---
id: "workshop:welcome-to-amplify-strategy-skills-and-the-stakes-of-public-communication-today"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/welcome-to-amplify-strategy-skills-and-the-stakes-of-public-communication-today"
date: "2025-10-07"
duration: "60 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["John Wihbey","Jill Abramson"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ECUBMbZIBI"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

InnovateUS workshop · 7 October 2025 · 60 minutes

This opening session introduces the series’ core themes: clear messaging, media logic, and the evolving role of AI. We’ll explore what’s changing in public communication, why it matters, and how public professionals can adapt with purpose.

## Learning goals

- Learn the series’ core themes: clear messaging, media logic, and the evolving role of AI
- Explore what’s changing in public communication, why it matters, and how public professionals can adapt with purpose

## Speakers

- **John Wihbey**, Director of the AI-Media Strategies Lab (AIMES Lab) & Associate Professor, Northeastern University
- **Jill Abramson**, Distinguished Professor of Practice and Senior Fellow, The Burnes Center for Social Change

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ECUBMbZIBI

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/welcome-to-amplify-strategy-skills-and-the-stakes-of-public-communication-today.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/welcome-to-amplify-strategy-skills-and-the-stakes-of-public-communication-today.json (every segment with its start and end second).

**John Wihbey**

[0:00](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=0) Hi everybody, welcome. My name is John Whibbey. I want to welcome you here to the very first session of what we're calling Amplify, which is subtitled Mastering Public Communication in the Age of AI. It's an Innovate US workshop series presented by the Burns Center for Social Change at Northeastern University. I am an associate professor of media innovation here at the university, and I am totally thrilled to be co-leading this with my colleague, Jill Abramson, who is both a professor and also someone who knows a little about media and communications insofar as she was head of the New York Times, the executive editor of the New York Times. So it's a great honor to have Jill as the co-leader of this series, and we'll be curating a whole bunch of different workshops through the course of this series, diverse topics that are both technical and high-level, and we really hope to inform the professionals who are part of this broad national community.

[1:15](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=75) And hopefully we'll build some knowledge together, we'll build maybe some relationships and get some dialogue going, and hopefully end in a good place in a few months. So the series is all about strengthening this community. We're going to explore both the timeless fundamentals of great public communication, credibility, clarity, trust, and new opportunities in the age of AI. There is a full schedule and register for the upcoming sessions. We'll drop the link in the chat. And before turning things over to Jill and getting started, just a quick note, this session is being recorded, but only the presentation portion, not the Q&A. So we'll save the final 15 minutes for your questions and discussions, which will not be recorded. So please feel free to share your thoughts in the chat at any time, and we'll try to take as many questions as possible. All right, without further ado, over to you, Jill.

**Jill Abramson**

[2:15](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=135) Hi, everyone. It is great to share this afternoon with you. And I wanted to start out just by saying that we have a lot in common. Although I have never worked inside government, I have, as a journalist, covered all levels of government, from New York City to spending 22 years in Washington. And our professions, I think, share something right now that probably troubles all of us. And that is, I'll speak first about journalism, because a Gallup poll just came out this very week showing that public trust in the news media is at an all-time low. It has sunk below 30% in people saying that they have at least some confidence in the news media.

[3:23](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=203) The other 70% do not. And those numbers in government have been moving the wrong way, too. But I think that you all have a huge plus going for you, in that many of you work for offices and government agencies at the state and local level. And what I was always told, covering Congress, was that, yeah, sure, Congress has low approval ratings, but most people rate their own House member, their congressman or congresswoman, very highly. It's like they hate the big thing, but they have a lot of confidence in what's local and near to them. I think you, as communicators for governments and agencies at the state and local level, are closest to the people and absolutely the most trusted.

[4:41](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=281) What I mainly wanted to talk about with you, because I wanted to make my remarks as useful as they can be, is give you some kind of basics which some of you may know about succeeding at communicating with the news media and with, that includes now, all platforms of news and information, and how on earth, for mainstream news organizations, you can succeed in getting your stories covered by journalists. You know, I think the other thing that is going for you is that, you know, we live in an era where it's said, content is king, and you are the purveyors of content, of important content about what governments are doing, and I think, you know, that everybody is hungry for news, for news and information that's important for people to know, and that they don't already know about.

[6:09](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=369) So, the first point I wanted to make to all of you is the fact that the word, the most important component of the word news is new. When you're trying to get information or story picked up in journalistic places or on podcasts or by bloggers, if you can develop a pitch for what you want written about or broadcast, you can always lead with what is new, and my main suggestion, suggestion number one, is that sure, you know, everybody and everybody who works in news is completely overwhelmed.

[7:15](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=435) Everybody who consumes it is overwhelmed, but if you actually possess information that's new and that communities at all levels and people at all levels should know about, you possess something very valuable in the 24-7 news cycle, something that is new news, and I would recommend you actually, you know, writing down and editing down to the shortest and most essential, what is new in the news or story you want to disseminate, because that is what every professional journalist and even community, you know, citizen journalist want.

[8:27](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=507) They want to know what's new, what has a state or local government agency recently done that people ought to know about, and, you know, really refining that pitch so that you're not wasting your time or anybody else's is crucial, and, you know, so rule number one is don't waste anybody's time, whether it's the booker for a podcast or the editor of a news organization. Get your pitch into perfect shape where you are clear about what the news is and why it's new information. My biggest frustration as a reporter, I've been a reporter at both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal covering politics and policy in Washington, was when someone had a long pitch and didn't really pinpoint what was newsworthy about it, what would excite my editors, what would make them want to schedule my story, so refine your pitch.

[10:06](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=606) Rule number two for me right now would be to pitch your news and your stories to every platform you can, you know, from LinkedIn to X to, you know, TikTok to, you know, every community outlet that you can think of. Think of not only eyes but ears as well, of not only print but every kind of platform. That is crucial, and, you know, you should have, if you don't already, and I bet many of you do, you've got to keep a running list of who the local bloggers are and state and local journalists.

[11:14](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=674) I always prefer to get a pitch in email before a communications person called me. I don't think cold calling is nearly as effective as emailing, even though everybody is deluged with emails. When you see something from, you know, a communications official from state or local government, I think certainly most local journalists and podcasters and whoever else, I think you get their attention because they're hungry for stories that they can either put up on their substack, blog about, or write or broadcast a story about. So I think the best opener is email, and, you know, keep a running list of the people, you know, keep the emails of everyone who responds to you, and each time you're making a pitch, grow that list. It's gold. It really is, and another, you know, rule I think might be helpful is when you're pitching stories about bills and specific legislation or committee action or council votes, you know, this is beyond obvious, but make sure you understand everything about the technicalities. You don't want to convey all the technicalities with a long, windy pitch.

[13:18](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=798) You want, you know, to boil the tech, to analyze and include the technical information and make it as understandable in your pitch as you can. My boss at the Wall Street Journal, when we'd be pitching stories to him, if I'd go on too long or get too much in the weeds to get mired in too much detail, he would always say to me, don't build me a clock, tell me what time it is. You know, he wanted the essence of something. So I think it's useful to, you know, keep that kind of nasty quote in mind, you know, but, you know, I wanted to end on an up note. You know, I admire all of you for the work you do.

[14:21](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=861) Very early in my career, right out of college, I was the communications director for a political candidate working for governor in Virginia. So I really do know how hard your work is and, you know, how in this crazy information environment, how much harder it is for you now that it was for me back in the relative stone age. And, you know, I think that You know, the popularity of Michael Lewis's book, Who is Government?, which has essays from wonderful writers about what state and local and some federal officials actually do, it was a major, major bestseller and the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, that people want to be reminded about how essential government is and how effective it is and how it makes tangible, good changes in their lives. And all of you here today have a role in protecting our democracy at a very perilous time.

[15:48](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=948) And I think you are doing a great job, and we're here very, very — John and I are very, very grateful to you for your time, your work, and your attention. Back to John.

**John Wihbey**

[16:11](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=971) Thanks, Jill. I really appreciate it. And I just want to echo and underline the sentiments of how important your work is and, you know, really hoping we can continue to add value in the coming workshop series. The, you know, the lineup for the coming workshops includes all kinds of things, everything from writing tips to, you know, thinking about strategy and thinking about various technical tools. And one area that I focus a lot on through my lab at Northeastern is the use of generative AI. And so today I wanted to just give a few kind of overview remarks about how I see generative AI intersecting with public communication at this time. So I have some slides, and I'll share those. But just know that we'll have more detailed sessions, too, about using generative AI from various perspectives, ethical, practical, functional.

[17:18](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1038) We'll have those coming up. But I'm going to — I'll spend a few minutes now talking about that space, and then we will open it up for questions. So let me first share some slides. Here we go. My email's right there if you want to get in touch, j.wibby at northeastern.edu, happy to answer questions or connect with people on various things. So, you know, I see the series agenda for generative AI as being about a bunch of different things. First of all, I think we want to get some kind of point of — we will offer a point of view on the state of the art. You know, it may be incomplete, in particular to the way I see it or other speakers see it, but hopefully we can give you some real value there in terms of what's important. We want to talk about customization of tools. Think about, you know, what are the fundamental skills that you need, some of the key terms and concepts.

[18:21](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1101) It's obviously a world that has a lot of jargon, a lot of very new jargon. I just actually filled a whiteboard — I was teaching my undergraduate students who were from, you know, different disciplines, computer science, business, journalism, communications, and we filled an entire whiteboard with jargon terms and tried to define them all yesterday. It is not easy, even for those who are pretty sophisticated users, to kind of keep up with what's going on. And we'll talk about areas like specific domains that communicators are interested in, such as visual images, data visualization, simulations, and getting kind of simulated audience feedback, which is an area that we just did a white paper on. Happy to share that. And then, of course, ethics. So, you know, our goals, as I see it in the series, are not — you know, is it really to make you faster, sharper, and more informed by context, research, and data, to leverage tools that adhere to and boost your core values and your brand identity as a public institution?

[19:36](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1176) So we're really mostly talking about kind of upstream workflows, so repeatable tasks, early to middle stages, you know, in, let's say, press releases, media advisories, newsletters, talking points, web FAQs, viz, meeting notes, et cetera. So not necessarily content farms or, like, really public-facing front-end content. I know there's a lot of trepidation about, you know, using AI directly, for example, to produce social media images, particularly when you're a public agency. We'll talk about all of that. So human-directed workflows, not content farms. Also thinking a little bit about the organizational communication structures that I think can help public agencies and communicators become AI-ready. So we talk a lot about AI readiness at Northeastern, and it's a sort of broad concept. In the communications realm, I think, you know, information integrity is going to be, and remains for you especially, like, absolutely the coin of the realm, the highest value. And so we need to make sure that whatever workflows we do put in place, there's accuracy monitoring checks, there are systems, and I advocate, and I'm not alone in this, there's a whole world of AI consultants out there, who are advocating the creation of communities of practice or AI committees within organizations, and that would include, and I know I spoke to a bunch of public communicators this summer in the land use and environmental space from across the country.

[21:22](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1282) Perhaps some of you are on the call. But, you know, we talked about forming AI committees, which can really be internal sandboxes, experimental places where new workflows, new ways of doing things can be experimented with without the high risk of producing stuff necessarily for the public right away. And so we can talk about those structures and there are diverse ways of doing that. We are going to talk a lot about ethics. This is a, this is a, from a couple of philosophers who, who looked at a lot of the literature on ethics and AI and kind of came up with some principles here. Basically what they said was, you know, the bio ethics principles that are sort of classic, like, you know, it's basically the do no harm stuff, right, beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. These are all informing the development of the AI models themselves, we hope. But there's also this other dimension, which is explicability or explainability that I think is really crucial for public communicators, because I think we owe it to the public to be transparent about how things are developed.

[22:37](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1357) Not always easy. And I think a lot of people do it with some trepidation because if you, you know, start labeling everything AI generated, people get very nervous, there's a lot of pushback. So we have to think very carefully about how we're going to be transparent, in what ways, what language we're going to use, but we can talk about sort of higher level principles. There's obviously two copyright issues. You know, we're also going to have to operate, as you already do, in a landscape where there's a lot of disinformation and misinformation and deep, so-called deep fakes, which are basically synthetic material that purport to be something that, like, never happened. And we've just seen some rollout of tools such as Sora 2 from OpenAI or VO3 from Gemini Google, which can do very, very compelling photorealistic video content. And so there are going to be, you know, we're going to operate in an ecosystem where there is going to be a lot of noise.

[23:39](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1419) And so I'll sort of wrap up the ethics bit here. Over to, like, the practical nature of what we're doing. So there are many models out there, and I don't want to shortchange any in particular, but there are kind of big, there's sort of a big three right now. And these would be Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. And so we'll discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the current frontier models, which would be Gemini 2.5, Chat GPT-5, and Sonnet 4.5, which actually just came out and my students and I were just exploring. And so we'll take a look at the models specifically. I'm also going to advocate in terms of, you know, articulating a point of view here, that we begin to think about AI not just as these sort of omniscient chatbots, you know, the HAL image that we get from the 2001 Space Odyssey movie or any of the other kinds of recurring kind of Hollywood images of a kind of a single general intelligence that's going to tell you everything.

[24:45](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1485) I want to advocate that we begin to think more about customization and creating really specialists, specialized little worker bees, who can help us with various tasks and repeatable workflows. And this is becoming best practice, I think, in the, you know, in areas of the private sector, particularly in the technology sector. But, you know, across enterprise and businesses across the country, and obviously some public agencies are starting to adopt these tools and customize them in particular ways. So, you know, what we'll talk about is sort of bringing AI back home to the kind of the personalized or the institution specific workflow. You know, obviously, you're probably using some amount of tools. I'm thinking about things in the social media space, you know, such as Sprout Social or Meltwater or any of the other kind of media monitoring tools, where actually generative AI is already embedded. If you're a user of Notion or any of the other project management software, you're seeing AI start to do new kinds of things, cluster tasks, bring in different data streams together, summarize things.

[25:59](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1559) And so we're already in some ways, you know, the frogs boiling in the pot a bit, because AI is already embedded in some of the applications that we may be using, you know, from a legacy standpoint. I mentioned audience simulations, and I'll talk more about that in a subsequent way, but there's some really important practical use cases around message testing. There's a lot of, there are a lot of caveats that I think we need to have in place before we really take message testing to any kind of, before we take the results as any kind of social scientific kind of output. I'll discuss that, but there are many teams out there, and I've, you know, we've, in my classes and in some of the course consulting work we've done, I mean, there are a lot of PR agencies that are doing, you know, kind of red teaming of messages or situations or scenarios.

[27:00](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1620) And it, you know, it turns out that the models are quite good at kind of generating for internal purposes, different kinds of provocations and, but whether they're actually simulating reality is something very different, so I think we want to be very careful. We'll talk about that. So, you know, the general, we're moving, as I said, away from the kind of the omniscient guru to the more customized worker bee from general purpose to kind of custom made. And I think, you know, when I think of the goal for communicators, I think it's, you know, preserving tone, style, voice. We want to be consistent with our brand, our institutional identity. You know, as I mentioned, information integrity and trustworthiness are paramount. As Jill said, you know, they're great questions, you know, very, very weighted and fraught questions right now about public trust, especially government, you know, communications related and how people may trust your communications or not.

[28:09](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1689) And therefore, I think, you know, using tools that allow for control, stability, precision, super important. And I will get to some of those customization tools in the next workshop. Also going to discuss what you might think of as like the learning ladder, I kind of, this particular slide actually has it both up and down. What you kind of need to know to get your feet on the ground, the orienting knowledge so that you can use the tools in a smart way. And then this whole discipline of prompt engineering and optimization, how you actually put inputs in that yield useful outputs. And then we'll talk about custom GPTs or gems or cloud projects, other ways of customizing the intelligence with base knowledge and instructions so that you can get something that is useful and part of a repeatable workflow.

[29:09](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1749) And we can also talk a little bit about, you know, the kind of the future of agents and, you know, also the governance structures that we might want in place. But there's, you know, I want to sort of at least introduce a learning ladder so that you can kind of place yourself in this world. One of the things that I think is a core skill, especially in terms of doing really good prompts, is this idea of thinking like a model. Each of the models actually have different, first of all, they have different pre-training data sets and ways of doing things, different algorithms. The models have kind of different personalities depending on the way you prompt them. Increasingly, they have memory of who you are and what you've done and what you're interested in if you want to turn that on. So we almost have to think about using the models as a kind of form of, you know, we're the therapist. Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

[31:10](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1870) Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

**Agueda Quiroga**

[32:20](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=1940) Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

[34:20](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=2060) Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

[36:20](https://youtu.be/1ECUBMbZIBI?t=2180) Welcome to Amplify — Strategy, Skills, and The Stakes of Public Communication Today

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Original page: https://innovate-us.org/welcome-to-amplify-strategy-skills-and-the-stakes-of-public-communication-today · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org