From Capitol Hill to Communications Architecture

Joshua Altman didn’t learn communications in a brand workshop. He learnt it on the floors of Congress.

Fresh out of journalism school, he landed on Capitol Hill, lugging 50–100 pounds of cameras, tripods and gear through the corridors of power. This was before you could shoot everything on a phone. If a story was going to make air, it was because someone like Joshua had:

• Found the angle
• Gotten the quote
• Turned chaos into a clear narrative — fast

At first, he imagined a long career as a producer and reporter. But, like many of the best transitions, his pivot into consulting didn’t come from a grand plan. It came from a series of small “yes” moments.

A corporate project needed someone who could write clearly. Another needed a short video. Someone else needed help with a website. Because he was already doing visual, multimedia storytelling, Joshua could bridge all three — and suddenly the line between newsroom and strategy blurred.

“There was no single day I said, ‘I’m leaving journalism forever.’ It was just the culmination of events.”

Over time, those one-off projects revealed a bigger pattern: leaders didn’t just need content. They needed someone who understood how all the pieces of communication fit together.

Building Beltway Media & Seeing the Gap

As Joshua took on more corporate and public sector work, he noticed the same structural problem repeating across industries.

Organisations tended to buy communications as silos:

• An ad agency to handle campaigns
• A web development firm to build the site
• A social media shop to chase likes and impressions
• Sometimes a PR firm to work with media and spin up coverage

Each team did its own job reasonably well. But the story was fractured. Marketing wasn’t talking to product. Product wasn’t feeding insights into sales. Internal communications weren’t aligned with what customers were seeing in the wild.

Joshua founded Beltway Media to tackle this problem head on — particularly for small and medium-sized businesses who could never justify a full-time communications executive on salary.

Rather than pitching a menu of services (“we’ll build you a website” or “we’ll run your socials”), Beltway Media walks in asking bigger questions:

• What decisions do you need your stakeholders to make?
• How do they currently see you?
• Where are messages being dropped, duplicated, or distorted?

That’s where the language of communications architecture comes in — seeing all the touchpoints as a single ecosystem, not isolated assets.

What Is a Fractional Chief Communications Officer?

Most founders know what a CMO does. Fewer could clearly explain the role of a Chief Communications Officer — and fewer still have heard of a Fractional CCO.

Joshua describes it simply:

“Our job is to do two things: shape perception, and build and maintain trust.”

Where a marketing team is often focused on campaigns, funnels and lead generation, the CCO zooms out. They look across:

• Investor decks and board papers
• Internal all-staff messages
• Websites, social content and newsletters
• Sales scripts, launch plans and product announcements
• Media relations and reputation management

Then they ask: “Does this all line up? Or are we saying different things to different people and hoping no one notices?”

The fractional part simply means this leadership function is delivered on a part-time, deeply embedded basis. Instead of hiring a full-time CCO on a 40-hour week, a business might bring Beltway Media in for:

• 5 hours a month — to guide strategy, review messaging and keep everyone aligned
• Up to 20 hours a week — to operate almost like an in-house executive without the full-time overhead

Crucially, this isn’t a detached agency arrangement. Fractional CCOs sit in leadership meetings, weigh in on decisions and act like internal owners of the communications function.

“We’re not your email marketing firm. We’re not your ‘launch the widget’ agency. We’re there as part of your leadership team, just not 40 hours a week.”

Communication as the Operating System for Decision-Making

Early in the conversation, Sam pulls on a phrase Joshua uses often: communication as the operating system for decision-making.

It’s a powerful reframing. Instead of thinking about communications as “getting the brand out there”, Joshua looks at it as:

• How quickly can people make a confident decision?
• Do they know what we stand for?
• Is the information they need clear, accessible and consistent?

Inside the business: internal comms as a force multiplier

When internal communications are poor, teams waste time. They dig through inboxes hunting for that one email with this year’s priorities. They hesitate in front of customers because they’re not sure whether the offer has changed.

When communications are strong:

• Everyone knows the story — why this strategy, why this product, why now
• Sales, product and operations are aligned on messaging and direction
• Investor and board conversations are grounded in the same narrative

That alignment removes friction. Decisions come faster because nobody is arguing about basic facts.

Outside the business: making it easy to buy (or not)

Externally, the same principle applies.

A customer who has been steadily educated about your product is more confident saying:

• “Yes, this upgrade is for me” or
• “No, what I already have is fine”

Both are good outcomes. The first drives revenue. The second avoids a refund, a complaint, or a churned customer who feels misled.

“If they buy something they don’t really want, you don’t just lose the sale. You lose trust.”

When you look at communications this way, it stops being a discretionary line item. It becomes infrastructure. It’s the system that lets the whole organisation think, move and decide with less drag.

Values, Culture & the Internal Story

Most companies have values. Far fewer have lived values.

Joshua shares an example from a client who wanted to write blog posts about their corporate values. Someone in the meeting said: “Wait — we have documented values?”

That moment of awkward silence told them everything they needed to know. The problem wasn’t content capacity, but communication failure.

Before publishing a single blog, they went backwards:

• Surfacing the values and making sure every team knew what they were
• Embedding those values into internal messaging and team routines
• Only then translating that into external-facing stories and examples

For buyers and investors, this matters. A business whose team is aligned around a shared narrative is worth more — it’s less risky, more resilient and easier to transition to new ownership.

Crisis, Silence & the Cost of Getting It Wrong

So what happens when things go wrong?

In the episode, Joshua and Sam talk through recent brand blow-ups — including a major US chain that changed its logo and visual identity, only to face massive backlash and an eventual reversal that reportedly cost hundreds of millions of dollars when the dust settled.

Joshua doesn’t share this as gossip. He uses it to illustrate how emotionally loaded symbols can be, and how clumsy, poorly timed communications can pour fuel on a fire.

When silence helps — and when it sinks you

There’s a cliché in crisis comms: “Never say nothing.” Joshua takes a more nuanced view.

“Strategic silence is real. In regulated industries, sometimes you literally can’t say much. But ‘we can’t say everything’ is not the same as ‘we say nothing’.”

Even highly constrained organisations can usually communicate something:

• A simple acknowledgement that an issue exists
• A statement that they’re investigating
• Clear signposting to where updates will be posted

Without that, stakeholders fill the vacuum with speculation. Media outlets and social feeds define the narrative for you.

Owning the frame

The moment you say something — even a carefully worded sentence — you start to frame the story in your own words. Journalists quote your statement. Customers share your official FAQ instead of guessing.

It doesn’t magically fix the underlying issue, but it does mean you’re an active participant in the story, not a passive target.

Staying Human in the Age of AI-Led Content

Sam and Joshua also tackle the elephant in every marketing room right now: AI-generated content.

Joshua isn’t anti-AI. In fact, he encourages leaders to treat it as part of their toolkit:

• Use AI to analyse data and spot emerging trends
• Use it to summarise long documents or brainstorm angles
• Use it to speed up the drafting of internal comms and FAQs

But — and it’s a big but — AI shouldn’t be the last person in the room.

“AI is brilliant at processing information. It’s not brilliant at being you.”

That’s where the competitive edge emerges. As more generic, AI-written content floods feeds, the organisations that:

• Keep real humans in the loop
• Write with genuine point-of-view
• Show vulnerability, nuance and context

will stand out even more.

Joshua also points out something subtle: humans make small mistakes. A misplaced comma, an odd turn of phrase, a personal anecdote that doesn’t fit perfectly into a pattern. Those imperfections are often the very things that signal “real person” to a reader.

If your content becomes too polished, too homogenous, it may look efficient — but it won’t be memorable. And it certainly won’t feel like leadership.

How Leaders Can Build Strategic Communications into Their Week

For the founder or CEO listening who doesn’t have a communications background, Joshua’s message is clear: you don’t need to become a comms expert. You do need to treat communications as a strategic function, not as an afterthought.

1. Think strategically, not voluminously

You don’t have to be everywhere. You don’t have to respond to every comment. You don’t have to post five times a day across all channels.

For some B2B firms, that might mean LinkedIn and a quarterly investor update. For some consumer brands, it might mean Instagram, email and a solid FAQ hub on the website.

2. Be the signal, not the noise

Joshua urges leaders to give themselves permission not to respond to everything. A wall of reactive replies rarely builds trust. Carefully chosen, useful responses do.

The practical question to ask is: “Where does my response move the needle?” Often that will be:

• Reviews on platforms that affect discoverability (Google, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc.)
• Critical feedback from key customers or partners
• Moments of misunderstanding that could easily escalate

3. Install a 60-second safety check

One of Joshua’s habits from his newspaper social media days was simple but powerful: nothing went out instantly. Even breaking posts were scheduled at least one minute into the future.

“We wanted to be first. But we wanted to be right more.”

That 60-second buffer gave him (or another editor) a moment to:

• Re-read the copy
• Double-check names, dates and links
• Catch anything that could be misread or inflaming

Every leader can implement a version of this. Before you hit send on a company-wide email or controversial post, take a breath. Read it once as the CEO, and once as the employee, customer or stakeholder receiving it.

4. Put someone in the right seat

Perhaps the most valuable lens for owners and buyers is this: in many organisations, communications is quietly “owned” by the wrong person.

The CTO ends up running the website because they’re “good with computers”. The operations director is unofficially managing social media. A founder who should be thinking about strategy is stuck editing newsletters at midnight.

A fractional CCO model gives you an alternative:

• Leaders get their time back
• Specialists handle the complexity of messaging and alignment
• The business builds an asset — a clear, documented story — that can live beyond the current owner