New communications company combines AI and human expertise to deliver better positioning, messaging and content in a fraction of the time and cost
SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Lisa Rodriguez and Melissa Laverty spent decades doing communications work the traditional way. They know how good it can be. They also know how long it takes and how much clients pay for the process around it.
When technology changed what was possible, they built a different way to do it.
Today, Rodriguez and Laverty launched Slugline, a communications company built to rethink the traditional PR practices with AI. Slugline helps companies find the right story, prove it against the market, and turn it into content.
"Every ad, pitch, article, speech, video and social post starts with the story," said Rodriguez, co-founder of Slugline and a former journalist who has spent more than 30 years in communications. "Companies spend an enormous amount of money making content. We think there's a smarter way to get the story right first."
That's where Slugline starts.
Slugline starts with leaders' own words and what they know about their company. It then tests those ideas against the market, competitors, and the audiences that matter. Its technology can analyze far more information, make connections, and test ideas at a scale a traditional PR agency process can't match, compressing months of discovery and strategy into weeks. Experienced journalists and communicators then use that intelligence to decide what matters and what story to tell.
"We didn't want to use AI just to do the same work faster," said Laverty, co-founder of slugline who built Slugline's proprietary interview and analysis agent. "We created something that makes the answer fundamentally better. It gives us evidence for why a story is the right one, who it will matter to, and where it might fail."
Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider helped shape the Slugline model early on and later became a pilot client.
"There's a lot of technology focused on making more content," said Schneider. "What interested me about Slugline was that Lisa and Melissa were starting one step earlier: What's the right story, and how do you know? They've built a much faster way to answer that without taking experienced people out of the equation."
Once the story is right, Slugline makes the content.
Founding Creative Technologist Luke Rodriguez leads content development across film, photography and emerging creative technology. He founded a Brooklyn creative studio after graduating from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and has created work for brands including Formula 1, Mercedes-Benz and Meta.
Slugline has no traditional PR agency layers. Its team brings together experienced journalists, strategists, writers, filmmakers, photographers and other specialists, with more than 100,000 hours of combined experience helping hundreds of clients get the story right. Together, they turn the story into a season of video, social and editorial content.
"Slugline delivered a high-quality library of video, social, and editorial content, backed by a clear story architecture that gave our messaging consistency, focus, and impact," said Katherine Atkinson, SVP, Global Sales & Marketing at Rapid Micro Biosystems, a Slugline pilot client.
Slugline tested its model with pilot clients ranging from early-stage startups to public companies, including Alloy, Artyc, Bluesky, Doximity, and Rapid Micro Biosystems.
Early work has ranged from identifying the message a public company later led with on an earnings call to helping a startup zero in on the core story its CEO would tell publicly weeks later, and taking another client's narrative from strategy to the main stage at its flagship customer event.
Learn more atslugline.ai.
About Slugline
Slugline helps companies find the right story, prove it against the market and turn it into content. It uses technology to see more, test more and make better recommendations, with experienced people making the decisions and creating the work.
The name comes from journalism where a slugline identifies a story before it is written so everyone working on it knows what the story is. Slugline works the same way. Know the story before you start making things!
Media Contact
David Schutzman, Slugline, 1 203 550-8551, [email protected], https://slugline.ai/
SOURCE Slugline
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