Hello! If you’ve subscribed to this newsletter, then you know that the media industry is rapidly changing. So, Now You’re A Journalist is a once a month publication for marketers, communicators, and PR specialists who want to understand the media industry and how to tell better stories.

In this issue: A big change coming to AI tracking in the coming weeks could have major implications for PR teams. We take a deep dive into explaining the ROI of brand journalism. The passing of Dolly Parton reminds us of beautiful lessons in storytelling. Plus, a community news reporter tells us what journalists are trained to do that corporate storytellers would benefit from doing more of.

Here we go!

Starting Sept. 15, the rules for how AI tools access the web are set to shift, and the fallout could reach further than most PR and communications professionals realize.

Cloudflare, which manages traffic for more than 20% of the world's websites, is rolling out new, more precise controls over which AI bots can access a site. The change affects whether a brand's own website, and potentially the news outlets that cover it, show up when someone asks an AI tool a question.

Until now, Cloudflare customers had one option: block all AI bots or allow them all. Cloudflare is replacing that with three separate categories site owners can control individually:

More than one in five websites sit behind Cloudflare, including many news outlets, blogs, and trade publications. That means decisions those outlets make about these new settings will play a big part in determining whether a piece of coverage shows up when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini, or similar AI tools about a brand.

A publication will be able to choose to stay visible in AI search answers while blocking its content from training AI models, addressing a concern publishers have raised for over a year about being scraped without compensation. It could also choose to block Agent bots, which are the kind that fetch a page in real time when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude a question on the spot, while remaining visible in standard AI search results, or the reverse.

Basically, whether a specific placement is citable by an AI tool now depends on settings at the publication, not just on whether the story ran.

The new controls also change what happens on a brand's own website. Cloudflare turns on its new settings Sept. 15, but the defaults work differently depending on whether a site is new or already on Cloudflare.

For any websites new to signing up with Cloudflare after that date, any pages that carry ads will automatically block Agent and Training bots. Search bots will remain allowed.

For websites already on Cloudflare, here's the catch: Google, Bing and Apple all run bots that do double duty. These multi-purpose crawlers go to your site to build search results and to train AI models. Right now, Cloudflare only looks at one job when deciding whether to block a bot. Starting Sept. 15, it will look at all of a bot's jobs at once. So if a site told Cloudflare to block AI training bots, it may now block Googlebot, too, which means the pages could potentially disappear from regular Google search results, not just AI answers.

Cloudflare says existing customers can opt out of the new defaults any time before Sept. 15.

The reality is that if you're tracking whether a brand's expertise shows up in ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude, this is part of your business now. You need to talk to your I.T. department and understand how your website is interacting with bots and how that relates to your PR and visibility goals.

The bottom line is that Cloudflare is giving the internet more precise control over how AI can use its content. Website owners now get to decide, in detail, whether AI companies can search their site, use it in real time, or train models on it. This is a push that many website publishers, especially press publications, have been asking for. Only time will tell how it will impact the world of public relations.

Read the full Cloudflare announcement

In the spring of 2015, Marriott International released an 18-minute short film called "French Kiss," about a hotel employee racing across Paris. It had no obvious sales pitch. It looked, and played, like a movie.

It also moved money. A booking promotion tied to the film generated $500,000 in revenue for the hotel, according to a 2015 report from the content marketing platform Contently, which worked with Marriott on the project.

The film was part of a broader shift at the hotel chain. Marriott had spent the previous year building a global content studio, and it staffed that studio not with copywriters, but with journalists. Matthew Glick, previously of CBS, and Marc Graser, formerly an editor at Variety were brought in to run creative and editorial strategy, Contently reported.

And it worked. By 2018, Marriott’s editorial travel site, Marriott Traveler, had grown to 3 million unique visitors, up 78% year over year, according to figures reported by Inc. Visits to individual hotel landing pages were up 80%. Revenue from hotel bookings attributed to the platform increased 200% compared to the prior year, Marriott told Inc. A separate Contently case study on the partnership headlined “How Marriott’s Content Generated $3 Million in New Bookings.” Marriott’s editorial director wasn’t writing travel brochures. He was running a newsroom inside a hotel company.

Marriott's experiment wasn't an isolated stunt. It's an early, well-documented example of a trend that has only accelerated: companies hiring real journalists to build editorial operations that serve an audience first and a sales funnel second.

The “brand journalism” or “brand newsroom” trend has its own hiring pipeline. A survey of 367 editors conducted by recruiter Chandra Turner found that 66% had left traditional media for roles in content, communications or marketing. The Wall Street Journal reported that LinkedIn job postings mentioning the term "storyteller" doubled over the past year. Even AI companies, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, are paying a premium to hire journalists and editors to run their own editorial operations.

The question becomes, do these expensive “storytelling” hires actually move the needle for brands? Editorial departments typically measure attention in the form of traffic, engagement, and awards. But we can look at what’s happening in traditional journalism to understand some of the fiscal impact.

The New York Times Company doesn't sell "content." It sells journalism, and its own public filings can serve as a test of whether trustworthy reporting is worth money.

In its 2025 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Times told investors that its brand is "a powerful and trusted brand," built on independent journalism, and that the brand is a key element of the business. The filing clearly states that if trust in that brand erodes, the company's ability to retain subscribers and advertisers "could be adversely affected," with a direct impact on revenue.

The Times reported that it added 1.4 million new digital subscribers in 2025. Total revenue reached $2.82 billion, up 9.2% from the year before, driven largely by digital subscription and advertising growth. For the Times, trust equals revenue.

Ramp, the corporate expense-management company, is proving that same strategy works inside a business that sells something other than news.

Ramp's lead economist, Ara Kharazian, publishes the Ramp AI Index, an Advertising Index, and a weekly newsletter on Substack called Econ Lab, all built from anonymized spending data flowing through Ramp's platform. His analysis has been cited by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Bloomberg and NPR's "Planet Money."

Ramp has since moved to formalize its editorial operation. The company posted a Head of Content role paying up to $350,000, describing it as a "builder role" meant to turn the company's existing assets, including its in-house economist, into a content system "no other company could make," according to the job listing, as reported by Culture Slant Media in May.

Ramp's growth in the same period has been extraordinary. The company raised $750 million in June 2026 at a $44 billion valuation, roughly tripling its valuation in a year, TechCrunch reported. Revenue crossed $1 billion in annualized terms in 2025, one of the fastest climbs to that mark in software history, according to Fortune's reporting.

Of course, that growth didn’t all happen because of a company newsletter and a few economic reports. Independent analysis of Ramp’s rise have pointed to at least nine separate growth levers. Treating editorial as infrastructure is one move among many. However, it is noteworthy that a company in the middle of one of the fastest growth curves in its industry has decided its data-journalism operation is important enough to formalize and fund at a six-figure hire.

To call what Marriott, the Times and Ramp built "content marketing" undersells everything they’ve created. These are not landing pages optimized around a keyword list or a conversion funnel. Marriott created a full production studio, with an editorial director and a production process, that could keep producing work independent of any single campaign. Ramp’s Kharazian isn't publishing case studies; he's running a beat, the way a business reporter covers an industry. That's the difference between a marketing channel and a content operation. A channel is a pipe you pour content into. An operation has its own editorial judgment, its own standards for what's worth publishing, and its own reason to exist that isn't "drive traffic."

This is all public relations in the oldest sense of the term: the discipline of earning a public's trust through credible information, sustained over time. These three organizations built the capacity to earn that trust from their audience, repeatedly, staffed by people who knew how to tell stories that build trust. They’re making money through consistency and credibility.

The world lost one of its most legendary storytellers this week. Dolly Parton called herself a songwriter, but she also coined the term “songteller” to describe her music. For Dolly, every hit was a story first, a melody second. As a storyteller myself, I looked up to Dolly as someone who understood that you could change the world with words. Here’s some of what she taught us:

Rest easy, Dolly. Thanks for the reminder that a story comes from many places, especially the heart.

1.) How do you figure out what people in a community truly care about before they ever tell you?

I’m always actively listening. Whenever I’m in public, I have my journalist eyes and ears open. Always looking to see if there’s a story to be had at any given time. If something intrigues me or rings my ears,

I start to ask questions. I also have the luxury of working as a journalist in my hometown, so I have an upper hand of what folks care about around the community.

2.) When you’re covering a company, organization or local business, what makes you put the executive or spokesperson’s quote aside and go find someone else to talk to?

This is a simple answer, but 100% truth on my part. If I speak with an executive or spokesperson of a company, I’m very skeptical about how it’s going to go. I will find someone else to talk to if it feels like they are just looking for earned media, or their responses sound like a commercial or too rehearsed.

3.) What’s something journalists are trained to do that corporate storytellers would benefit from doing more of, but that might make a brand uncomfortable?

Corporate storytellers need to put the human emotion into their stories that people can relate to. And not sound like a generic PR pitch.

Devin Kidd is a multimedia journalist and Southern Illinois Bureau Chief for KFVS12, covering local news and community stories across the region. Watch him in Southern Illinois on KFVS, or www.kfvs12.com