Shante Micah and Josh Moody: Good News

We interview Shante Micah and Josh Moody from Good News in Episode Five of Season Nine The Creative Influencer” podcast.

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, creators and influencers are discovering that traditional social media reach alone isn't enough to build lasting authority and credibility. Our guests are revolutionizing how creators approach public relations by empowering them to tell their own stories rather than relying on traditional PR agencies. Shante brings 20 years of PR expertise with a master's degree in the field, while Josh combines marketing and product development experience to create what they call a “done with you” approach to PR.

Good News helps influencers develop authentic connections with journalists and media outlets. Their philosophy is that creators can tell their own stories better than anyone else, but need the right systems and guidance to do so effectively.

For creators and influencers, this interview gives actionable insights about building authority beyond social media platforms. Whether you're just starting out or looking to elevate your existing brand, this conversation offers strategies for leveraging PR to amplify your reach and establish lasting authority in your niche.

A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:
I am joined today by Shante Micah and Josh Moody. Welcome to the podcast.

Shante Micah:
Thank you.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I have to tell you, this is my first double interviewee podcast ever. Seldom have firsts at a certain point of our life, but this is my first, so I am looking forward to this.

Shante Micah:
Oh, we're honored. Unprecedented, my goodness.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, so where are you located?

Shante Micah:
So we're located two different states. I'm in Utah, Josh is in Texas. Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Shante is the co-founder with Josh of Good News, and I know it's a softball question, what is Good News?

Shante Micah:
So good news is not an agency. I think that's the number one question we get. Are you a PR agency because you work in PR? We are specifically not an agency, but we are a business systems solution for getting the type of visibility you would get through PR.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So, and I want to unpack that because I've worked with a lot of PR agencies in the sense of with my clients, what's the difference between you and what a PR agency does?

Shante Micah:
So there are a lot of good PR agencies out there, and I've worked with a lot of them. I got my master's in PR 20 years ago. So I've been doing this for various corporate settings, agency side, but mostly for the brand for about 20 years. What we created at Good News is what I had always wanted for 20 years, and specifically it deals with the landscape of today. It doesn't have any of the gatekeeping and the delayed timelines that we see. So agencies, good agencies usually onboard within two to three months. Our timeline is two to three weeks, and we're structured in a way that our clients, they're sending the pitches from their own inboxes. So feasibly in two to three weeks, they can launch a full scale pitching and publicity pipeline across all media categories. And we've also developed the system so it doesn't require dependency. We certainly want them to be part of our ecosystem and we try to make it really enticing in all of the ways we support them. But because PR is about relationship building, the relationship building needs to sit squarely in their court.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So Josh,

Josh Moody:
Yes.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I want your version of what you do.

Josh Moody:
Yeah, this is

Jon Pfeiffer:
A good cop, bad cop. Okay.

Josh Moody:
Unfortunately, it's going to be both bad cops, so,

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay,

Josh Moody:
Buckle up. No, honestly, the way that I look at it is, so my background comes from a marketing background turn product slash software enthusiast. And blending that with shante's skillset has really led to a fresh paradigm, a new perspective of how we can do pr, right? So instead of the agency model of, Hey, we're going to onboard an agency, we're going to let you run it. So the agency is going to start pitching media sources and get you on all sorts of shows and get you placements and all sorts of print media. What we advocate for is, Hey, you're the founder. You own your business or you're part of a business. You have a story that you can more than likely tell, better than any agency, better than anybody because your story. And so we advocate for, hey, we want to help you, empower you to tell your own story through.

Basically we call our services more done with you as opposed to do it yourself or done for you. We do it with you. And so really what we focus on is helping you find the places that you need to be online. So finding the publications that make sense for your specific brand, helping you craft your story so that you can connect with people. And really that's going to be a thing that we talk about probably over and over in this conversation is we're human first. We want to help people be human first and connect with journalists not for quid pro quo. Like, Hey, I'm going to help you, you help me, but rather let's connect. Let's be friends and we can help each other out throughout the rest of our lives. So instead of owning that like an agency would and saying, Hey, that's part of my media database. We want to help other people build that network as well. And then lastly, we help people take those connections or those places to pitch and those stories merge them together and help craft their pitch for them so that they can be out there and really focus their time on human to human engagement.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So most of the vast majority of the listenership to this podcast are creators. If a creator came to you and said, I have my gig on YouTube and on TikTok and on the various channels to support that, why do I need traditional PR to help me build my brand? What would you say?

Josh Moody:
Phenomenal question. I would love to run with this one. So typically when a brand is first starting out, an influencer, someone who wants to be a thought leader or an influencer, they're not going to have a whole lot of eyeballs. So they don't really have that visibility that they need in order to start getting out there and having a lot of people really see them as a thought leader. So that's one core aspect is the visibility aspect. And we have kind of two other components here that credibility and clout that really they summarize around authority. So you need to be authoritative in your industry, but you also need that reach. And really there's not, at least in our perspective, there's not a better approach than starting to connect with other influencers, other people that already have that visibility and that authority and starting to be on their show, starting to contribute to their listeners, contribute to their podcast, and really be selfless in that respect of helping. Because then what ends up happening is that part of that audience comes over and says, I really like what John had to say. I want to follow what he's up to, and they'll come over to your show. And so you get that one, two punch of not only the eyeballs, but your co-branding with someone that already has authority in the space.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So to put it in YouTube terms, collabs,

Josh Moody:
Collabs,

Shante Micah:
A lot of collabs. I think a lot of creators, they think of PR as the thing they get in the mail. It was the product from the brand or the swag, but the before times of creators and YouTube, it really was what Josh is saying. It's that visibility with a massive amount of third party credibility. And if you can become the go-to expert in whatever your niche is, whatever category you are, and you're talking to people that you're collaborating with them, but also just very traditional media, I think your brand longevity, you reinforce that, which is important, especially with creators.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I mean the creators, they're now coming to see this as, some of them have been doing it for years. It's just like a sitcom. You can watch a sitcom for five years, seven years, and then all of a sudden you got to rebrand yourself even though you have loyal followers. It's like, I've heard that. So I got to now rebrand. I got to work on creating something to keep people interested, which is a bad transition into the question of developing the story, the creator's story, they're creative people just by nature, but how do you help them develop their story? Most of my clients have not had to explain who they are, they're just, they are. But how do you help them talk about their story and develop their story?

Shante Micah:
I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into understanding your story through the lens of what the audience cares about. So I've said this before, when you get to the part of the pitch, a lot of things happen in advance of the pitch, but the pitch ISS sole purpose is to make a stranger care. Your story is similar, so it is equal parts about you, but equal parts about the audience and why would they care? So that story is understanding your position within the marketplace, what the marketplace is, what your audience cares about, the way that they articulate that. And then it has to do with things like relevant cultural conversations. It has to do with the hot takes or the opinions that you would have where you would stand with this. We help them see that clearly, because within a pitch, you only have so many sentences, really only two to three sentences where you can talk about your story like, hi, I'm so and so, blah, blah, blah. So we help them do that in a way that it gets to the point people almost immediately think, yes, this person's for me, or I want to hear more.

Jon Pfeiffer:
How does this differ, if at all, from the traditional elevator pitch, that being, I'm in an elevator, I have 30 seconds to talk to somebody, I got to get them interested. Does it differ at all in concept, or is it the same kind of thought?

Shante Micah:
It does. A lot of the elevator pitches we talk about, especially now when there's so many places people can look, marketing is everywhere. Everyone has the elevator pitch. So there is a level of,

Jon Pfeiffer:
I got to stop you just a second, I've come to learn. They don't You think that, but they don't. But go ahead. I'm sorry.

Shante Micah:
Yeah, I mean, capturing attention is hard. Capturing it for a long period of time is the mystique. I mean, a podcast like this, it is probably the one last frontier where people are paying attention for more than 20 seconds.

Jon Pfeiffer:
But

Shante Micah:
I would say it is different than an elevator pitch in that we're not trying to be clever, but we are trying to, and it's hard to balance this to be as genuine and authentic as possible. And authenticity is, it's not something that's actionable. It's kind of what's left when you stop trying. So there's that element, I guess we do tee it up where it could be an elevator pitch, but then there's a whole other filter that we have to run it through where it's like, okay, now really a little bit of levity mean something. You're not trying to be overly clever.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You both mentioned thought leader, that means something different to each person that hears it. And I want to have Josh key up on this one first just because I want to be even out the speaking time. So what is your definition of thought leader? And I know to me why it's important, but why should it be important to a creator?

Josh Moody:
That's a really good question. This is something that Shante and I talk about a lot, which is we've started using this phrase effortless omnipresence. And I believe that that really sums up when someone becomes a thought leader. It basically means this individual has enough to say they have enough credibility, they have enough voice to be kind of everywhere. When people in your industry are going to look for the newest data, interesting takes in your industry, you're everywhere. You're omnipresent. And PR can be that effortless omnipresence, right? If you strategize it correctly. And over time, that turns into, oh yeah, we know John, we know Shante. They're the thought leaders of this space. They're the go-to sources. If I'm a journalist, they're the go-to source for any hot takes or stats or allows me to vet my story for creators. Hey, I know that John has an audience. I know that John has a really good perspective on what AI is going to do to this creator economy or what have you. So really it's being that pillar of the industry as opposed to just kind of a consumer of everybody else's value that is being created.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I got to follow up. What is AI going to do to the creator economy?

Josh Moody:
Oh, AI is going to do a lot. I think it's going to do a lot more than just the creator economy. I think it's going to affect ruin. But honestly, one thing that we're seeing a lot of in the creator economy specifically is we see a lot of people leveraging AI in the wrong ways for the wrong reasons. We see creators will use AI in order to just craft generic pitches and send those out the door or create generic content scripts for their YouTube videos or blog posts for their site. And we believe that's completely the wrong way to use it. The right way to use it is to use AI to outsource some of the kind of menial tasks that can be leveraged at scale. So in our use case, we use it a lot for analyzing podcasts, podcast hosts, helping us pull together a 360 view in this case of John, so that we understand, hey, this is John be and body of work. This is what makes Sim tick, and this is what his audience cares about. And then having that done in a relatively compressed timeline via ai now it's fun. We just get to be humans that connect with other amazing humans, and the game kind of builds on each other.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, it's funny you said that because now I'm being analyzed by ai. I have I think seven or eight former CIA clients, and one of them, they were interviewing for an entertainment lawyer, and they hired me and we're at dinner a couple years later, and I said, so did you vet me just being an idiot? Of course they vetted me. Yeah,

Shante Micah:
Yeah. They know more about you. You know about yourself.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Well, I know I was telling this story early to a friend of mine, and I was like, you idiot, John. Of course they vetted you.

Shante Micah:
That's what we do.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah. So what advice do you have for a creator to kind of self vet so they can make their self appealable more desirable? I don't even know the right word to call it.

Shante Micah:
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of not to dos that we would say sell, let's not dos,

Jon Pfeiffer:
Don't do,

Shante Micah:
Right? I mean, there's a few things that even in recent interviews that we've had where the host or the journalist has said, all they do is send a bio. They don't connect any dots for me. They don't have a link in their signature, just one link. I wouldn't say inundate them with links, but they don't make it clear enough and they don't connect the dots enough. So I would say if you're self vetting, your bio is probably not going to be the thing that you send unless you can send the two to three sentences we just talked about as your anti elevator pitch. And then everything else is about the audience, about the host's audience, about what they care about, which is their audience almost exclusively. So it would be having things teed up that were, if you're going to have a link in your signature, does that link go to a resource that lets them see almost all encompassing what they could see? Is it scannable? Is it really easy for a very busy journalist to get a good idea of, yes, no, am I going to spend two more minutes on this person or is it a no?

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I already know the answer to this, but I'm going to ask you anyway. How much time will a journalist spend in vetting pitches,

Shante Micah:
30 seconds if that anymore? They receive upwards of 300 pitches per day. And if you've seen what's happened in the media, traditional media, we're seeing more publications doing mass layoffs. So the journalists that remain, if they're freelancers, if they're actually in-house, they're required to do more stories with less time. So they do need your pitches, but unfortunately, the pitches they get, those 300 pitches they get are terrible pitches. So what you do with a bad pitch, it's not a just not right now, you could potentially go onto a blacklist with that journalist because you've already proven you're not a helpful resource. You don't know anything about them or care to demonstrate that. So it goes into a black hole.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So say you've done your research and you've pitched and you've made a pitch that actually is meaningful to the person you're pitching to. How do you develop that relationship going forward? Is it just you deliver that one time and then you deliver the next time, but how do you develop that relationship?

Shante Micah:
Josh, you can take this one.

Josh Moody:
Yeah, absolutely. So that question is at the core of why we love this model and why we advocate for people doing it themselves. Because you can develop that relationship ongoing. So not just, Hey, I'm going to be on the show one and done. That's it. But we actually advocate for building what we would dub a social CRM. So build a list of all of the people that you've met with and that you take notes on them. And you could do it in a spreadsheet to begin, if you want to build your own social CRM so that you can

Shante Micah:
Wait, I have to take notes. AI can take notes for you. Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I'm sorry. It was one of those, I'm talking like one of my students. Wait, I notes on this,

Josh Moody:
The pain points surfacing. Yeah, but really, I mean, it comes back to being a true human. So as you take those notes and you are connecting with a human, not just someone that I can get something from, it starts to become fairly effortless where you'll see something and you'll say, oh, that made me think of John. I'm going to send this over to him and just keep that relationship going over time. It echoes back. The core thing that I would say for any young creator or even older creator, which would be focus on value first, focus on value first, not for you, for others. In your pitch, focus on focus on the value that you're going to be delivering to that audience, to that host. And if you really start out and you come with that selfless mindset, it comes back around a lot faster than you can imagine. So if you kind of go in that human first approach that is selfless, it's easy, it's authentic, it doesn't have an ulterior motive.

Shante Micah:
And follow-ups are okay.

Josh Moody:
Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead, please.

Shante Micah:
You asked specifically, is it just one pitch? No, you can do, I would recommend no more than two follow-ups to a single pitch and then let it be, even if you don't hear from them, it doesn't mean anything other than maybe the timing's not right, but if you circle back to them with another thoughtful pitch, that's a new idea, and you connect those dots, yeah, you could do pitch most

Jon Pfeiffer:
Follow. I think you just hit the nail on your head that I hadn't been able to articulate quite that right. That way is the timing might not just be right

Shante Micah:
At

Jon Pfeiffer:
That point as opposed to, no, they've rejected me. Maybe the timing isn't right.

Shante Micah:
Yeah, you don't take anything personally unless they come out and tell you stop, then yeah, you stop. Except

Jon Pfeiffer:
Many of my clients are under 21. It is very hard to tell somebody under 21, don't take it personally if they don't accept you. And that's my job, is to counsel them through that. What do you say to the younger people who are pitching ideas to get over that hump of don't take it personally, just go forward and get your ideas out there?

Shante Micah:
Yeah, I mean, everything we talk about, I mean, we do talk about the pitch a lot, but what we really mean is that you get to a place where you have a pipeline, and a pipeline means putting in the reps. And if you only ever consider it, I'm putting in the reps. Nothing has to come of this pitch in particular, you don't put all of your hopes and dreams into a single pitch. So you put in the reps, you make sure that you're putting more pitches out into the ecosphere. Naturally, things will land naturally. Timing will line up naturally. You'll get a feel for that space. And I mean, there's trends always happening. There's seasonality. It could be that a journalist just wrote a piece, it was similar to what you pitched, but they haven't published it yet, so you didn't know.

Jon Pfeiffer:
You're telling me this is like dating.

Shante Micah:
It's a little like dating. Yeah. Do it smart, do it wisely. Have some boundaries in place, but you got to put in some reps.

Jon Pfeiffer:
But be careful of the blind dates.

Shante Micah:
Be careful of the blind dates. Yeah, it's like dating.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, so I haven't asked, but how did you two get together to start working together,

Shante Micah:
Josh?

Josh Moody:
Yeah, so this story goes back, I can't even remember 12 ish years probably. I've known Shante for about 12 years. And we met at a marketing agency that we both were working at the time. And it's kind of interesting. We never worked on the same team, but we were always colleagues through that journey, both running our separate marketing teams and consulting with one another to see what the other person is doing in terms of marketing. But then after that, Shante went onto a different role and led a very successful marketing team at a humongous company. And I kind of transitioned into, not pr, but product, product and software. And so I got really excited and obsessed with the AI front. And then down the road we reconvened taking everything that Shante had been doing for 20 plus years and all the marketing and software that I had been doing. And that's where it kind of blended together back into this thing. And we started chatting again, saying, Hey, the PR space has a PR problem. Let's fix that. Let's see what we can do to fix that. And if we can do it, helping people have a human first approach, it's a victory. In our book,

Jon Pfeiffer:
And I have not asked Shante about this, but it's behind your right shoulder. You are the author of PR Power Play.

Shante Micah:
You can't see what the glare, but yes, no.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, well, you can kind of see it, but yes.

Shante Micah:
Yeah. So the book came out a couple years ago, and the point was this framework that I've had for 20 years to make it as accessible as possible. So I figured, let's put it into a book. It's $5 and it is the DIY approach. So it is heavy on theory. All of our TED talks that we would give if we had to educate people on how to do this well and be a proper human, and then a framework.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And if somebody wanted to get a copy of that, where can you get it?

Shante Micah:
So if you go to our website, hi good news.com/book, you can get it. Plus a lot of bonuses.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Oh gosh. Oh, I was going to give both of your LinkedIn one-liners at the start of, this is Shante, it says, I am an expert in turning brilliant people into their thought leader dreams.

Shante Micah:
That's right.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And Josh, it is. I build marketing campaigns and tools, and if I wanted to work with you, how would I get in touch with you?

Josh Moody:
Best way is probably going to go to our website. So go to hi good news.com, and we've got a contact page there.

Jon Pfeiffer:
And can you spell that?

Josh Moody:
Yep. HI.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay, so it's exactly how it sounds. Hi,

Josh Moody:
Exactly. Hi. As in, hello. But

Jon Pfeiffer:
The last question I ask everybody, what question should have I asked you that I didn't? And the fact that you're pausing is a good sign for me. Right?

Shante Micah:
Well done. Well done.

Jon Pfeiffer:
I agree. Okay, then I do have a question for you then.

Shante Micah:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Okay. I want you to put your crystal ball in front of you.

Shante Micah:
Okay.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Where do you see this going in the next one to two to three years?

Shante Micah:
Oh, we talk about this daily and a number of, I mean, huge thought leaders in the marketing space in particular are saying the same thing, which is PR is the future of marketing. In that traditional marketing, you cannot attribute it the way that you used to. And AI has changed everything with Google search. So we are seeing more marketers looking at PR and thinking, I'll reverse engineer that. And unfortunately they're making it a little too transactional. But crystal ball is that PR is going to come to the forefront and that if you can do it well, because there's so much mystique, if you do it and then do it well, you're going to be a light years ahead of anyone else in your space.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So what's old is new again?

Shante Micah:
Yes. Yeah, it really is. The oldest quote, marketing is pr, but people don't remember that. They don't understand the headline is, what was it? 90 cents of the charge of the dollar when it was a paper ad. So my prediction is PR is going to get more focus.

Jon Pfeiffer:
Yeah, I mean it is. I'm seeing it with my clients. Every time you see something on Instagram, you assume it is paid for, and now I'm seeing you see a cute animal video and you think, let's ai, I can't differentiate anymore. So it is like, okay, fine. I'm just,

Shante Micah:
Which that's a good point too, is we're all experiencing ad fatigue, which means marketing needs to change. We don't want to see ads, we want to see third party sources, third party validation of your story. That's how people are building and trust. It can't be your own content marketing strategy exclusively, or ads, but it can be stories, podcasts like this where you're creating something with someone. It's just conversations.

Jon Pfeiffer:
So I try to keep these interviews to about a half hour, go to about a half hour. I thank you. This has been a lot of fun and I'll be right back.

Josh Moody:
Thanks, Jon.

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