Journal.

Woodrow will lead press office, executive profiling and creative campaigns as Zoom pushes beyond video into AI-powered work.

August had a sense of old institutions meeting new questions. New Scientist turned 70. The Africa Food Systems Forum turned 20. Our first Influence Economy report asked what happens when trusted institutions stop commanding attention. It's August wrapped.

Have you heard of the "AI shelf"? Associate Director and Lead of Digital Communications and Design, Ashlie Allen, explains why AI answers, presented to us as fact, often come from a surprisingly narrow (and not always credible) slice of the internet, and what that means for brands trying to be seen and trusted online.

Andy Burnham just proved our new report right. Because trust didn't make him PM. Personality did. This month's This Campaign Matters, written my our Head of Campainging & Influence Sophie Woollands, looks at why, and what it means for anyone trying to build real influence, not just social media views.

In a recent op-ed from our own Luke Jones, published in PR Moment, he asks a question the industry doesn't like sitting with: do we still understand what good communications looks like? Drawing on Woodrow's Influence Economy report, Luke unpacks why Andrew Tate outranks the Pope on influence, why a potato-tossing Prime Minister can out-compete a World Cup semi-final for attention, and why trust and understanding have quietly become two very different currencies.

In her latest piece, Steph Bailey argues that trust and influence, long treated as the same thing in our industry, have come apart. She traces how the attention economy rewards engagement over accuracy, why polished corporate messaging is losing out to authentic, direct communication, and what it means for comms professionals when even the BBC is telling its correspondents to prioritise TikTok over the Today programme.