About the Author

David A. McInnis, author of News Marketing — David A. McInnis

David McInnis has spent more than three decades building tools that help small businesses be heard. His entrepreneurial streak started early, improbably enough, with a lollipop business he launched at thirteen.

That instinct never left him. Over time, it grew into a belief that would shape his career: visibility should not belong only to organizations with the biggest budgets.

At the time, that idea ran against the grain. The PR industry revolved around the pitch: the phone call, the relationship, the gatekeeper. McInnis was not interested in improving that system. He wanted to go around it entirely by putting news directly in front of the people who needed it. Inspired by the pharmaceutical industry's move toward direct-to-consumer advertising, he saw press releases not as private messages for journalists, but as public, searchable assets anyone could discover.

It worked. PRWeb helped launch countless startups and gave tens of thousands of small and midsize businesses their first real opportunity for online visibility, long before content marketing became a recognized discipline. In 2006, PRWeb was acquired by Vocus, Inc., which later merged into Cision, sitting alongside PR Newswire.

After PRWeb, McInnis kept building at the intersection of news, technology, and access. Through Cranberry.com, he launched content marketing platforms aimed at helping brands create and distribute content more effectively, experimenting with persona-based native content formats. He also founded PriorThings.com, a blockchain registration platform for content creators that today powers the content provenance engine within Newsworthy.ai, BoostifyPR and NewsRamp.

In 2021, he co-founded Newsworthy.ai with Mark Willaman, a long-time friend and integration partner at PRWeb, creating what became the internet's first News Marketing platform built for the AI era. Newsworthy.ai was the first newswire to register press releases on the blockchain, establishing cryptographic proof of content provenance and origin.

It was also the first newswire to let companies self-host their press releases and among the first to meaningfully integrate AI into press release distribution through tools such as Newswriter.ai.

He later launched NewsRamp, a companion software-as-a-service platform for press release newswires that expands a single press release into a full suite of AI-optimized content, including articles, blog posts, FAQs, audio briefings, podcasts, video summaries, and zero-click social content, then distributes it across hundreds of media endpoints. Together, Newsworthy.ai and NewsRamp form the foundation of the News Marketing system he pioneered.

McInnis is widely credited with pioneering News Marketing as a discipline: the strategic use of news-format content as discoverable, multi-format assets designed to reach customers, AI systems, and media wherever they consume information. He has spent nearly thirty years studying how press releases move through each era of digital discovery, from early search engines to Google's dominance to today's AI retrieval systems.

He holds a BA in International Studies from Texas State University. He is a speaker, trainer, and mentor who regularly leads AI and digital marketing bootcamps. He is based in Boerne, Texas.

Over the course of his career, he has built three companies around one core belief: a well-structured press release, made public and preserved, is one of the most powerful marketing assets a business can own.

This book is that work.

Next in the Series: Brand Equity

When I was writing News Marketing, I realized the manuscript had grown past 350 pages. That was not a badge of thoroughness. It was a problem. Most people do not finish a 400-page business book. I wanted them to finish this one.

So I broke the material into smaller books of about 150 pages each. Books you can read in an afternoon. Books you can put to work the same week. News Marketing is the first. The second book in the series is Brand Equity: AI, News Marketing, and People — The New Brand Equity Stack, available free at brandequitybook.com.

Brand Equity explores how to build the accumulated trust, recognition, and preference that lives in other people's heads — and the commercial advantage that goodwill gives you. It turns brand equity from an invisible byproduct into an asset you can build and measure, through what McInnis calls the new brand equity stack: AI as the toolkit, News Marketing as the credibility and findability engine, and people as the reason the market believes you. Along the way it covers measurement, pillars, proof, culture, and the News Marketing engine that makes preference findable.

Each book stands alone. You do not need to read them in order. Start with whichever problem you are trying to solve. Success Pillars will be the third book in the series.

David A. McInnis
Newsworthy.ai