As local news outlets dwindle and AI-powered search reshapes how audiences find information, Texas founders, mayors, and economic development leaders face a new challenge: getting discovered by both humans and machines. In the latest episode of The Building Texas Show, host Justin McKenzie speaks with Mark Willaman, co-founder of Newsworthy.ai, about why the press release is uniquely suited to this dual-audience environment.
Willaman, who previously integrated PRWeb into his HR marketing software, contends that the press release format itself is the moat. "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: SEO gets you into the library, but AI retrieval decides whether you're pulled off the shelf.
The conversation digs into the mechanics of modern discoverability. Willaman explains how Newsworthy.ai displays a live counter of AI training bots crawling its site, walks through schema and entity structuring, and 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. The episode also covers Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), grounding, and why AI training bots scraping a site does not guarantee AI answers will cite it.
McKenzie connects the framework to his own 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. Both push back on conversion-first thinking, invoking the updated marketing rule of seven touches across five platforms.
The implications are significant for Texas communities where local news coverage is thin. Willaman and McKenzie map a practical playbook for brand discoverability in the AI era, including running press releases as six-piece campaigns over David McGinnis's 28-day news cycle. For local leaders and entrepreneurs, the message is clear: structured, factual content is no longer just good PR—it is essential infrastructure for being found by the algorithms that increasingly mediate public attention. The episode is available on The Building Texas Show and wherever podcasts are heard.
