That Solo Life: The Solo PR Pro Podcast

Episode Summary A cheerful holiday jingle drops on TikTok. Within hours, millions of people are using it to soundtrack flight delays, lost luggage, and crying toddlers in airport terminals. The airline never planned for that. Nobody does. That is the reality of PR in the age of the internet — and it is exactly what Karen Swim, APR, and Michelle Kane dig into in this Halloween-season episode of Tha...

That Solo Life — Episode 361 Hosts: Karen Swim, APR & Michelle Kane Episode Summary In the before times, there were people whose entire job was to clip your name out of a newspaper. A physical bureau, staffed by real humans with scissors, tracked press coverage for PR firms and their clients. They mailed stacks of paper clippings before anyone had thought to call it a media monitoring service....

Episode Summary Two résumés land in front of a reviewer. Same skills. Same experience. Same note that AI helped write them. The only difference is the name at the top: one says James, the other says Emily. James earns a 97% approval rating. Emily gets a comment that she can't even write a résumé herself. That experiment, and the research behind it, opens a hard but necessary conversation for a pro...

Episode Summary You've pitched the proposal, answered every question, and left the discovery call feeling great. Then — nothing. Or maybe you've sat in a client meeting nodding along as someone circles back on the synergized learnings of the integrated touchpoints, wondering if anyone actually knows what's being said. Or perhaps a prospect has just emailed asking for a Wall Street Journal feature...

Episode Summary If a client asked you right now to prove that anything you did last quarter actually moved their business, could you do it? This is the provocative question that opens today’s episode and sets the stage for an honest discussion on what PR practitioners are missing when it comes to measurement.  According to the Meltwater and WE Communications State of PR report,  21% of PR pros sti...

Episode Summary Kaitlin McCready calls it 'many lives of communications',  a career that has moved through corporate tech, the MTA in New York City, Jacobs Engineering, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation inside the federal government, and now Communio Strategies, her solo practice that is about one year old. But the through line across all of those chapters is the same problem: the gap...

Episode Summary Fractional roles seem to be growing in scope, including in Public Relations. Over the years, we have seen our fair share of creative titles, but does the Fractional title in Communication roles have longevity? In today’s episode, we take an honest look at the fractional title, extract what's actually useful, and give solo PR practitioners a real framework for deciding whether fract...

Episode Summary In a recent episode ( Episode 350 ), we addressed burnout and called it out as a business risk.  Today’s episode addresses a different reason to step away from your business with a micro retirement. Unlike burnout, micro retirement is a planned business response and not a crisis break. It is a deliberate, designed pause that you build into your practice before you need it, the same...

Episode Summary Some industries are on fire right now, hiring, growing, and spending. And some are bone dry. If yours has gone quiet, you've probably already heard the advice to pivot. Karen and Michelle are not here to tell you that pivoting is possible. They're here to tell you how. Episode 354 is a practical guide to breaking into a new industry when your current one has stalled. This episode i...

Episode Summary Most PR wins are hard to see in real time. The brand building, the reputation work, the slow accumulation of coverage that eventually shifts how a client is perceived.  Those results are often invisible until long after the campaign ends. Mitch Leff's World Cup campaign for the city of Decatur, Georgia was the opposite. The goal was clear: get people to the square. The measure of s...

Episode Summary In this episode of That Solo Life, Karen and Michelle discuss five headlines from newsletters, online news, and blog posts that caught their attention recently. From the hotly debated AI content watermarking to how negative SEO is being used as a competitive weapon to the giant hairball that rolled through the streets of New York City, they provide their point of view and offer act...

Episode Summary Quiet cracking,  distinct from quiet quitting, describes employees who are still showing up, still performing, sometimes performing really well, but are internally under pressure, uncertain about their job security, or unclear on what's expected of them. They're not checked out. They're just cracking quietly while holding it together on the surface.  In this episode, co-hosts Karen...

Episode Summary If you've read one burnout wellness listicle, you've read them all — sleep more, take a walk, set boundaries, breathe. Karen and Michelle aren't repeating any of that, because you already know it. Instead, Episode 350 treats burnout as a business risk: something that shows up on your profit and loss statement before it shows up in a therapist's notes. Industry surveys show 91% of P...

Episode Summary Michelle opens with the question a lot of solo PR pros have been quietly asking themselves: if I call myself a communications generalist on my website right now, am I costing myself money? Karen's answer is immediate — not 'am I?' but 'you already are.' What follows is a data-driven, practically grounded conversation about the specialization economy: the growing body of research ac...

Episode Summary Muck Rack's State of PR 2026 report surveyed 971 PR professionals. Only 18% were solos. The rest were mostly from agencies and in-house teams — which means that when the report says 66% of PR pros rate their stress above five out of ten, or that 55% worked more than 40 hours last week, those numbers were never really measuring a department of one. Karen and Michelle decided to buil...

That Solo Life Episode 347: Why Senior PR Pros Should Focus on Development Not Decline Episode Summary Are you in the later stages of your Solo PR career?  Today’s episode of That Solo Life is one of the most grounded, research-backed, and genuinely useful conversations the show has had about what it means to be a late-career practitioner in an AI-dominated landscape — and why the narrative tellin...

That Solo Life Episode 346: Why Independent PR Firms Are Outperforming Holding Companies Right Now Episode Summary It's the week after the Fourth of July, and Karen and Michelle are talking about a different kind of independence. It turns out that the future of PR looks a lot like its past: closer to the work, the relationships, and the accountability that got lost as holding companies scaled. Kar...

That Solo Life Episode 345: The New Rules of Trust but Verify Episode Summary Every solo PR pro has heard the same directive for the past year: show up in AI search. Get cited by ChatGPT, Gemini, and the rest. But Karen and Michelle pose a different question: when AI mentions your client, does anyone actually believe what it says? New research says visibility and believability are two distinct job...

That Solo Life Episode 344: The Secrets that Filmmakers Know About Marketing That Most Business Owners Never Learn with Jake Isham Episode Summary Jake Isham describes himself as an accidental marketer. He went to film school, realized he wasn't going back for a grad degree, and spent his 20s learning to build a business the hard way. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Creative Minds, a creative...

That Solo Life Episode 343: What Solo PR Pros Need to Know About IP, AI Legal Risk and Building a More Valuable Agency Episode Summary Most solo practitioners have contracts. What they don't have is a strategy. Sharon Toerek, founder and principal of Legal+Creative | Toerek Law, and an intellectual property attorney whose entire practice serves independent marketing, advertising, PR, and creative...

That Solo Life Episode 342: What the 2026 USC Global Communications Report Says About PR Today Episode Summary Karen and Michelle open with a question that lands before the intro music fades: When was the last time a client approved a statement without pushback? The answer tells you everything about the communications environment right now and so does the report they spend this episode unpacking....

That Solo Life Episode 341: The Leap, the AI Edge and Authentic Leadership Episode Summary Kara Ryan spent 20 years of her career navigating corporate communications in some of the most regulated industries in the world - financial services, healthcare, and medical devices. In April of this year, she closed that chapter and opened Klyr Strategies, a solo communications advisory built upon the high...

That Solo Life Episode 340: Why Right Now Is Your Moment as a Solo PR Pro Episode Summary In this episode, Karen and Michelle deliver a timely reminder that periods of disruption are not just a challenge for solo PR pros — they are an opening. As larger agencies navigate layoffs and major brands question whether their big agency retainers are actually serving them, seasoned independents are unique...

That Solo Life Episode 339: Why Smart Solos Are Watching These Five Trends Right Now Episode Summary Karen and Michelle are back with one of their favorite formats — a roundup of what's happening in the world right now and what it means for solo and small agency PR, communications, and marketing professionals. From the growing opportunities in internal communications to a telling shift in how and...

Episode 338: One PR Pro Shows There is Purpose in the Press  With Candice Smith, MEd, Founder & Chief Strategist @ French Press Communications    Episode Summary Running an independent public relations business requires more than just excellent communication skills. You need a solid strategy, a growth mindset, and a commitment to continuous learning. In episode 338 of That Solo Life, hosts Kar...