There's a lot of chatter about "going direct" these days — where a company founder and sometimes other key people use social platforms, newsletters and all the other tools of media themselves — eschewing the traditional route of telling their stories through journalists. Whether or not you think it's a smart PR strategy, there's a lesson here for the media, too: bypassing intermediaries is an essential part of audience "ownership" — one of the biggest concerns in a world where AI chatbots answer user questions without connecting those users to the sources who originated the information. To better understand how publishers and the media can re-assert ownership of their own audiences, I talked to Mike Donoghue for The Media Copilot podcast. Mike is CEO of @JoinSubtext, which transforms text messaging into a broadcast channel. Publishers use Subtext to create conversations with readers, celebrities use it to connect with fans, and all those interactions can be two-way. All they need to do is hit reply. Lots if insights on how adapt media strategy in an AI-mediated world. I hope you check out the convo.