Phil Singer and the art of getting ahead of the story

Phil Singer found an unusual way to get a Sunday off: he ran 26.2 miles. In November 2003, while working as Chuck Schumer’s spokesman, he entered his first New York City Marathon. Near the end, he discovered that Sean Combs was running beside him. Singer finished in four hours and five minutes, just ahead of the celebrity. For a press officer, this was a rare arrangement. He had beaten the famous person while leaving the famous person with the attention.

His explanation was more revealing than the result. Schumer’s Sundays were working days, good for generating the next morning’s coverage. A marathon offered an excuse to be elsewhere. Singer’s later company would be called Marathon Strategies. The runner and the working life make the name feel appropriate, though a business, unlike a race, keeps moving its finish line.

The Sunday assignment

The congressional record captures Singer in an unglamorous but consequential position: communications director. In Schumer’s 2003 office listing, his name sits among the people responsible for keeping the senator’s operation working. The title sounds administrative. Its public consequence is considerable. Someone has to decide which subject deserves attention, explain why it matters, and help a reporter turn a politician’s position into a story.

Earlier work took him through the offices of New Jersey politicians Steve Rothman and Robert Torricelli. In 2004, he joined John Kerry’s presidential campaign, working on opposition research and as a spokesman. His career was already connecting two functions that would remain close together: finding information and deciding what to do with it.

By 2005, the Congressional Directory listed him as communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. A Senate campaign organization presents a different scale of argument from one senator’s office. There are more candidates, more opponents, more local circumstances. A fact useful in one race may be irrelevant in another. Research becomes a way to make those distinctions before the message goes out.

A conference call with bootlegs

Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign put Singer in a national press operation with Howard Wolfson. Singer served as deputy communications director and a spokesman. The daily conference call was one of the campaign’s instruments: a scheduled opportunity to advance an argument, answer questions, and try to influence what would be written next.

The preparation had its own cycle. Advisers discussed the following day’s call in the evening, then reviewed the plan again in the morning. Overnight developments could change the assignment. This is the less cinematic side of campaign communications: the conversation about the conversation, followed by another conversation to check whether the first one still makes sense.

Singer once reminisced about a call featuring nearly a dozen generals. Wolfson teased him for sounding as though he were discussing Grateful Dead concerts. Singer answered that there were recordings online. The joke works because it preserves a small professional truth. What sounded to outsiders like another call could, to the people arranging it, become a memorable performance with a particular cast.

When the spokesman becomes the story

The Clinton campaign also exposed the limits of Singer’s approach. After it ended, he publicly acknowledged mistakes in dealing with reporters. His account was direct: antagonizing them had interfered with the job. He recognized that a campaign’s fighting instinct could be aimed at the wrong people.

“It made me less effective.”

Phil Singer, reflecting on his treatment of reporters during the 2008 campaign

That admission gives the career a dimension a list of employers would miss. A spokesman can know the material and still make the exchange harder. The reporter asking a difficult question remains someone the campaign needs to work with. Skill at attacking an opponent does not automatically supply the patience required to explain a position.

Singer also described his dislike of boredom. The demanding work had suited him; its intensity had costs he was willing to discuss afterward. There is no reason to tidy those reflections into a conversion story. They stand as his own assessment of a period when the person managing attention became an object of attention himself.

A firm with room for the investigator

Singer founded Marathon Strategies in 2008. The business took his experience beyond electoral campaigns, serving corporate and nonprofit clients through communications and research. Today, he remains its founder and CEO. The combination is central to the firm’s identity: advice about what to say sits alongside work to establish what is happening.

Marathon describes a team of more than 70 communications professionals, drawing experience from journalism, government, law, research, digital strategy, and design. Its services cover corporate communications, public affairs, crisis and issues management, competitive intelligence, digital strategy, and creative execution. That is a broad menu, but the underlying problem is often specific. An organization needs to understand an audience before trying to persuade it.

The firm works from New York, Washington, and Albany. Those locations put national policy, state government, and corporate communications within the same operation. Singer’s earlier employers dealt with voters and reporters; his business also deals with companies, industry groups, nonprofits, and other organizations whose decisions invite public scrutiny.

There are business milestones as well. Marathon appeared on the Inc. 5000 in 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023. A growth list cannot tell you whether a particular message persuaded anyone. It does establish that the consultancy became a continuing enterprise, rather than a brief stop between campaigns. Singer’s role expanded from representing a candidate to building an organization that represents many clients.

The rumor acquires a balance sheet

One of Marathon’s public research projects examined disinformation surrounding corporations. Published in February 2022, the analysis covered a year of material, from November 2020 to November 2021. It counted 5.7 million mentions in which S&P 500 companies appeared alongside common disinformation terms. That measure describes associations in the monitored material; it is not a count of independently proven attacks.

Singer’s warning concerned preparation. He argued that attention to political disinformation could obscure the risks to businesses, and urged companies to monitor their brands before a damaging claim arrived. “When it comes to online disinformation, punting on preparation is not an option,” he said.

The project connects his political background with his corporate work. An adversarial story can travel across channels, collect repetitions, and become a problem for people who never saw the original claim. For a communications adviser, the first assignment is to understand that movement. The polished statement comes later, and has to meet an audience that may already have formed an opinion.

After the gavel, another audience

Singer has also argued for closer cooperation between corporate legal and communications teams. His 2023 writing on litigation stressed the reputational consequences of large jury awards. He discussed relationships with journalists, background briefings, statements prepared in advance, and attention to the digital material people encounter after a case.

The practical issue is timing. A court proceeds through its formal process. Coverage and public interpretation develop along the way. Singer’s argument asks corporate leaders to prepare for both, with legal and communications teams working together rather than handing the problem from one department to another after the verdict.

Marathon’s August 2026 report examined corporate verdicts from 2025. Its research identified 190 cases resulting in jury awards of $10 million or more, totaling over $25.6 billion. Those are the firm’s research findings, covering a defined class of verdicts. They give a scale to a subject Singer had already been addressing in his writing.

His published advice on companies taking positions on social issues approaches credibility from another direction. He emphasizes consistency, employees as well as external audiences, and commitments backed by action. The shared concern is whether an organization’s words can bear inspection. A statement may leave the building quickly. The people receiving it can take rather longer to decide what it is worth.

The audience moves again

In February 2026, Singer was elected to a three-year term on the PR Council board. The organization’s agenda includes practical AI implementation, clearer conversations about agency value and pricing, research tied to business outcomes, and professional standards. For Singer, the appointment also brought a chance to work on developing the next generation of communications talent.

He marked the occasion by looking back to 2008, when he launched Marathon as Twitter and YouTube were changing media. Eighteen years later, he sees another change in how the work gets done. His recent commentary discusses AI discovery and the range of material that can shape an answer about a brand or executive: major outlets, trade publications, videos, and reports.

That wider map suits the research question running through his career. Who is listening? What have they encountered? Which facts will survive being passed along? The campaign spokesman, the investigator, and the agency founder all work on versions of those questions. The channels change; an audience still has to understand the argument.

The 2003 runner knew his distance and could check his finishing time. Singer’s professional course offers fewer conveniences. A verdict produces another conversation. A new technology changes discovery. A statement invites a question. Marathon remains an apt name for the work, provided nobody mistakes the arrival of a headline for the end of the race.