Is That the Real CNN? The Perils of Pay-to-Play PR

When production companies pretended to be newsrooms, startups paid the price. Here’s how we fought back—with earned media.

Long before AI started churning out soulless pitches and “sponsored content” blurred the line between news and native ads, there was another menace infecting the media world: Pay-to-Play (P2P) PR.

If you were in the trenches in the early 2000s, you’ll remember the Boca Raton hustle. Production companies—often operating from unassuming office parks in Florida—cold-called CEOs claiming to be from “CNN” or “Fox News.” The pitches were always breathless: We’re considering you for a feature on innovation in America. Sometimes they invoked the name of a retired anchor. Sometimes they had the audacity to reference a real show. The phone calls sounded urgent. But there was always a catch: a “production fee” that ran upwards of $25,000–$40,000 for a spot that aired at 3 a.m. on a cable access channel with a logo vaguely resembling a news network.

These weren’t one-off grifts. …