Slack, Asana, Teams, Monday, Signal, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, email: what do all of these platforms have in common?   If you juggle multiple projects, someone is probably sending you messages on all of them. Right at this very moment, perhaps. Here are some tips for managing the onslaught.

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Public communications is unlike molecular biology in many ways, but we’d like to suggest the most obvious difference is the level of linguistic complexity required.

Not every organization has to acknowledge "these uncertain times." But if you're going to join that conversation, it's wise to offer people something more than empty therapyspeak.

Guessing about what the future holds is an amusing and low-risk pastime—most of the time, newspapers won’t write stories about you admitting you were wrong—but we still think it’s best to be realistic. We also believe it’s important to have a sense of humor about these things. Because have you seen the world out there? So, having established the parameters of  “practical” and “fun,”  here are the themes that (we hope) will define communications in 2026:

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[The] forces that defined the past year—the AIfication of everything, the Trump Administration’s crusade to reshape the world, the ultra-personalized emptiness of digital life—still seem to have a head of steam. When they’ll run out is anyone’s guess. So here’s a prediction for the new year: people are going to start valuing a human touch a lot more.

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If the 2010s were an era of diversity in media, the 2020s are one of consolidation. This presents obvious challenges when trying to get small or medium organizations mentioned in the news. Success depends on riding the waves that already exist, instead of trying to make new ones.

Press releases sometimes feel like relics from a simpler, more innocent time. Much like fax machines, most people are aware they continue to exist. What’s less clear: who actually uses these things in 2025? And for what purpose?

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The ability to not sound like you were just lobotomized by a team of nonprofit execs with MBAs has become a way to stand out. It's “riskier” in a sense, because it’s easier for people to tell what you’re actually saying—and potentially criticize it. On the other hand, nobody’s listening to the jargon jockeys anymore.

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When we founded this agency last year, we had a pretty straightforward idea of how we’d run our business: do good work with our own hands, communicate honestly, and treat people fairly. We thought this would be the simplest path to earn a decent living and contribute something to human society. After a year of this experiment, here’s what we’ve found...

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Working with people you think are interesting is good for your own personal and career growth. If their ideas are good enough to work on for free, someone will eventually pay them for that, and you’ll have forged a professional relationship—or better, a friendship—with someone smart.

There’s nothing wrong with media outlets exploring new revenue streams, and newsrooms are always fluctuating in size. But outlets can only hollow out their core product so much before it collapses entirely, and a growing number of media organizations seem to be reaching that point now. Live events are not going to save them.

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Comms agencies that are good at their work tend to be curious and resourceful. We can’t pretend to be ignorant about the people and products we’re telling the public to trust. In all but the rarest cases, the agency knows what it wants to know. Business is never as pure or idealistic as we might want it to be. It does have ethical boundaries, though, and these are especially important at inflection points like the one we’re in now.

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