Neville has been ill and unable to record, so Shel is on his own in this episode (except for Dan York’s Tech Report). This shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode includes reports on rethinking thought leadership, maintaining “brand sovereignty” in the AI era, and whether hedging in your communication can serve a useful purpose. Dan’s report was recorded in Vienna, Austria, where AI was front and center at the 126th meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force. Dan also reports on Bluesky’s Attie AI feature, Instagram’s plans to charge for AI access, Beehiv’s new community feature, WordPress’s plans for version 7.1, and some UK social media regulatory updates.

Links from this episode:

Links from Dan York’s Tech Report

The next monthly, long-form episode of FIR is tentatively scheduled to drop on Monday, August 24.

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 fircomments@gmail.com.

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. 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:

Shel Holtz

It’s an unusual FIR episode today, with just me and three reports for this long-form installment.

Thought leadership isn’t what it used to be—or at least it shouldn’t be what it used to be. With AI summaries increasingly becoming the way people get the information they’re looking for, how do you maintain your brand’s sovereignty over the information that gets shared about it?

And do you hedge in your communications? There’s actually research into whether hedging is a good or a bad thing.

That’s what’s coming your way in this shorter-than-usual monthly long-form episode of For Immediate Release.

Hi, everybody, and welcome to episode number 523 of For Immediate Release. I’m Shel Holtz in Concord, California. This is our monthly long-form episode for July 2026, and I am on my own.

You may have noticed that we didn’t post a short midweek episode last week. Neville has been quite ill, with an infection in his chest and some other issues, some of them related to the ridiculously intense heat they have been suffering in England. It has kept him from being able to record.

He is planning a trip to the U.S.—here to the Bay Area, in fact. We are scheduled to have lunch on my birthday while he’s here, and right now he is focused on doing everything his doctor has told him to do so he can make that trip. That’s a decision I fully support.

It has been way too long since Neville and I have seen each other face to face in the same room. I am really, really looking forward to it. I hope you’ll join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.

Rather than skip this episode, I’ve decided to do it on my own. We used to do this fairly routinely back in the day, when both of us were full-time consultants and traveled a lot to meet with clients.

Frequently, one of us wouldn’t be available on the day we were recording. The other would record solo, or occasionally, if I had enough notice, I would find a guest co-host.

But today, you get just me.

At this point, we usually start with Neville providing a wrap-up of the episodes we’ve recorded since our last monthly long-form installment. I will take that on, along with a comment or two we have received related to those episodes.

Episode 520 was our long-form episode for June. It covered the PR meltdown that was going on among the big AI frontier labs.

There were five other topics, including one about Wowcher, a U.K. coupon company that sent an email with a promotional statement that upset just about everybody.

It was related to a young child who had been picked up and put into a crocodile enclosure and was in critical condition, the last I heard. Wowcher’s email said, “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.”

Yes, if you didn’t hear the episode and you’re hearing this for the first time, this is not a joke. This is not The Onion. This was a real promotional message from the company, and it got hammered over it.

Tim Sutton left a comment saying:

“Your closing line is the whole thing, Shel. The ‘AI approved it’ defense itself is never enough. An approval step is not bureaucracy. It’s where a human asks the question no machine thinks to ask: How does this read on the worst possible day? Strip it out to move faster, and you have not saved time; you have removed the brake. I have seen the aftermath.”

Episode 521 focused on Ford rehiring people it had previously let go, ostensibly because AI would be able to do their jobs. AI was not able to do their jobs.

Rick Segal found it interesting that Microsoft, his alma mater from the 1990s, had decided to let the graybeards and their institutional knowledge walk out the door through early retirement rather than undertake the hard-core and honest “Oops, we overhired” cuts.

The decades of knowledge walking out Redmond’s door, he said, are going to be felt eventually.

Eric Carroll replied to Rick, saying:

“They will pay for replacing expertise with engines of mass satisficing. Just as you say, how long will the blast take to propagate? From what I am hearing and seeing, the return on misinvestment is way faster than I expected.”

Episode 522 was about Podcasting 2.0, a new ...