Beyond Content

We’ve spent years making it easier to publish. Maybe it’s time to ask whether we’re saying anything worth publishing.

I’ve spent most of my career working in industries that were changing faster than the people running them were willing to admit.

Looking back, it’s almost funny how often I managed to land right in the middle of one of those transitions. I started in print journalism when newspapers were still trying to decide whether the internet was a useful tool or the beginning of the end. Later, I found myself helping lead digital strategy in a television newsroom, where conversations about websites sometimes sounded less like innovation and more like an existential crisis.

Then social media changed everything. Smartphones changed everything. Now AI is changing everything yet again.

At least, that’s what we keep saying.

After you’ve watched this happen a few times, the conversations start to sound strangely familiar. People worry that the old way is dying. Everyone scrambles to learn the new thing. Experts appear overnight to explain what the rest of us should be doing, and someone confidently declares that nothing will ever be the same again.

Fair enough. Sometimes they’re right. But usually not in the way they think.

For the last twenty-five years, we (as a society) have spent a lot of time asking what each new technology will replace. Will websites replace newspapers? Will YouTube replace television? Will smartphones replace professional cameras? Will AI replace writers?

Those are super important questions to ask. I’ve participated in plenty of those debates myself.

But lately I’ve been wondering if we’ve been so busy watching what changes that we’ve overlooked the more useful question.

What hasn’t changed?

People still want to understand what’s happening around them. They want answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. They want to laugh, learn something, feel reassured or occasionally get mad enough to do something. The technology we use to reach them has changed dramatically, but the reason we’re trying to reach them hasn’t.

Somewhere along the way, though, we started talking about “content” as though it were the goal. It’s gotten to the point where “content creator” has become a job title. Scroll through enough social media profiles and you’d think half the country woke up one morning and collectively decided, “You know what? I create content now.”

I don’t mean that as a criticism. It’s just interesting how quickly we accepted the language.

“Content” can mean almost anything, which is probably why it’s such a useful word. It can be a video, an article, a photograph, a podcast or whatever fifteen-second dance the algorithm has decided to reward this week. But the word is so broad that it can also make us forget there’s supposed to be a person on the other end of whatever we’re making.

I sit in a lot of content-planning meetings. I enjoy them, actually. They give us a chance to think through what an organization has coming up and how we might tell those stories. Inevitably, we talk about what to post, which platforms to use and whether we need more video. Sometimes we talk about hashtags. None of my clients has ever hired QuickFlip because we knew the perfect number of hashtags, by the way. Except maybe that one guy, but let’s not get derailed.

Those conversations aren’t wrong. I have them all the time. They just occasionally leave me wondering whether we’re starting in the right place.

Before we decide what to post, it might help to remember why we’re posting in the first place.

There is a real person we’re trying to reach. What does that person need from us? What are they confused about? What do they care about? Is there something we know that could genuinely help them? And when they finish watching or reading whatever we’ve made, what do we hope has changed for them?

That’s the part that interests me.

Once we understand what we’re trying to communicate, choosing a format becomes much easier. Maybe it should be a video. Maybe it should be an email that only reaches fifty people but convinces forty of them to show up. Maybe the answer is a photograph, a public meeting or a clear paragraph on a website. Sometimes, if we’re being honest, the answer may be that we don’t need to post anything at all.

Not everything needs to become content. I realize this is a slightly inconvenient position for someone who owns a content company, but here we are.

When I worked in television, people spent years debating whether the web would replace broadcast. It didn’t, exactly. It changed how newsrooms gathered information, how quickly they published it and how audiences found them. The organizations that adapted well weren’t necessarily the ones that chased every new platform first. They were the ones that understood why people came to them in the first place, then learned how to meet those people somewhere new.

I think we’re watching that happen again with AI.

AI is going to change how a lot of things get made. It already has. It can help us write faster, edit faster, generate ideas and produce an astonishing amount of material in very little time. Some of that material is useful. Some of it is very good. Some of it exists primarily because we now have the ability to make it, which isn’t quite the same as having a reason to make it.

That distinction matters.

We’ve spent the last twenty-five years removing almost every barrier to publishing. You don’t need a printing press, a broadcast license or an expensive production studio to reach thousands of people anymore. Most of us carry everything we need in our pockets.

That’s an extraordinary change. It’s also made one thing painfully obvious: creating something is no longer the hard part.

The hard part is having something worth saying and understanding the person you’re saying it to.

So before you spend too much time trying to figure out what you “should” be posting to get more views, stop for a minute and ask why you’re posting at all. If the honest answer is that everyone says you need more content, I’m not sure that’s enough.

But if there’s a real person you want to help understand something, solve a problem or see the world a little differently, now you have somewhere to begin. Figure out what that person needs from you. Then choose the tool that helps you deliver it.

The latest trend taking over TikTok may be part of the answer. It may not. Either way, it shouldn’t be where the thinking starts.

After all these years of watching communication change, that’s the part I keep coming back to. Technology keeps giving us new ways to reach people, but it has yet to change the fact that there’s still a person on the other end deciding whether what we have to say is worth their time.

That’s the person I’d focus on.