As local news outlets dwindle and AI-driven search reshapes how information is discovered, Texas founders, mayors, and economic development corporations face a new challenge: getting content noticed by both humans and machines. A recent episode of The Building Texas Show, published September 29, 2026, tackles this question head-on. Host Justin McKenzie interviews Mark Willaman, co-founder of Newsworthy.ai, in a conversation titled “Building Content for the Algorithm: Are You Doing It Wrong?”
Willaman argues that the press release is uniquely suited to today’s AI-dominated environment. “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. The episode outlines a practical playbook for brand discoverability, covering topics such as why press releases work well for large language models (LLMs), traditional SEO, and generative engine optimization.
The discussion also explores David McGinnis’s 28-day news cycle and the strategy of running press releases as six-piece campaigns. Willaman explains how Newsworthy.ai curates a single source release into multiple formats—30-to-90-second audio snippets for Spotify and Apple Podcasts, AI-narrated video for Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, and zero-click social posts—through its NewsRamp.com platform. He also delves into technical mechanics, including Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), grounding, and why AI training bots scraping a site does not guarantee AI answers will cite it. Newsworthy.ai now displays a live counter of AI training bots crawling its site, and Willaman walks through schema and entity structuring behind the scenes.
McKenzie connects the framework to his own work with Texas mayors, small business owners, and site selectors, noting how the show’s mayor series has helped candidates in communities without a local newspaper reach constituents. Both hosts push back on conversion-first thinking, invoking the updated marketing rule of seven touches across five platforms. They also point listeners to McGinnis’s paint-by-numbers book, available free in digital form at newsworthy.ai.
The implications are significant for Texas communities and businesses. With local news outlets increasingly scarce, the ability to structure content for machine consumption while still engaging human audiences is becoming a competitive necessity. Willaman offers a memorable frame: SEO gets you into the library, but AI retrieval decides whether you’re pulled off the shelf. As AI continues to mediate information discovery, the press release—often dismissed as a legacy format—may prove to be a powerful tool for visibility. The episode is available now wherever podcasts are heard, and more information about the show can be found at The Building Texas Show.
