Rick D. Smith and the Business Hidden Inside a Book Review

Rick D. Smith wrote a review of his own book. In most literary circles, this would be an awkward beginning. In his case, it helped reveal a business. The prospective reader mattered, naturally. So did another person, sitting between the author and that reader: an editor with a newspaper to fill and too little time to fill it.

Smith’s career has kept returning to that desk. He founded NewsUSA in 1987, after starting News Canada, and made the movement of stories his trade. Nearly four decades later, he is selling services aimed at a different intermediary: the AI systems people ask for recommendations. The distance between a newspaper column and a conversational answer looks considerable. For Smith, both raise a practical question about how a business becomes visible beyond its own front door.

Three books, one unexpected customer

His route into media began with accounting work and a computer business. He also wrote guides for entrepreneurs. Promoting them proved expensive; press releases attracted little interest. An editor suggested supplying a finished article, formatted for the publication, with a cover photograph. Smith prepared reviews of his books and mailed them to newspapers. He recalls that the approach helped sell more than a million dollars’ worth of his first three titles.

The service then found another customer. His brokerage firm wanted articles of its own. In Smith’s recollection, reader inquiries arrived by mail and were handed to brokers as potential leads. The thing he had devised to move books could move somebody else’s business forward.

There is a pleasing economy to that beginning. An entrepreneur writes about getting a company going, then encounters an obstacle his own manuscript cannot remove. The effort to find readers supplies another line of work. Anyone who has spent longer promoting a project than making it will recognize the predicament, even if they have never emerged from it with a syndication company.

A company built around the next desk

NewsUSA gives that original problem an organized commercial form. A sponsor has something to communicate. A publisher needs material its readers might use. The company packages a message as a consumer feature, with a headline, photograph and article, and distributes it through news outlets. The sponsor pays for the service; the finished material is made available to publishers.

The arrangement asks Smith to think about two customers at once. The organization commissioning a story wants its name remembered. The editor needs a piece that earns its space. Too much corporate self-regard makes tedious reading. Too little connection to the sponsor leaves a rather unhappy customer. Useful information gives both parties a reason to proceed.

That balancing act helps explain why the mechanics matter. Formatting, writing, distribution and proof of placement can look like administrative details beside the glamour of a campaign idea. They are also the steps that determine whether an idea ever leaves the meeting in which everyone admired it. Smith built a company around those steps.

Today NewsUSA says it guarantees placement on more than 2,500 news sites, with coverage across all 50 states. It describes a network with 170 million cumulative monthly readers. That last figure describes the network’s audience, rather than the number of people who read a particular client’s story. Smith’s offer is easiest to understand when the unit stays concrete: an article, a publication, a recorded placement.

It is an unusually specific answer to the loose request to “get us some publicity.” The customer can look for something that has appeared. Whether that appearance changes a mind remains a separate question. Publishing creates an opportunity for attention; the reader retains the charming habit of doing whatever they please.

Getting sales, and helping others get started

The titles of Smith’s early guides have the briskness of someone trying to get through a busy morning: Getting Started, Getting Money and Getting Sales. He has authored six books. These are practical subjects, arranged in roughly the order an ambitious business owner might begin worrying about them. The poetry, should it arrive, can wait until the invoices are paid.

His activities also extend to other entrepreneurs. In 2021, he was described as an early seed investor in more than 100 emerging companies, as well as an adviser, bringing contacts, media experience and marketing strategy to that work. Those are assets a founder can bring alongside money: introductions, a way to explain a product and some knowledge of how to reach its buyers.

He has taught through the Young Presidents Organization and judged the National Press Club’s Consumer Journalism Awards. He also received a Blue Chip Enterprise Award for reinventing his company. Taken together, those activities place him among people who build businesses, people who communicate for them and people who decide what deserves a reader’s time.

His education followed a similarly commercial path. Smith lists economics at York University, an honours commerce degree at the University of Windsor, and MBA studies at the University of Toronto. He also lists public relations accreditation. The range fits a career spent crossing between a customer’s business calculation and a publisher’s editorial requirements.

He continues to explain the work in public. His LinkedIn activity promoted a July 2025 webinar on helping nonprofits turn their missions into messages and improve visibility. For an association or charity, that translation can be demanding: the people closest to a cause know a great deal that an unfamiliar reader has never been given a reason to learn.

Smith has discussed syndication on marketing podcasts, including a conversation with April and Laura of PR Wine Down about press releases, mat releases and video distribution. These appearances keep him close to the questions practitioners ask about the format. He has a product to sell, but explaining its machinery is part of selling it.

The next reader asks a machine

The current NewsUSA pitch places AI discoverability beside media placement, search presence and sales conversations. Smith’s company now offers an AI Authority Audit and a broader placement plan intended to strengthen the information available about a business beyond its own website. The ambition is commercial and plainly stated: help customers become easier to find when buyers research a category.

Smith sums up his view in two words: “Authority wins.” It is a seller’s phrase, short enough to travel. Behind it lies the same concern that runs through his career: an organization can know its subject well and still struggle to become visible to people who have never heard of it.

“Authority wins.”

Rick Smith

NewsUSA’s description of its AI services contains a useful boundary. It says no reputable provider can guarantee that an AI model will cite a particular brand in response to a particular query. The company offers publication commitments while aiming to influence discoverability. A controllable action and a hoped-for outcome occupy different places in the transaction.

That boundary gives the new chapter some tension. Smith can organize the production and distribution of material. He can offer a service that examines how a company appears in AI answers. He cannot make every future answer behave like a reserved advertising space. His latest business challenge involves persuading customers to invest in a public record whose eventual use they do not control.

The commercial vocabulary has grown more elaborate since the book reviews. The practical work still involves deciding what to say, giving it a usable form and arranging for it to exist somewhere another person might encounter it. Smith’s advantage is familiarity with that work. The newer uncertainty concerns who, or what, will consult it next.

A town needs a memory

In September 2026, Smith brought the argument down to the scale of a community. “Local newspapers document things that frequently aren’t documented anywhere else,” he said. His concern was the gap between what residents know about their town and what an AI system can discover about it. A familiar business can be well known on its own street and poorly represented in the available digital record.

That observation gives his current work a setting more recognizable than a dashboard. A community carries knowledge in conversation, habit and memory. A newcomer needs some of it written down. Smith argues that local reporting helps create that record, with value that may extend beyond the day a story first appears.

He has extended the question to students, encouraging them to think about digital reputation before graduation. The audience changes again: a prospective employer researching an individual, rather than a customer researching a company. His advice follows the same concern with the information that exists outside a person’s own introduction.

For Smith, all of this returns to an old professional interest: helping a message find its way into someone else’s field of view. The business books gave him an early reason to work on it. NewsUSA made it his occupation. Now he is following the question into another medium, where being present may begin with making sure there is something accurate to find.