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It has been a full week. Cheetos made us laugh, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is giving brands a runway to run on, and somewhere in between all of it, we came across an important report about who actually controls the stories we tell and how they travel. This edition is about paying attention: to your audience, to the infrastructure around you, and to the training you already have.

One question to carry with you as you read: what signals is your audience already sending that you have not acted on yet?

If you are not yet an Inner Circle member, this is a good week to join us. And if you are, welcome back. Let's get into it.

With love and intention,
Fatou & The PRGM Post Team

Every edition, we’ll share the articles, essays, and industry reads that have been living in our heads lately

PRGM has always been built around one idea: that PR and communications professionals deserve better resources, sharper analysis, and a community that takes the work seriously. The Inner Circle is how we plan on delivering on that fully!

Every issue of The PRGM Post will have two layers. Free content that's worth your time, and Inner Circle content that goes deeper: complete case studies, cultural analysis, strategic frameworks, in depth conversations with industry leaders, feature opportunities and first access to everything PRGM builds next.

The Inner Circle is $8/month. And this edition is a good place to see exactly what that gets you.

Earlier this week, we shared a post on our Instagram reflecting on the communications major and what it was actually building: the rhetorical criticism, media theory, source evaluation, and critical analysis that the rest of the world spent decades dismissing as soft skills. If you haven't seen it, it's worth a read before you continue.

That dismissal had real consequences, and the numbers make the case plainly.

These are not just media industry metrics, they are communication infrastructure metrics, and communications professionals have more relevant expertise here than most industries are willing to acknowledge.

What That Recognition Looks Like in Practice

Source discipline is the most unglamorous version of this work, and also the most direct. In an environment where claims travel faster than corrections, communications professionals are often the last line of verification before something reaches the public. Insisting on sourced claims, pushing back on inflated statistics, and refusing to circulate a story that hasn't been verified are not small acts. They are contributions to an information environment that is visibly degrading, made by the people closest to the machine that produces it.

Access to journalists matters more now because there are fewer of them. The ratio of PR professionals to journalists stands at roughly 6 to 1, according to Muck Rack's State of Journalism report, and that gap is structural. Every pitch, every correction, every piece of verified information a communications professional brings to a reporter carries more weight in that context than it did a decade ago. Accuracy is not a baseline courtesy at this ratio, but a form of responsibility.

Honest counsel to clients is where the industry's actual values get tested. The impulse to shape a narrative before someone else does is legitimate, and often good strategy. Counseling clients to mislead or flood the zone with noise is a different thing entirely. It makes the information environment worse for every practitioner who operates in it, including the one giving the advice.

The Training Was Built for This Moment

Communications programs were producing people who understood how power moves through public discourse, how institutions shape what gets believed, and how language is used to persuade or mislead, while everyone else was calling it the easy major. The practitioners who came up through that training are watching the consequences of that dismissal play out in real time. The work now is putting what they already know to use: in client counsel, in newsroom relationships, in the choices made every day about what gets sent, what gets sourced, and what gets pushed back on.

SolComms, the integrated communications agency founded by Bruno Solari, released its State of Brand 2026 report this month, and it's worth reading in full. The report pulls together data, brand case studies, and practitioner perspectives to map what cultural relevance actually looks like right now, not in theory, but in the campaigns and decisions that moved the needle over the past year.

A few findings we think were great signals for PR & Comms professionals:

On loyalty: only 25% of consumers say they feel "very loyal" to a company, according to a 2024 study from customer experience firm Medallia cited in the report. Loyalty hasn't disappeared, but it has become conditional and earned incrementally across every touchpoint, not just at the point of purchase. For communications professionals, that means the work of building trust between a brand and its audience is never really finished.

On creators: Poppi's co-founder and Chief Brand Officer Allison Ellsworth makes a point in the report that will stay with anyone who reads it. At a moment when brands are competing to sign the biggest names, Ellsworth's counsel is simpler: find the next Alix Earle and grow together. Poppi partnered with Earle when she was still in college and Jake Shane when he had 90,000 followers. Their Coachella collaboration in 2024, which included 20 TikToks, led to a 200% spike in sales. The lesson is not just about timing. It is about the difference between renting an audience and building one with someone.

On cultural moments: the report cites Sprout Social data showing that only 44% of consumers want brands to post about Taylor Swift's most recent album unless it's relevant to the brand's actual product or service. The instinct to insert a brand into every cultural moment is common and usually counterproductive. Duolingo's Bad Bunny Super Bowl campaign worked because it was grounded in something real: the cultural weight of his performance created a genuine on-ramp to Spanish learning, and the brand saw a 35% week-over-week increase in new Spanish learners after the campaign launched.

The full report is available at solcomms.co!

Each edition, we spotlight a member of the PRGM community doing work worth knowing about: from agency founders to in-house leaders, independents, and everyone in between. If you'd like to nominate someone (or yourself), send us a note at [email protected].

Ketia Jeune grew up in Miami as a first-generation American, the daughter of Haitian immigrant parents, and was sitting in a graduate program at NYU by 21. She came up fast, and she came up with a point of view.

Her first major assignment was supporting the campaign of Chi Ossé at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, using press strategy and fashion-driven cultural moments to help elect one of the youngest city council members in New York City history at the time. It was an early signal of what would define her career: the ability to move between worlds that most communications professionals treat as separate.

She became known for working at the intersection of fashion and music, a space that rewards people who understand that cultural relevance doesn't respect category lines. One of her most widely circulated moments came at the Balenciaga Spring 2023 show at the New York Stock Exchange, where she captured and distributed the clip of Kanye West saying he hadn't touched money in years. The moment landed in Us Weekly, HotNewHipHop, and across the digital press. It became part of the cultural conversation of that season. That kind of instinct, recognizing what will travel before it travels, is what separates good publicists from great ones.

She later worked with Bktherula during the artist's emergence, securing front-row placements, runway opportunities, and editorial coverage in the New York Times Magazine, Hypebeast, Paper, and V Magazine. By treating a music career as a fashion story, she expanded the artist's visibility well beyond traditional music press. She has also worked with Meta, Farfetch, Milk Agency, Pelle Pelle, and WhenSmokeClears, and served as lead publicist for Denzel Dion's first runway show for his brand Noid.

Her goal, stated plainly: to never have to start an agency and we love that for her.

Want to be featured in Community Corner? Nominate yourself or someone you know at [email protected].

Everything above is free. Every week.

We hope it's already worth your Sunday, but the Inner Circle tier is where we go further: deeper analysis, stronger takes, and the case studies that connect what's happening in culture to what it means for your practice.

This week, Inner Circle members get:

If that sounds like your kind of Sunday reading, we'd love to have you.

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Pitch Us: We are always looking for stories, campaigns, and perspectives worth covering. If you are working on something you think belongs in The PRGM Post, a campaign that got it right, an industry shift worth naming, a conversation the community should be having, we want to hear about it.

Pitch us at [email protected].