the sPRint: Taylor Swift vs America 250
July 9, 2026| Was the ‘wedding of the century’ a PR success or blunder? We also look at the decline of climate journalism and why PR pros should ditch the transactional approach to media relationships.
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The Warmup
July Fun Fact 📅 July 16th is World PR Day. Since 2021, this has been the day PR professionals worldwide recognize strategic excellence, set industry standards, and celebrate work that shapes trust across every continent. This year’s theme is “The Golden Age of Strategic PR.”
The World Cup breaks a Google Search record ⚽ Despite the challenges ahead for Google Search as AI chatbots increase in popularity, the search engine saw “the most queries per second happen right after the winning goal” between Argentina and Egypt on Tuesday.
America the Beautiful 🇺🇲 The Spry PR team celebrated the Independence Day holiday with friends, family, and a lot of beautiful nature. From the mountains of Utah to the woods of Virginia, see photos of our adventureson LinkedIn.
Fast Twitch
Taylor Swift Gets Hitched. Is it PR Genius or Disaster?
Over the holiday weekend, many people were celebrating something other than Independence Day: Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce officially tied the knot in a star-studded ceremony at Madison Square Garden in NYC on July 3.
The wedding received so much attention that, on their wedding day, mentions of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce actually exceeded mentions of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In fact, between July 2 and July 6, overall mentions of the wedding (roughly 82,000) fell just shy of mentions of a major historical milestone for the entire country (roughly 96,000)—a 15% difference. Think about that for a second.
The keyword here is attention. Taylor and Travis have received plenty of flack online for the "narcissistic spectacle,” while many others praised them and were eager to get more details on the wedding party. But how do we measure attention versus real impact? To get answers, I invited communications strategist Matt See to help me break down the PR implications of the wedding, including:
Why the ironclad NDAs, MSG venue, and $26M in charitable donations were strategic moves, not just optics
The one stakeholder the wedding team actually missed
The difference between "noise" (angry posts, snarky columnists) and real stakeholders—and what you can learn from this example for your own brand
Whether Taylor Swift risks overexposure, and how she's avoided the trap other celebrities fall into
What her Eras Tour, re-recorded albums, and the Scooter Braun masters battle reveal about her long-game PR strategy
Matt brings 20+ years of experience repping brands like Disney, Nicki Minaj, Gatorade, and Lowe's Motor Racing, plus a decade advising Fortune 20 healthcare execs.
Listen and subscribe to Good Marketing with Stephanie on Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Podcasts.
Slow Twitch
An Argument for Protecting Climate Journalism
Reporters and news organizations have been sounding the alarm on a concerning new trend: The slow-fade of climate journalism.
As it stands, climate journalism is already underrepresented, making up just 0.55% of reporting in the U.S. In a new essay for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Suzannah Evans Comfort and Jill Hopke argue that volume is only one part of the story—and that we should be paying closer attention to layoffs at major news organizations like The Washington Post or the shuttering of the climate desk at NPR.
“Climate reporting must be informed by an underlying understanding of the human-caused drivers of climate change. This is why specialist positions held by journalists familiar with reporting on the climate crisis are essential,” write Comfort and Hopke. “News organizations with climate or environmental reporters on staff are much more likely to connect extreme heat to climate change in coverage and to discuss climate solutions, as compared to news organizations without these dedicated positions in the newsroom.”
The Home Stretch
No More “Transactional Relationships” with Media
Journalists are a people, too—and nobody likes to be the subject of a transactional relationship. That’s why the specialty is called “media relations,” not “media tit-for-tat.”
"The best media relationships I've built didn't start with a client need. They started with something I shared without expecting anything back." — Andrew Petro
A transactional relationship is a dynamic based on conditional giving, where interactions operate like a business deal or a "this-for-that" exchange. At the end of the day, we all need to earn coverage for our clients or our brand, but PR & communications Leader Andrew Petro recently called out in a LinkedIn post that interactions with journalists do not need to be (and should not be) limited to pitches.
“If you want a real (non-transactional) relationship, find ways to engage without an ask attached,” Petro writes. “A tip they can use. A genuine response to something they wrote. A comment on their social post. The best media relationships I've built didn't start with a client need. They started with something I shared without expecting anything back.”
If we look at the reality staring down journalists today, we’d see layoffs, shrinking newsrooms, and a wave of AI-generated pitches that are enough to make your head spin. So, instead of only reaching out when you need something, ditch the transactional approach and find more meaningful ways to engage with journalists.
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