It’s become a giggle moment among my friends and me who started out in political media relations two decades or more ago. There comes a time every few months where we’re talking with an intern or junior staffer and someone will say, “You know why they call them clips right?” Knowing grins and eyes dart around the room as one of us says, “Because when we started out, we had to cut them out of newspapers with scissors.” The joke, of course, underlies just how completely different a world we live in today, as many of us young press flacks spent the past 20 years trying to evolve our communications strategies through two non-stop decades of change.
We’ve navigated an era of mass layoffs, media consolidation, shrinking newsrooms, hollowed out local media. We’ve navigated changing consumption habits in different generations of social media users, the need for paid amplification, crumbling confidence in institutions like mainstream media. We’ve navigated the commoditization of truth, the age of the influencer and without even catching a breath, we now find ourselves at the beginning of an AI-driven landscape that goes far beyond the algorithms that used to define what people see, hear, and internalize as truth.
Throughout that time, I can tell you, the left and the Democratic Party have struggled to think past the broadcast mentality that defined our work prior to the digital age and into a distributed communications landscape where people turn to micro-influencers or ChatGPT to answer their questions about the state of politics and the country. That, to me, continues to define the fundamental place where many of my peers, and many of our clients, struggle to understand how we need to operate today and how we need to operate in the future.
The left and the Democratic Party have struggled to think past the broadcast mentality that defined our work prior to the digital age.
Let me take you back a moment, back to when we were all taking scissors to the New York Times for our bosses. A combination of media consumption and trust in institutions made doing the work of communicating through media easy by today’s standards. Major centers of journalistic excellence existed throughout the country. Major cities had two or three major papers, sometimes more. Each paper had newsrooms stacked with folks who became experts in their beats. Television was diffuse — every media market had major network affiliates owned by different companies who competed to break stories in real ways. The audience was captive to it, too. You got your news the same way your neighbors did, the morning paper, the 6:00 pm local news, maybe a few hours of cable news here and there. Communities trusted those news sources, too. The biggest journalists and local anchors were community leaders themselves.
Our jobs were, and still largely are, structured for this world. Find reporters, cultivate relationships, place stories, know those stories would be read and taken as fact by thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions of readers. Everyone was drinking from the same well, so the conversations in Church, in line at the supermarket, in the bowling alley or the bar were governed by the same baseline of information. That all began to change between 2008 and 2010.
During and immediately after the economic meltdown in 2008-2009, we started to see two long term trends develop — social media began its rise as the primary mode of internet consumption and confidence in institutions began to seriously erode. I subscribe to the belief among many on the progressive side that watching Wall Street walk away scot-free from the economic crisis they created probably did more to cement the idea that there were “two sets of rules” in this country — one for elites and one for everyone else — than any other event in recent years. It also helped shift political action in this country toward nascent grassroots movements like the Tea Party.
At the same time, the broadcast business model of communications began to erode. Those of us who worked to place stories and craft public opinion contended with a small and ever changing group of bloggers and celebrity journalists who had large social followings, allowing us to reach audiences at scale, but with a diminishing return. Our work was further complicated by contractions in newsrooms, consolidations, and closings of newspapers.
On Capitol Hill between 2007 and 2012, there was an incredible amount of innovation taking place on social media as communications directors sought to not only place content, but create it for the first time. Streaming allowed us to create moments in hearings and YouTube off of one minute speeches on the floor in ways we never could before. It also meant that we needed to learn how to edit video, figure out audio quality, and, of course, be the first out of the gate with pithy tweets whenever a big story moved.
Once again we saw our work fundamentally change between 2015 and 2020. With changes in the algorithms on social media, and with misinformation and disinformation flooding into these spaces, audiences retreated into smaller and smaller filter bubbles. Many continued to struggle with being able to parse what is true, what isn’t true, what feels right versus what the facts tell us about the moment. The online environment now allowed folks to have their confirmation bias supercharged, algorithms got better at serving up folks the opinions that they agreed with most, and shielded them from the ones they didn’t want to see.
This new operating environment closed whole communities off from one another, radicalized many, and for those of us trying to speak across those filter bubbles, made our work increasingly difficult. While many at the upper end of income and education clung to legacy media, most folks had turned completely away from those sources, and instead began listening to niche podcasts, reading niche online publications or frankly, relying on friends and family to serve them a steady stream of information confined to their own political tribe.
It feels weird to say, but five years after COVID, it as though we live in a completely different media world than we did before. We are living in an age of influencers, and our jobs have changed again. With many folks continuing the “doom scrolling” that defined 2020 and 2021, with group text chains looming larger in people’s lives than many offline interactions, and with legacy media now accounting for around 10 percent of market share, the broadcast model is officially dead. Social media sources and creators are now America’s number one news source.
In order to really penetrate, we need to be looking at folks who sometimes have followings in the 5,000-10,000 range, while not even talking to people whose audiences scale in the millions.
Those of us who trained in the pre-Internet era, came up professionally as that era took hold, and have struggled to change our very mindset around how we reach audiences beyond our own filter bubbles have reached a reckoning where we question how much, if any, of how we have done or work in the past is even relevant to today’s environment. When clients ask us to place an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, or to grab a reporter’s attention at the Washington Post, we ask ourselves, and increasingly our clients: Who exactly are you trying to reach? Who exactly are you trying to talk to.
But that is our moment, and those are the kinds of questions we face moving forward. Trying to get our own minds wrapped around a media that is so stratified, so niche, and so deeply complex that in order to really penetrate, we need to be looking at folks who sometimes have followings in the 5,000-10,000 range, while not even talking to people whose audiences scale in the millions. Frankly, those who are still trying to talk at those numbers are missing fundamental truths around the parasocial relationships that folks have developed with influencers, or the very real relationships they have formed with others participating in ongoing conversations in the spaces where fans come together to commiserate — on reddit, on slack, on twitch, on patreon and on substack.
Those are the conversations that matter now, and those are the places where smart communicators are now working to influence ideas, influence opinions, and influence voter behavior. And I do mean for now, because now might very well be through 2026 or 2028. The fact of the matter is, Large Language Models (LLMs) and the sources they are reading and using to parse truth and serve up immediate answers on GoogleAI or ChatGPT are likely going to be the next battlefield that folks like me are engaging on. As those LLMs get to know users and become even more adept at instantaneously knowing what, exactly, users are looking for in an answer — to confirm their long held beliefs in the face of counter-facts — our work will undoubtedly change again.
Sometimes, I think back to the simplicity of the media landscape when I was doing our arts and crafts projects at 5:00 am, cutting headlines and key quotes out of the newspapers so they were ready for our bosses when they got into the office. I think back around the simplicity of how we were able to communicate at scale and wonder if something like that should ever be replaced. I don’t know. What I do know is that 20 years into an information revolution, we haven’t kept up — much less gotten ahead of — what’s to come next.
Brad Bauman is a principal in Raben’s Strategic Communications practice. In 2024, he was one of the founders and organizers of White Dudes for Harris. He previously served as executive director of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and as communications director for various House members and multiple Congressional campaigns, including Congressman Tim Ryan and Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy.