A former ABC News correspondent explains why AI didn't kill earned media — it made it the asset most founders are ignoring. T.J. Winick on how ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity now decide how you're described, the reporter's playbook for getting covered, and how to turn a crisis around in a single news cycle.

SHOW NOTES

For twenty years, T.J. Winick built stories from the inside — six of them as a correspondent for ABC News. Now he helps founders survive the same machine he used to run.

His argument in this episode cuts against the grain: AI didn't make earned media less important. It made it the asset most founders are ignoring at exactly the wrong moment. For decades, being found meant ranking on Google — SEO, a clean website, owned channels, with press coverage treated as a bonus on top. That's flipped. The people you want are now asking ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity the questions they used to type into a search bar, and those tools don't crawl your website or read your press release. They synthesize answers from published, credible, third-party coverage — which is earned media, and it's now the raw material AI uses to describe you to the world. T.J. calls it GEO: generative engine optimization.

From there, he opens the reporter's playbook from the other side of the desk — why a story that can't answer "why should anyone care?" in the first ten seconds dies on the spot, how to build a hook reporters can't ignore, and why authenticity beats polish every time. We get into the crisis case study at the heart of his book — the employee fired for using a weapon against a robber — and what it takes to turn a story like that around without spinning. We close on how any founder can become a genuine thought leader, and exactly how to vet and hire the right PR partner.

In this episode:

• Why AI search made earned media more valuable, not less (GEO explained)
• The client who moved a $20K/month Google Ads budget into PR — and why
• How reporters actually choose stories in the 10 a.m. editorial meeting
• The hook: timeliness, tension, data, and finding a "real person"
• The rule of seven and building an omni-channel narrative
• Newsjacking with a contrarian take to get picked up fast
• A crisis case study on empathy, truth, and the one-news-cycle goal
• How to find, vet, and hire the right PR partner

About the guest: T.J. Winick is the founder of Essex Strategies, a Boston-based strategic and crisis communications firm, and the author of Reputation Capital: How to Navigate Crises and Protect Your Greatest Asset (Berrett-Koehler), winner of a 2023 Independent Publisher Book Award. Before crossing over, he spent two decades in broadcast news, including as a correspondent for ABC News across Nightline, World News, and Good Morning America.

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🌐 essexstrategies.com
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