Adam Torres and Shanté Micah discuss PR and media coverage.
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Show Notes:
What’s the biggest myth about PR and media coverage? In this episode, Adam Torres and Shanté Micah, Founder of Good News, explore PR and how founders can increase their digital footprint
About Shanté Micah
Shanté Micah is the co-founder of Good News, author of PR Power Play, and the visionary behind the Good News Blueprint—a pioneering visibility intelligence system. Through her work, she empowers founders, executives, and high-growth brands to take control of their earned visibility, build lasting thought leadership, and dominate conversations within their categories.
Unlike traditional PR models built on access and hustle, Shanté’s approach is rooted in research, strategy, and ownership. Think of it as the Gartner of earned media: Good News analyzes your industry landscape, competitor narratives, untapped storylines, and media white space to architect a customized visibility system that delivers long-term value.
The result is not just press—it’s authority, inbound credibility, and true category leadership. With the Good News Blueprint, Shanté helps ambitious teams turn insight into influence, transforming media strategy into a lasting competitive advantage.
About Good News
Good News is not a traditional PR agency—it’s a visibility intelligence company. Specializing in research-backed media systems, Good News empowers founders, executives, and high-growth brands to take control of their earned visibility, establish thought leadership, and lead conversations within their categories.
At the heart of Good News’ approach is its flagship service: the Good News Blueprint—a strategic, research-driven advisory system that redefines how media strategy is built and executed.
By blending intelligence, strategy, and execution, Good News helps ambitious leaders cut through the noise and position themselves at the forefront of their industries.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on BR Guest to apply. All right, today I have Shante Micah on the line, and she’s a founder over at Good News.
Shante, welcome to the show. Thanks. All right. First thing first the name of your company. Good news. I mean, love it. First off, how’d you come up with that? I just, have to know the story behind it. There is a story. So Josh is the co-founder. He’s my business partner. We went through all sorts of naming conventions and at the start I was like.
Josh, I hate all of these. Can we just call it good? Can we just call it good news? Because in my world I’ve been in PR and brand marketing for 20 years. It’s something that I would often say, and it was usually, Hey, good news, we just landed Vogue and then onto the next. Mm-hmm. So it was like, yes moment, but then moving forward, so like, can we just call it good news?
And lo and behold, it was available. So that, was the naming convention that we ended up going with after a series of just, I hated everything that we came up with until that point. That’s amazing. and so you’re, an industry vet, as you mentioned. You’ve been doing this work for a long time.
how’d you break into the business? how’d you get hooked, I should say? ’cause you’ve been doing it for a couple decades now. Yeah. Yeah. So I started out as a, a journalist, a broadcast journalist. That’s what my, mm-hmm. My bachelor’s was in, and I jumped in with International Sports Broadcasting.
And it was really cool because international sports broadcasting, back in the day, they were the host broadcasters of the Olympics, and they were the only host broadcasters of deal. Oh, cool. So it was really, yeah, I got to do some really, really interesting things and. But I will tell you that broadcast it, it’s one of those industries where you can love most of it and then really loathe like a part of it and, mm, the burnout is quite real.
So I, I. A few years after I graduated, I was working, I found myself upstate New York and on Syracuse University’s campus, and they happened to have the number one communication school in the country. And for PR it was, it was number one. I think for most of their programs, it’s either number 1, 2, 3, or four, or five.
Mm-hmm. And they only accepted at the time, 15 students per year for the graduate programs per program. I thought, okay, hail Mary. Had this moment where I’m like, I think I’m, I’m supposed to, to do this. So I submitted an application at, I mean, 11:00 PM the day before it was due and just waited, thinking, okay, you know, this will be a test of fate.
And I was accepted. It was a nine month program. It was insanely hard and amazing. And came out of it. And that was, that was the next thing. I jumped into a startup that was growing really crazy and I was over all of their corporate communications, including pr. And from there I went to another company that sent me to Israel to be an expat and opened that market.
And that was insane. I don’t think I slept more than four hours a night for a year. Wow. And that was when social media was just becoming a thing for business. So the before times, you know? Mm-hmm. Now we can social media, that is business. But there was a before times and they were telling me, can you figure this out for us?
And I’m like, sure. That’s something I do. Wow. And it was really cool. So SEO was emerging but I was, I was very most much focused on media, brand marketing, social media. And it was, I had my own consulting firm for a bit, was recruited again by an agency and that’s where I met Josh, my business partner.
And that was 11 years ago. Oh wow. Congrats. 10, 10 years with the same business partner over that. Congrats. Good shout out to you and Jess. That’s amazing. Yeah. We’ve known each other 11 years, but we started good news four years ago, namely because. we stayed in touch and we just had immense amount of respect for one another.
And we were accountability partners ’cause we were each building some, some just projects that we had personally. Mm-hmm. And one day he was like, would you ever wanna do anything together? And I’m like, that list of people I partner with is real short and you’re on it. Wow. We considered, what’s that project?
And honestly, for a minute we were like, we both love podcasts. So we were, we’re circling around that idea of let’s do a podcast together and that’s still on the docket. But then this, I kept getting phone calls from colleagues or former colleagues, friends, families. They were like pr, like demystify it for me.
So that’s when I wrote the. PR power play, and it was really just putting all of my framework into a book and making it accessible to people I cared about. Mm-hmm. Because there really was mystique to pr and then good news emerged and with Josh’s engineering, his approach to like engineering and facilitating like productization of certain things and research and data.
We have just like found this, I would call it a blue ocean in this marketplace. Mm-hmm. And it starts become new and fun again. And let me tell you, after Covid. I thought pr I was like, okay, I, I think I’ve seen everything. Mm. Nope. Nope. I’m back.
Well, let’s get into I do like a little bit of of myth busting here. You’re obviously an expert. What’s the biggest myth about PR media coverage that you’ve seen? Tell me, talk to me about the myths. So I think the biggest myth is that you need a, PR agency, or it’s about luck or timing or who you know, and really it’s about owning your messaging, understanding how to show up in conversations that already matter.
So it’s, actually less about you than you think. It’s your ability to adapt your message to relevant. Cultural conversations to what’s happening in the world to angles that journalists care about, and then the ability to, to put that into a pitch, a very pissy pitch. Mm-hmm. And do that with enough reps that you just start landing consistently those media features.
Yeah. And I’m thinking about this ’cause I haven’t been in this business as long as you have. Not pr specifically like podcasting. Going on nine years before that I was in finance and mm-hmm. For almost 14 years. And now you know, we do quite a bit in pr. It’s just, it’s just overflowed based off of being in the podcast and media space.
and I’m thinking to myself like, where do you, find that people many times go wrong? Because I don’t know how, like there’s certain stigmas sometimes in the industry and and it’s like, oh, PR doesn’t work, or this or that. Like some, or sometimes somebody will have like a bad experience or this or that with one particular company, but where do you think people go wrong when they start thinking about PR and when they, when they put themselves out there, where do they go wrong?
Definitely the approach to it is this mass blast mentality, and you probably get a lot of really pitches in your inbox and mm-hmm. It’s just, and maybe you don’t blacklist them, but in your mind you kind of bookmark, like they’re not a A source, so you’re not approaching it in the way of I’m here to build a relationship and be.
A value add from from 0.1. Mm-hmm. And demonstrating that I’ve done due diligence. But I would say even before that is to your point, saying that it doesn’t work means that you’re expecting direct attribution to the bottom line. There are ways to measure that, but even now, direct attribution, it’s like become a thing of the past.
We ran Fishkin. He was the founder of Maoz. He now runs Spark Toro. He’s come out and said Attribution is dying because of so much that is being shared that has that substantial brand credibility is happening on dark social. Mm-hmm. Text messages, it’s happening on Slack channels. It’s happening in ways that you can’t attribute.
So whatever you think you’re attributing to, whether it’s first touch, last touch, is wrong. Anyway, so wow, consider like more content is probably not the gameplay, especially with AI being, it a huge equalizer of just creating sheer content, your own content, make it good. But I don’t think that’s. That’s the singular strategy ads we’re all experiencing ad fatigue and then the attribution of that and an algorithm change means all of that could change, tomorrow.
Mm-hmm. So I would say the myth is really in that attribution is that it doesn’t work because it really does. If you think of the content that shows up in media, even the SEO value of that versus 30 pieces of your own content is higher. It’s gonna rank with more authority. If we’re talking in terms of SEO, it’s gonna have, yeah, better no, like and trust factors.
So it’s gonna improve the velocity of them coming to your site already trusting you enough, and then the velocity of that sales cycle. It’s just in ways that you have to adjust your thinking in terms of measuring everything. Mm-hmm. Because people, it’s people and feelings, irrational things. Mm-hmm. how can founders start, you know, earning their first media features?
Like where do you, where do you normally recommend people start? Yeah. A lot of times we’ll tell them, you have to consider message clarity. So what do you wanna be known for? And don’t think of it in terms of exclusively your expertise. Think of it in terms of what your expertise adds value to in the, in the marketplace with your audiences.
So that message clarity is really important. The alignment, so knowing the topics, but the, the angles to that. From that, you can go, let’s say you have your dream list of places you’d like to be, and I assume most people when they think of media, they think of Top national. I would also heavily consider your industry because that’s when you’re gonna get ready buyers, even if it’s smaller.
But go there. Look at the stories that people are telling. Look at the bylines. You know, do, do a little bit due diligence of, you know, who are the people that are being featured, how did they share their story? Look at the journalists that wrote the stories about them. Figure out their beat, their body of work.
And then from that you can create pitches. And really it’s about pitch consistency. So regularly tough pitches that it works for not only relevance, but also the timing. Some journalists, I mean, some journalists get 300 pitches in a given day. So what they’re looking for is relevance. And then I have a deadline tomorrow.
This actually matches that. So the pitching consistency means that you’re, you’re just out there, you’re taking the shots. Enough of those will land. You’ll build rapport with the ones that even don’t land. ’cause they’ll think, wow, they really. They really showed, like they demonstrated, they understood my audience.
I gotta bookmark them. Hmm. I like that you bring this up because for people that aren’t in the industry, mm-hmm. They may be sometimes create, and I’ve seen this, that spray and pray kinda like mentality. As you mentioned, you didn’t use those, you didn’t use that wording, but they’re just like kind of sending stuff out and you’ll see.
It’s interesting to see how, you can quickly like do the opposite and then you see the same person’s name or something else. You’re like, okay, what are they talking about now? Okay, yeah. Move on, move on, move on. Right, right. And so over time it, I try to tell people whenever I’m having, whenever I have somebody on like yourself who’s an expert in the field, I.
There’s people on the other side of that email or that, or whatever you’re sending out that are actually reading this stuff, right? They’re humans, so you have to think about what you’re sending out, right? I mean, that might sound obvious, but I mean, I’m sure you’ve seen it too, right? Yeah. It’s not, I mean, we talk about this, a lot of good news, human first principles, so we build systems to everything too.
But if it’s in lieu of a human first principle, we don’t do it. Because ultimately a journalist could be very protective of one thing, which is their audience. Mm-hmm. And their beaten body of word support their audience. You care, Adam, about your audience on this show. So assuming, you know, I sent you a pitch you obviously responded, your audience, just based on the repetitions and the, the positive deposits you put out there.
They assume, well, Adam has vetted this person. Therefore I have more credibility than if I were to come and just be like, I’m really cool. Believe me,
you tell people the pitch. The only job of the pitch is to make a stranger care. Hmm. That’s great. That’s great. how do people work with you at, at good news? how do they connect and who normally gets the most value out of working with you and your team? Mostly people that are founders, executives, VIPs or people responsible for them.
You know, they’re the, the marketing people that have also been tasked with media and pr. They’re the, even the in-house PR team that’s maybe a team of one or two or 10 and a billion dollar brand, and they need a system that they could implement within a few weeks versus months and months. And those are the people like I said, the founders and executives, those are like celebrity CEOs.
Like we’re seeing a lot of the value of a big brand. Also having that CEO or executive that has a personal brand and how that doubles down on that no life and trust factor for them. Mm-hmm. We work with those people in that. They have a business to run, they have a job to do, and we build them the system that they can feasibly within an hour each week, manage the system.
Of course, you have to bank more time when you start landing multiple podcasts, interviews, and top national features, which that’s, that’s a good problem to have, but the management of it is isolated to the system and everything’s based into that. Fantastic. How do people follow up? Where do they connect with you and how do they pick up a copy of that book?
Yeah, so if you go to hi good news.com and that’s hi. So hello, but hi good news.com. There’s a banner and we have a a gift for anyone that puts on that banner and you can opt in and get that. And then the book is forward slash book and you can get PR Power Play. And that’s my entire framework.
It’s the framework I’ve used for 20 years. On teams where I’ve been a team of one, where I’ve led a team of 20 or more, it’s the same framework. It’s the DIY approach. But the point was to make it accessible for people that think PR is a, a nice to have or something that once I hit a billion, I’ll be able to afford it.
Mm-hmm. No, get started now even if you’re in the startup phase because you’ll probably get a lot more leverage. Now then if you wait. Fantastic. If everybody, listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put the links in the show notes so that you can click on ’em and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re releasing new content, new ideas. Hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button.
And again, thank you so much again for coming on the show. It’s been, it’s been a really pleasure. Of course. Thanks, Adam.