The first office of Catalyst Media Factory sat above a bail-bonds business. It contained Jennifer Foster, a laptop and the suspicion that both would soon be looking for a new job. Foster had left an established public-relations agency after 13 years, taken two months off and rented a coworking desk because a kitchen table did not feel like the sort of place that reassured a client. She gave the venture a few months. The room, in other words, was less headquarters than controlled experiment.
What changed her forecast was not a viral campaign. It was proximity. The coworking space introduced Foster to people and organizations willing to take a chance on a new firm; those early clients supplied work, referrals and proof that the experiment could continue.
Experiments were familiar. Foster had studied microbiology and worked in viral research, extracting DNA from plants that might carry a tomato virus. The laboratory was meaningful, but her mind wandered while the centrifuge spun. A PR-writing class supplied the missing creative outlet, then an internship supplied the marble conference table, the intimidating polish and a career. The scientist became a publicist without quite abandoning the scientific habit: isolate the important thing, test it and explain what the result means.
A decade after that room above the bail-bonds office, the controlled experiment has become a roughly ten-person company. Catalyst is headquartered on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit, with satellite offices in Sterling Heights and Traverse City. It works beyond Michigan, but its center of gravity is unmistakably local: businesses, nonprofits, festivals, downtown districts and civic institutions that need attention to produce something more useful than applause.
The news is usually hiding in plain sight
The standard agency word for this work is storytelling. Foster dislikes it. Stories can sound invented, she argues, and this is not bedtime. Catalyst's narrower and more interesting claim is that an organization is often too close to its own work to recognize why anyone else should care. The firm's job is to find what Foster calls the “news nugget,” sharpen the key messages around it and connect it with the reporter, producer or editor for whom it is genuinely useful.
That makes the product less like publicity dust and more like translation. A restaurant opening has food, jobs, a neighborhood and a founder with a reason for risking capital. A nonprofit grant has a dollar figure, but also a change in who receives help. A downtown festival is entertainment to one person, foot traffic to a shop owner and a visual segment to a morning television producer. Catalyst looks for the overlap.
“This isn't bedtime.” The line is funny because it is also a boundary: earned media cannot rescue a claim that contains no news.Jennifer Foster on avoiding the “storyteller” label
The agency concentrates on media relations, social media and media training, then reaches outward into advertising, geo-fencing, graphic design, websites, trade-show support, grand openings, news conferences and crisis communications. Its documented clients and partners reveal the market it has chosen: Arts, Beats & Eats, Downtown Detroit Partnership, Downtown Berkley, Hudson-Webber Foundation, the Sterling Heights business incubator Velocity and Shades of Pink Foundation. Catalyst also helped promote the 2024 NFL Draft in Detroit. These are assignments where place, people and public attention collide.
A rate card, briefly visible through public glass
Private agencies rarely show their arithmetic. Municipal meeting packets occasionally do it for them. A Downtown Berkley agreement from 2022 priced up to 12 hours a month of media relations at $1,500. Social management added $600 and included an editorial calendar, roughly five weekly posts across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, comment monitoring, light graphics and audience growth work. The combined retainer was $2,100 a month; pre-approved hours outside the scope were $130.
In 2024, Sterling Heights' Local Development Finance Authority approved a $4,050 monthly Catalyst contract for Velocity. The scope included press-release drafting, print and web distribution, television and news coverage, podcast outreach and client highlights. These figures are historical public contracts, not Catalyst's current menu. They are valuable because they make the invisible labor legible.
Historical public monthly contracts
Two scopes, two moments, one warning against comparing retainers without reading the work
Not an inflation chart and not a present-day quote. Each contract carried a different scope.
The Berkley document is especially revealing. It names television stations, newspapers and magazines. It calls for calendar listings, holiday hooks, restaurant segments, spring-fashion pitches and follow-up. It even notes that some broadcast clips may vanish from monitoring services after about two weeks. Public relations, seen this close, is not a person having a clever idea at lunch. It is a system of lists, timing, judgment, persistence and receipts.
Rehearse the question you hope nobody asks
Catalyst's most transferable product may be media training. The version designed for Downtown Development Authorities begins with leadership: build concise messages, practice bridging through hard questions, understand how journalists work, prepare for a crisis and sit for on-camera mock interviews. A second phase teaches business owners and district spokespeople how to identify news, approach local reporters, pitch a segment and make it visually useful.
The distinction matters. Memorizing an answer can make a spokesperson brittle. Practicing the situation makes one adaptable. A useful training session does not promise that the difficult question will disappear. It makes the surprise disappear. The idea applies well beyond television: a board meeting, investor call, neighborhood forum or unhappy customer's phone camera all reward a clear message delivered by someone who has heard the objection before.
The first thing to fail was the calendar
COVID arrived in 2020 and erased the assumptions under a business built partly on gatherings, interviews and events. An intern who had visited the office once completed her entire placement from home, drafting releases, pitches, social posts, interview memos and crisis plans from a couch. Foster has said there was a moment when she thought the pandemic might wipe out the company.
What changed was not a sudden taste for reckless expansion. It was the team's operating tempo: fast decisions, constant communication, planning and mutual reliance. The experience reinforced Foster's existing instinct to scale within the firm's means. Hiring sometimes came later than a role appeared to demand, but the company avoided building a cost structure that required every month to behave perfectly. By 2026 it was still there, with the team enlarged and the culture intact.
That restraint shapes the client promise. Catalyst presents itself as an extension of a growing team, not a mysterious publicity machine. It asks many questions, tries to understand the business objective and chooses from a broad toolbox. The fit is strongest when a client has real expertise, a specific audience and someone willing to prepare. It weakens when the underlying claim is thin, nobody can speak on the record, or management expects earned coverage to behave like guaranteed advertising.
The part worth copying
A five-question newsroom test for any announcement
- What changed, and for whom?
- Why does it matter outside our own organization?
- Which reporter's audience already cares about that consequence?
- What can a camera see, a listener remember or a reader verify?
- Who will answer the uncomfortable follow-up without wandering off message?
There is a final lesson in the bail-bonds office. Foster rented the coworking space to signal permanence before permanence existed. The address did not make the firm credible on its own. It gave clients a place to arrive while she did the work that credibility actually requires. Ten years later, Catalyst Media Factory still sells that same sequence: find the fact, prepare the person, make the connection, follow through. Sometimes it also brings the giant scissors.