll listen to you more and repeat your side of the story rather than what the other guys are gonna be doing all the time.
So that’s interesting. I think also. Newsweek, the independent, the uk newspaper that has a strong focus on North America and the Huffington Post as well, told Digiday they’re gonna focus on softer, more lifestyle focused news content in 2025. And they say that this strategy can help boost traffic.
So many days. The discovery, the majority of their audience comes from Google Discover according to Newsweek. And that platform favors increasingly softer [00:11:00] lifestyle and consumer focused content. And Digiday notes. He’s not the only one coming to that conclusion. So rather than simply hard news reporting, they’re going to focus on stuff that I guess adds comfort to the readers in the face of all the disruption that’s likely to be the case.
That’s a really interesting approach. I wonder what. Communicators are gonna think of that in terms of what they’re planning in using the mainstream media and their engagement with journalists, et cetera. What do you think about that, Sean? Think that we as communicators need to seriously think about what’s going on.
In the media. Media in terms of our relationships with them, if they’re doing softer news in order to gin up subscriptions and make money as opposed to fulfill their obligations as journalists. And let’s say you are a PR person working representing an organization that. Attacked and the attack against you [00:12:00] a political one may not be justified.
It may not be based in fact it’s hard to. Disprove a negative though, right? Or to prove a negative that we didn’t do this, we’re not this and the relationships that we have built up with the media in the past I don’t know how well those serve us if these publications are shifting their emphasis away from this kind of reporting to fluff as I would call it.
So yeah, I, I think as we’re. Proactively and I’m hopeful that organizations are proactively developing their crisis plans for this. Even if you have differentiated. Clearly those things that you will engage in publicly and those things where you are going to remain silent. You should be considering your vulner vulnerabilities.
Where might we be attacked by somebody from the other side of the political spectrum and what crisis plans can we put in place in order to [00:13:00] address those? If the media is shifting its emphasis away from this kind of coverage. We need to find other ways to get those messages out, whether it’s getting onto podcasts or doing TikTok.
Clips or, flooding blue sky and threads and the like. I don’t know. This is something I’m going to be thinking seriously about. I don’t suspect the organization I work for is gonna be subject to much of this. It’s just not the nature of the organization. But on the other hand, I don’t wanna be blindsided either.
Yeah. So I am gonna put together a group from our legal and HR team to start thinking about these things and be ready if any of it, rolls down our way. Yeah I think there is a a clear and present risk of the environment changing so radically that it’s hard to plan for it when you’re not sure how it’s gonna change.
All you know is there are forces at play that will become official on the 20th of January, and my feeling [00:14:00] based on simply what I’m just observing others saying in the mainstream media in particular. It will be like a you know, a gushing river again. There’s a quote in Digiday piece about a large news publication not named the head of social there saying that the news cycle during the Biden administration compared to Trump’s administration in his first term was like a slow stream versus a gushing river.
So the tap is on. There’s this constant stream of stuff coming your way. How do you navigate that? And that’s where they then lead into. Another issue they need to be highly cognizant of is the risk of burnout by the journalists and other people who work for these publications. So you gotta take that into account as well.
I think it’s good for the business side of news according to this unnamed publication, but the people side, we are gonna have to watch that. They said, I think we’re all gonna have to take care of each other as journalists in this environment. And that’s actually a good, I think a good thing to recognize the reality of this is what’s coming.
Yeah. I was having this [00:15:00] conversation with somebody yesterday and I’ll, reveal if it’s not already clear. My, my personal political leanings here, which I try not to do, we, you wanna appeal to all communicators with FIR, not just those who agree with us politically. I. But I have been reading reports about people on the left who are checking out.
They are, they’re burned out, they’re distressed, and they’re not paying attention to the news and they’re not engaging politically. And it was Edmund Burke who said that all it takes for evil to succeed is for. Goodman to do nothing. And that’s what worries me. It worries me about burned out journalists.
It worries me about people who were politically active, who are throwing up their hands and giving up. So yeah, this is a source of concern for me. I was reading something interesting. This was in an article by Matt Purdue strategist at Magnitude Inc. This was in PR daily.
The Reagan [00:16:00] publication and he was writing about what corporations can do to prepare for this. This is something that we discussed briefly in our December monthly episode. Yeah. But he had some data here that I thought was really interesting. ’cause one of his first points was to lean on your employee resource groups.
These are groups representing, people within your organization who share commonalities. You could have a black employee resource group. You could have a queer employee resource group, a Hispanic, whatever it may be. He said 73% of companies use their ERGs to communicate internally on societal issues, but only 41% hold regular meetings between ERGs and leadership to talk about these issues.
And only 11% have ERG representation. On leadership groups that make decisions about these issues. These are not clubs for these folks to get together. They are called resource groups because they are supposed to be resources to the organization. And I absolutely think that the communicators [00:17:00] and organizations can help facilitate that.
And during these turbulent four years. That we’re looking at. I think we should be leaning on those ERGs and at least calling them in for consultation when issues arise that are related to what binds them. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think what all of this says to me certainly is whatever your role in an organization as a communicator or whatever, your role in a mainstream media company as a communicator you need to be utterly aware of the wave that’s coming.
Way collectively in terms of what we communicate, how we communicate indeed be being clear on who our audiences are and where they are now. It’s hard to define that better than that. All I know is simply is a wave of. Change coming and much of it depending on your outlook. I think for mine, certainly [00:18:00] it’s not good what I see developing and that’s coming our way and you need to be on the case particularly, but not, certainly not exclusively if you work in an organization or you’re in an industry sector or something.
That attracts controversy or is involved in an industry that doesn’t have great public support and is a target for people like Trump, for instance. So if you are in the I dunno, in the fossil fuel in, actually fossil fuels, they probably support that. But if you are in, wind farms or whatever it might be you better be ready for the kind of bad guys to be very active and using.
Methods of communication that are certainly beyond the norm that we’ve been used to. You can already see the trajectory of insults and bad language and just general reactions to people in a negative way that are commonplace across some social networks. Now, how long will it be before it’s.
Everywhere, particularly on Meta’s properties collectively, which a stat I read this morning said there are 3 billion [00:19:00] people in the world use meta social media properties every single day. So what happens if the the discourse on those just turns just awful, just like x Then everything is shifting and it seems that we might be headed down that road according to events here.
Unknown yet. So keep an eye on what’s going on. That’s what I see. Yeah. Without question. It’s important to monitor how the, this is all affecting the media that we rely on to communicate as well as to gather information. I’m gonna have to make a time code because I had something I wanted to Oh, I remember.
Okay. So where am I? 20, right around 20 minutes. Yep. We recorded our 20th anniversary show recently. We’ve been doing this for 20 years. 20 years. And I, one of these days there will be an AI tool where we can point it at FIR and it will say how many times in an episode we said we don’t talk politics here.
And [00:20:00] it’s, I think, telling how significant this challenge is that it has led us to talk exclusively in an episode about. Politics that this could have a significant impact on our businesses and our ability to engage with our stakeholders especially as our stakeholders. Reflecting society in the US in particular grow more po, more polarized?
No, it’s not a good forecast. She, but it’s it, looking at it PAs dispassionately. If I, if it’s possible to do that. This is probably one of the most interesting. Times we could be in as communicators. Set aside, this is about a curse. May you live an interesting times. Yeah, we got the curse of it, no question.
But we’re in it and we can help navigate it for others and be prepared. The boy counts. Be prepared. We need to be on the case. Absolutely. And before we go just a note to listeners on a completely different topic, Neville, you today posted our [00:21:00] interview with Martin Waxman. Yes. We spoke with Martin in just before Christmas, the week before Christmas.
Martin’s a digital communication strategist. He’s a teacher. He has LinkedIn training courses. He’s a speaker based in Toronto. And he was, as we mentioned in that conversation, a part of inside PR and, lots of stuff here on podcast with others, Joe Thornley, Jenny Dietrich, and David Jones.
We had a chance to talk to him about AI and public relations and there were revelations of that conversation, shall I thought. Martin, very articulate speaker. He certainly knows a lot and he’s able to talk through many of the topics related to public relations in a way that are very credible and really good to listen to.
So that was published today, as you noted. And it’s up there. If you’re not subscribed to the FIR interviews feed, it’s not on the FIR main feed, it’s the FIR interviews feed. We’ll do so you can easily find that on your favorite podcast app or on the [00:22:00] website. Yeah. Also, if you are listening to us on the Marketing Podcast Network, the FIR.
I interview Feed is not part of MPN, so you’ll have to head over to FIR podcast network.com or find FIR interviews on your podcast app and that will be a 30 for this episode of four immediate release.

The post FIR #444: Preparing for Trump 2.0 appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.