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This month, we chat to Shirish Kulkarni, Director of Monnow Media about effective storytelling. He shares his research about why the way we tell stories needs to change to make news more engaging, inclusive and informative. 

Isentia’s Insights Director, Ngaire Crawford also shares some of the trends we’re seeing across social and traditional media, and how we’re seeing the notion of ‘effective’ storytelling change for our clients.

https://youtu.be/tz8LuhjuzBA

Ngaire Crawford talks about the storytelling trends across social and traditional media

3:41 - Mainstream media is talking about:

1. Back to end-to-end COVID coverage with a regular cadence of updates
2. Anti-maskers are in the spotlight and the phrase “Bunnings Karen” has returned over 6000 media items
3. A slight increase in global coverage related to second waves of the virus.
4. Considerable reduction in racial inequality discussions
5. Across New Zealand where COVID isn’t quite the main focus, there is a lot of coverage about elections and electioneering.

 

5:12 - Across social media, there is a lot of division:

• Between openly calling out misinformation, and perpetuating misinformation.
• Between those ‘doing the right thing’ and those who are not. This is more about calling out individuals rather than organisations.

6:12  - On Google Trends, people across Australia and New Zealand are looking for search terms:

1. Kerry Nash (Bunnings Karen)
2. A lot of TV shows and celebrity content (Kanye West etc)
3. Sports (NZ)

 

7:06 - In terms of storytelling, it’s important to understand the context in which you are communicating. The things to consider:

• Impact of video - divisiveness can breed “recipients” or “evidence” based culture. Video is the easiest way for messages to spread quickly and for media to lift the story. Consider this from a risk perspective (media and customer service training) as well as your content - it might not the time for beautifully produced videos just yet.
•  
• Echo chambers - heightened emotional states can mean that audiences seek out information that confirms information they want to believe. Keep an eye on misformation that’s relevant to you and your organisation.
•  
• Media as a moral high-ground: Anti-maskers, “fake news” etc can cause a really visceral reaction from the public, and from news media. Unfortunately, this misunderstands the context of those arguments.

9:37 - The narratives to watch at the moment:

• Rules fatigue: People are getting tired of being told what to do, it’s a natural reaction (psychological reactance) but it’s something to be really mindful of when communicating right now. There is a heightened emotional state, especially for those who are entering a second lockdown.

Shirish Kulkarni talks effective storytelling

10:26 - Over the past year I’ve conducted research on how we can better tell news stories, and my findings can be applied across the communications industry. We are all storytellers in one way or another.

11:00 - We’re hardwired for stories, at an anthropological and neuroscientific level, stories help orientate us within the world. They are a virtual reality simulator helping us practice for real life.

11:53 - Typically, news stories do the opposite of traditional storytelling (i.e have a beginning and an end to the story). Instead, we (journalists) use the inverted pyramid structure where the top line is the conclusion and then filters down to the least interesting or least important information. 

12:39 - The concept of the inverted pyramid structure dates back to the days of the telegraph, the original newswire. It was expensive, unreliable and it made sense to put the most important information at the beginning, just in case you lost the end of it. Although we don’t use the technology of the telegraph anymore, we still use the habits formed by that technology which continue to define journalism and communications.

13:03  - We conducted research with 1300 participants and the results showed users prefer stories that work in a straightforward and linear structure, much like traditional stories.  More information was picked up as it fits with how we are hard-wired to navigate the world.

13:28 - Journalists are failing because they are ignoring what users need from the news. In an attempt to reverse that, I came up with six key principles that should be at the forefront of our minds when telling our stories.

1. Content - is it useful or relevant and does it help us understand the world better?
2. Context - are we providing enough context? News largely focuses on breaking or moving news but that's often to the detriment of context, analysis and understanding. 
3. Users have agency - they are not just passive victims of the news, they can be part of creating solutions and want the opportunity to choose how to engage with the news.
4. Tone - we need to consider the tone we are using. We tend to fall back on journalist language which is old fashioned and formulae.
5. Diversity and inclusion  - are crucial when storytelling. It’s about telling different stories, ones that reflect the richness of our societies. This is very important.
6. Inverted pyramid - is this the best structure to tell a narrative? What are the alternatives? What we are doing isn't working so we’ve got nothing to lose by trying something different.

 

17:24 - Based on these principles, I created a number of prototypes and tested them with users. When compared with a BBC news article, users overwhelmingly preferred our prototype. They picked up more information in less time and found it easier to navigate. This proves there is a better way of telling stories, we just need to be prepared to think differently and put users at the centre of our thinking.

Q&A

18:40 - How do you think the media coverage of COVID-19 applies to your research?

Media has a crucial role. The only justification to have journalism is to provide reliable and useful information. There’s a big thing about news being about entertainment and there’s a focus on the drama of news rather than the information of news. What do we need to know? We are users as well as the audience and this should be taken into consideration when wanting to drive engagement.

23:46 - Do you have any tips for making the linear narrative structure more effective especially through face to face presentations rather than emails?

What really worked for us was using a "narrative accordion". We had 5 questions, and the answers could be expanded and read based on the user's interest. It didn't matter whether the question was at the beginning or end as it was up to the interest of the user. Simplify what you’re saying, and question whether it’s useful to your users.  

28:15 - What have you learned about younger generations and their behaviours?

People have an incorrect characterisation of young people and get their needs completely wrong. There is a perception you can’t make a video longer than two minutes for the younger generation because they have a short attention span and are unable to comprehend what is being said. This generation is the most emotionally and culturally intelligent generation we have ever had. Young people aren’t put off by complexity or depth, they are craving it. Don’t underestimate them.

If you would like to view other Webinar Isentia Conversations: Communicating through Change:

Isentia Conversations: with Katherine Newton at RU OK?

Isentia Conversations: with Bec Brown at The Comms Department

Isentia Conversations: with Rochelle Courtenay at Share the Dignity

Isentia Conversations: with Rachel Clements at Centre for Corporate Health

Isentia Conversations: with Helen McMurdo at MTV

Isentia Conversations: with Daniel Flynn at Thank You

Isentia Conversations: with Campbell Fuller at Insurance Council of Australia

Isentia Conversations: with Craig Dowling from Mercury 

Isentia Conversations: with Stella Fuller from Bright Sunday

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From multi-national corporations to local government bodies, a media release is the bread and butter of any organisation.

It's the primary vehicle for delivering to the myriad journalists scanning both the digital and paper world for tidbits of information they can sculpt into newsworthy articles.

A media release that stands out from the crowd is much more likely to gain traction and, if you have accurate media tracking tools in place, can reveal a lot about your target demographic and its awareness of your brand. Of course nailing the perfect media release is no easy feat, but that doesn't mean it's impossible. 

While a good writer will gradually hone their skills over years of practising their craft, there are a few things you can do to instantly improve the quality - and open rates - of your releases. Boost your chances of exposure and consequent brand recognition by avoiding these seven deadly sins of media release writing:

1. Lust - your uncontrolled desire for wordy headlines

Conciseness is the hallmark of any good media release writer, and this extends to your headlines, too. While your headline should convey an idea of what the media release contains, making it too long turns audiences off and discourages them from reading on. Copyblogger reported that 80 per cent of people may read a headline, but only 20 per cent will read the rest.

Keep your headlines, short, snappy and creative. Incorporating meaty or surprising statistics into the headline will improve your press releases' chances of getting opened, as it immediately indicates what the rest of the text will be about.

2. Gluttony - your appetite for lengthy intros knows no limits

Journalists are busy people and don't have time to spend dissecting lengthy discussions on the latest and greatest developments at your organisation, regardless of how well it's written. A reader should be able to get the gist of your media release within the first paragraph or two at most.

Media monitoring analytics may be able to reveal successful patterns in your media release structures, allowing you to cut the filler, condense your writing and get to the crux of the issue as quickly as possible. Time is of the essence and convoluted media releases are unlikely to ever see the light of the day. 

3. Greed - you overindulge in promotional phrasing

Media releases are a balancing act between news and promotion, though many PR managers are guilty of leaning too heavily towards the latter. A media release is not an opportunity to sell a product or service and the language you use should reflect this.

Steer well away from salesy sentencing and avoid hyping up your organisation too much. Instead, present the facts in an objective and impartial manner, discuss the role your organisation played in the topic at hand, and let readers form their own opinion.

4. Sloth - you recycle information and use it in your media releases

Media releases feature a distinct style of language and structure and each one you write should be treated as an opportunity to teach consumers about your organisation. Even with deadlines looming over you, avoid copying text from internal documents and including it in your media releases.

Similar to how you would tailor a resume to get a specific job, media releases should be crafted to target a specific magazine, newspaper or website. Write each one from scratch and create unique content that will really hit the mark with your chosen demographic.

5. Wrath - you use excessive exclamation marks

Exclamation marks, most commonly associated with anger (wrath) or loudness, are one of the most ill-used punctuation marks in media releases. You may be excited about developments within your organisation, but using exclamation marks (or worse, multiple exclamation marks) to highlight your point makes the media release look spammy, overly promotional and untrustworthy.

Limit your use of this punctuation mark. Unless someone in your media release feels particularly strongly about a certain subject, it's unlikely that you'll need one whatsoever.

6. Envy - you try to copy other press releases

It can be frustrating to see another media release gain serious traction in your market, especially when you feel as though yours are just as well crafted. However, do not begin mimicking the media releases of other organisations in hopes of achieving similar success.

Be confident in your skills to create a winning media release and feel free to experiment with structures that are a little bit different. As noted in the slothful sin, a media release should be unique in style and content, and copying another's will not reap sustainable results in the long run. 

7. Pride - you write about events that are not newsworthy

You're proud of your company and you want the world to know about every little development that takes place behind its doors - we understand. However, remember that media releases essentially help journalists report on the news. If it's not timely, local, new, extreme, unusual or high-impact, you may need to reconsider how newsworthy your media release really is. 

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Audiences are no longer finding information through traditional search engines that favour established news outlets. AI models now highlight highly relevant and contextual information to audiences to often include niche and regional publications alongside major news media. This change challenges the old media hierarchy around tiered publications and pushes organisations to reconsider how and where they need to show up to stay visible in an AI-first world. 

Yes, organisations must focus on optimising their own content for LLMs, but will that always drastically increase the chances of AI models picking up your page? Probably not always. Smart strategy means targeting the specific publications your actual target audience reads — because those are the sources AI models retrieve when answering niche questions. 

It’s closer to digital PR than SEO

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is changing how brands approach online visibility. For years, traditional SEO meant focusing on your own site—optimising keywords, building backlinks, and improving on-page content. But AI models work differently. Instead of just using your website, these AI engines rely on trusted third-party sources to answer questions. This shift is taking place  gradually, of course. LLMs increasingly source from earned media (where it is accessible) and even offsite links from trusted sites. Owned media is still where the organisation has maximum control of how it’s own content travels, but a pivotal strategy shift is needed to match what AI models are picking up and citing.

To succeed with AI search, comms professionals need to think more like a digital PR strategist than a SEO expert. The best way to stand out is by earning mentions, quotes, and citations in the external publications your audience—and the AI systems they use—trust most. This does not make a distinction between Tier 1 or Tier 2 media. If AI models are crawling sites that mention an organisation, but the organisation does not acknowledge or even know those sites are being prioritised by LLMs, they risk falling behind in being the right kind of visible. 

To make this strategy work, looking beyond common metrics like traffic to the site or domain authority is not enough. Even a respected industry site will probably not influence AI answers as much if its content is behind a paywall or blocked from search engines. For AI visibility, accessibility to the site or page, structured data that can be crawled, and strong audience alignment are important. Since AI systems use both slow training cycles and fast real-time web searches (RAG), being featured on accessible, relevant niche sites helps an organisation show up accurately when models learn and when they search the web in real time. 

Why is Tier 2 media punching at Tier 1 weight?

According to Isentia's report How AI is destabilising trust and reputation amongst audiences, LLMs cite industry and trade publications about twice as often as traditional news sources. Company content and industry press make up over 60% of the share of voice LLMs use, while traditional news is twice as likely to generate negative sentiment. Thus, tier 1 outlets no longer automatically dominate AI-generated responses and may sometimes have the opposite effect.

Two main factors are driving this shift in which media is picked up by LLMs:

• The paywalled problem was further expanded on by Dr Momoko Fujita during the Digital News Report: Australia webinar that news organisations must figure out how to make paywalled content easily readable by LLMs. By bridging this gap, these organisations can ensure that AI tools deliver accurate, high-quality reporting rather than missing out on premium content. If not, high-quality coverage may never reach the model. Isentia’s Prashant Saxena, VP of Revenue and Insights, SEA, during a recent partner event with IABC APAC on Why AI Visibility is the next reputation frontier illustrated a paywalled Bloomberg story, for example, that was accurately summarised details it could read at the top level, but fabricated details about raised guidance, even though guidance had been cut. This is because it could not read the rest of the article and tried its best to assume what it can with the information that’s accessible.
  
• Specificity outweighs prestige. Tier 2, trade, and specialist publications are often more accessible, focused, and likely to provide the concrete, citable facts models need. Amy Chappell, Vuelio's Head of Insights Strategy, found a similar trend across sectors in her report on the visibility of supermarkets in the UK “ The role of AI, LLMs, and earned media in shaping reputation” and noted that supermarkets were most often cited by trade publications like The Grocer and Grocery Gazette, not national newspapers. Trade press stories, being more focused and well-sourced, provide models with clearer, more citable facts than broader national articles. This doesn’t mean that Tier 1 coverage does not matter — CEOs value front-page exposure because it remains highly influential. However, relying only on tier 1 hits now means missing significant AI visibility opportunities.

Cited vs consulted: LLMs read a hundred sources, but cite only a few

Which type of media gets cited relies upon how AI models scan different pages. If these models are citing much more niche media outlets, we can assume that a lot of these pages that are consulted could be a part of very relevant Tier 2 media that ends up actually getting cited, and that we’re seeing more and more examples of in AI answers.  At the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar on measuring brand visibility in AI answers, Prashant Saxena, Isentia's VP of Revenue and Insights for SEA, stated that in the search era "we would get sources on our page one, page two, mostly page one", and people would click through to form their own opinions. The combined click-through rate in that era was 35 to 40 per cent. Nowadays, he says, "it's just four to five per cent" — since LLMs provide a smooth, ready-made answer and "most of us aren't really checking the citations".

Communications teams now face a new consideration: the distinction between sources that are consulted and those that are cited. At the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar, Takeo Apitzsch, Hoffman Agency’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, explained that AI models scan hundreds of pages to generate an answer but cite only a select few to users. This means that the audience sees only a small, curated portion of the sources that actually influenced the AI's response and a lot of what actually shapes the AI answer doesn’t get visible credit. Therefore, organisations need to make sure they reach out to those publications that AI models can actually crawl and audiences trust the most. 

What does this mean for communications professionals?

We are seeing four practical shifts:

• Rebuild your tier list based on what LLMs actually cite, not on internal assumptions. A so-called “low-priority” trade publication or niche forum may contribute more to your AI visibility than a national outlet you have long targeted.
• Keep your reshuffled tier list fresh, not just correctly ranked. In Why is content freshness the new currency for AI visibility? we discuss that a page that hasn't been updated in eighteen months is far more likely to drop out of AI answers altogether, no matter how well it once performed. Getting the right tier 2 outlets on side is only half the job done. Feeding them (and your own owned channels) on an ongoing basis is the other half.
• Treat consistency as an essential. The largest gap between an organisation’s claims and what an LLM will confidently state is often due to inconsistencies between owned content and third-party coverage. When this occurs, the model may stop providing factual answers altogether.
• Shift your focus from share of voice to share of mind. It is now less about how much you are discussed and more about whether the systems mediating the most have got the correct information about your organisation.If the system holds the wrong version, your audience may never access the right one.

Structurally, as Ashley Knapp, Head of Brand and Corporate Affairs, East Asia at Schneider Electric noted during the webinar, these efforts can no longer remain siloed. Owned, earned, shared, and paid media have traditionally been managed by separate teams. Now, because of AI visibility, this required a unified approach, as models do not distinguish between departments but are first to detect inconsistencies. 

This also means reconsidering the PESO (paid, earned, shared and owned) strategy deployed by organisations since the way that LLMs access and prioritise them has changed. They prioritise brevity in content due to the high costs of GPUs and data centres. As a result, the shortest, clearest, and most trusted answers are favoured which benefits brands with strong reputations. Earned media remains important, but its influence now depends more on the credibility of the analyst than the platform. Shared content amplifies messages more than ever but is also where misinformation spreads fastest. Paid media is becoming more prominent in some models, though brands are still learning how this impacts visibility.

Media monitoring companies are becoming strategic AI visibility consultants

This shift requires media monitoring companies to evolve. Tracking mentions and sentiment across media channels has been central to media intelligence, but AI visibility has added a new dimension to this.  This means monitoring not only what is said about an organisation, but also which sources AI models use when answering questions about that organisation, and assessing how current, authoritative, and consistent those sources are. This gives media monitoring organisations an opportunity to own what they’ve developed and also be thought leaders in this space. Stakeholders value the “so what” advice much more than just knowing “this is what is being said about you in the media”.

Lumina AI View addresses this by tracking which sources ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and other models cite when representing an organisation, benchmarks citations against competitors, identifies narrative shifts before they reach stakeholders, and regularly scores AI visibility against four reputation pillars: Direction, Performance, Integrity, and Innovation, These pillars have always supported reputation management, now applied to a largely unseen audience.

If you're weighing up where a tool like this sits alongside the rest of your stack, our own comparison, Best AI Tools for PR & Comms Teams (2026), breaks down how AI-assisted coverage, measurement, crisis response and reporting tools stack up, Lumina included.

Because that’s really the mindset shift comms teams, and the firms advising them both need to make. As Takeo put it on the IABC APAC and Isentia webinar: “I fear that this is the mindset shift communications teams and their advisors must adopt. I fear that AIs will be your secondary, and if not, at least equal… audience in the future.” Beyond human visibility, reputation is about being accurately represented by the systems that mediate access to your audience, which is an additional layer that cannot be trivialised anymore. 

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Want to see which sources are shaping how AI describes your organisation? Get in touch about Lumina AI View.

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