In the public-relations business, the easiest thing to make is a list. A database can produce five hundred travel writers before lunch. A machine can address every one of them by first name. The impressive-looking spreadsheet arrives with columns, colors and the quiet promise of scale. Then the emails go out, and the first thing to fail is the very thing the spreadsheet was built to create: attention.
Roland Alonzi, founder and chief executive of Atlanta-based CONTENTO, recommends a more severe edit. Find the story first, he has argued publicly, then identify a small group of writers who are right for it. The advice sounds modest. In an industry that often sells reach, it is practically contrarian. The list gets shorter. The work before the send gets longer.
CONTENTO, founded in 2019, is the company formed around that trade. It handles strategic counsel, media relations, media training, crisis communications, reputation management, social content, writing, editing and events. Its lane is food and beverage, travel and tourism, and hospitality - businesses that want someone to notice a meal, a room, a destination or an experience, and then describe it accurately to other people.
The operating systemA publicist who remembers the trip
The firm's differentiation begins before the company existed. Alonzi entered travel PR in 1996. He went on to represent destinations including Georgia, Colorado, Greater Fort Lauderdale, Lee County in Florida and Jamaica, and later directed media training at Dalton Agency. In one recollection, he can still feel the old workflow: fax a release, mail another copy, then call. He has also traveled to more than 40 countries. Category knowledge, in his case, is not an adjective in a capabilities deck. It is accumulated mileage.
That matters because travel publicity has a peculiar verification problem. The pitch promises an experience. The journalist eventually has to stand in it, eat it, sleep in it or ask a skeptical question about it. A publicist who understands both sides can spot the difference between an opening announcement and a usable story. One is company news. The other gives a writer a reason to care now.
Travel journalist Sucheta Rawal supplied a useful outside view in a 2025 interview, calling Alonzi one of her most trusted PR people because of his responsiveness, professionalism and trust. Those qualities are pleasingly unscalable. They require remembering what a writer covers, replying when the deadline is ugly and resisting the temptation to promise confirmed coverage that no ethical publicist can control.
“Find a really solid story angle and identify a small group of writers who are perfect for the pitch.”Roland Alonzi, on the alternative to spinning your wheels
The proof pointHow zebras put a Georgia town on the map
Consider Madison, Georgia, a town of roughly five thousand about an hour east of Atlanta. Public meeting minutes from its convention and visitors bureau credited Alonzi with helping land coverage in Southern Living and Travel + Leisure. The engagement focused on the drive market around metro Atlanta and nearby areas. That is an instructive scale: begin with people who can plausibly arrive by car, not an abstract worldwide audience.
Then the town acquired a story with hooves. Georgia Safari Conservation Park opened in June 2024 across 530 acres, with giraffes, white rhinos, zebras and overnight accommodations. CONTENTO worked on its communications. In March 2025, TIME placed the park on its World's Greatest Places list. Alonzi later pointed to the park, the visitors bureau and MAD Hospitality as clients that appeared in the resulting story.
No honest account should turn that sequence into a magic trick. A publicist did not manufacture the rhinos, build the giraffe barn or write an editor's decision. The client supplied an unusual, visual and timely place. A journalist supplied independent reporting and judgment. CONTENTO's role sat between them: recognize the angle, build the relationship, make access and facts move cleanly. Earned media is a chain of independent choices. The publicist can strengthen the chain; the publicist cannot own it.
The economicsThe missing layers are part of the product
CONTENTO positions itself against what Alonzi calls the massive-agency price tag. The firm does not put dollar packages on its website. The offer is comparative instead: high-level counsel without buying the whole chassis of a large integrated shop. In practice, clients appear to buy scoped professional services - a campaign, ongoing media relations, training or crisis counsel - and access to the senior practitioner whose experience brought them in.
The experienced counselor stays near the pitch, the interview and the follow-up. The tradeoff is straightforward: less institutional capacity than a network agency, more continuity of judgment.
That model works best when the client's need sits squarely inside the founder's map of the world. A destination launching an attraction, a hospitality group opening a restaurant or an executive preparing for media has a clear use for accumulated category relationships. It works less well when the assignment demands a vast paid-media engine, simultaneous offices across continents or round-the-clock production at network scale. Boutique is not a synonym for universally better. It is a bet on fit.
The copyable partMake the list hurt a little
The lesson to borrow from CONTENTO is not a contact database. It is the discipline of exclusion. Write down the one fact a stranger would repeat at dinner. Find the five writers for whom that fact belongs to an existing beat. Read their recent work. Remove anyone who would need the first paragraph to explain why the story matters. Prepare a spokesperson who can answer in sentences worth quoting. Then be useful after the email arrives.
This is harder than blasting five hundred names because every removal becomes a judgment. It also reveals the uncomfortable possibility that the announcement is not yet a story. That is where good counsel changes the product. The hotel opening becomes a rescue of a midcentury motor inn. The butcher shop becomes farmers reconnecting a neighborhood with local food. The safari becomes conservation, accessibility and rural economic change, with giraffes wandering through the frame.
Alonzi named the company after an Italian word he heard around his childhood home. Contento means happy. It is a warm name for a business built on rather exacting choices. Perhaps that is the point. The reward in communications is not sending more. It is sending the one note that makes another person genuinely glad they opened it.