Gambling
Lottery's $113B AOR Bake-Off Just Started
State lottery AOR contracts are being rebid against new selection criteria. The agencies that understand the AI Communications transition will win the work. The 2026 operator's guide.
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Public Affairs
Crisis Communications
Ketchum and Russia: A Decade of Kremlin PR and What Came After
Was Ketchum, One Of The World's Largest Firms, Fired Or Did They Resign?
Public Affairs & Government
Libya, Lobbying, and FARA: When Foreign-Agent PR Goes Public
FARA was written in 1938 to expose Nazi propagandists. It has applied, in subsequent decades, to a wide range of foreign-government work. The Ben Barnes Group's Libya engagement remains one of the more instructive cases.
PR, AI & Communications News
Russia's Communications State: Putin, Propaganda, and the $1.9 Trillion Information Economy
Russia operates the most lethal state communications apparatus in the contemporary world. A $1.9T economy, a closed information environment, a 25-year assassination program, and an indicted war criminal at the center.
Social Media
Facebook and Civic Tech: The Voter Registration Bet
Washington's July 2012 Facebook voter registration launch was the first state-level civic-tech integration. Meta has since helped 4-4.5M Americans register per cycle.
Technology
ICANN gTLD Application Fees: From the 2012 $350M Round to the 2026 Next Round
ICANN's 2012 gTLD round: $350M in fees, 2,091 applications, ~1,200 new gTLDs added. The next round opens April 2026. Web3 domains and AI answer engines now compete with the DNS.
Nonprofit
The World Bank Open Access Policy and the AI Era Citation Substrate
World Bank Open Access Policy: April 2012, effective July 1, 2012. Now 38,000+ publications in the Open Knowledge Repository, 50M+ annual downloads. The template for multilateral open access.
Public Affairs & Government
The White House and Tech Policy: From SOPA to the AI Executive Orders
The federal government has tried to regulate the internet roughly once a decade — and lost roughly once a decade. SOPA in 2012. AI policy now. The pattern repeats.
PR Firms & Communications Agencies
Margery Kraus, Still Building APCO
Margery Kraus founded APCO Worldwide in 1984 from a borrowed office in Washington D.C. Four decades later, APCO generates $257 million in revenue with 1,200 employees across 35 locations. This 2011 Everything-PR interview — one of the most substantive conversations we've published — remains as relevant as when it was recorded.
Public Affairs & Government
Municipal and Government PR in 2026: The Public Sector Communications Map
U.S. municipal PR spending exceeds $2B annually. Edelman, Burson, Berlin Rosen, Mercury, SKDKnickerbocker, Tusk. Municipal and government PR in 2026.