Businesses and community leaders trying to stay visible as local news outlets thin out may already have the right tool in hand: the press release. That is the argument Mark Willaman, co-founder of Newsworthy.ai, makes in the latest episode of The Building Texas Show, titled Building Content for the Algorithm: Are You Doing It Wrong? Host Justin McKenzie recorded the conversation in San Antonio, and the episode was published September 29, 2026.
The discussion centers on a question the show says every Texas founder, mayor, and economic development corporation now faces: how to get discovered when content has two audiences, humans and machines, and local news coverage is increasingly scarce. Willaman argues the press release format itself is the advantage. "What's intriguing about the press release is it's kind of a perfect document for today's environment. It's current, it's factual, it's structured, it has name entities in it. Machines love that," he tells McKenzie.
He offers a memorable frame for the shift: SEO gets you into the library, but AI retrieval decides whether you're pulled off the shelf. The two also discuss retrieval augmented generation and grounding, and why AI training bots scraping a website does not guarantee that AI answers will cite it. Willaman explains that Newsworthy.ai now displays a live counter of AI training bots crawling its site and walks through the schema and entity structuring behind the scenes.
The conversation maps a practical playbook for brand discoverability, including David McGinnis's 28-day news cycle and running press releases as six-piece campaigns. Willaman describes how a single source release is curated into 30-to-90-second audio snippets pushed to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, AI-narrated video for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and zero-click social posts. Both speakers push back on conversion-first thinking, invoking an updated marketing rule of seven touches across five platforms.
The implications reach beyond marketing departments. McKenzie connects the framework to his work with Texas mayors, small business owners, and site selectors, noting how the mayor series has helped candidates in communities without a local newspaper reach constituents. For founders and economic development groups in those areas, structured, factual content may be the most reliable route to being found by both residents and AI tools. Willaman previously integrated PRWeb into his HR marketing software before reconnecting with McGinnis to build Newsworthy.ai. Listeners can find the show at The Building Texas Show, which releases new episodes weekly across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
