You Can Read This If You Want
When content is everywhere and nowhere all at once, how does good storytelling rise to the top?
25th Anniversary
You Can Read This If You Want
Many of you won’t finish this article. Statistically speaking, the odds are against me.
There’s a lot of research out there about how we consume media today, and much of it, as it relates to written articles, is pretty drab:
- People spend less than 15 seconds on a page!
- 60% of readers scroll through 60% of an article.
- The average page visitor reads one-quarter of an article.
If you believe that last one…you’re about to leave.
But that’s ok. Perhaps you’d prefer I break this down in slide form on LinkedIn, send you a newsletter, or share an Instagram reel. As media consumption habits shift, so does the way we deliver the messages.
It wasn’t so long ago there was only one “real” place to consume media: print. In 2009, I had an internship under the fashion editor at Boston Magazine. It wasn’t exactly a “Devil Wears Prada” situation, but I was tasked with assignments like testing the effectiveness of different umbrellas on the windiest Boston street (Tumi’s are the best, Marimekko’s fold with the wind). Each day, I would come into the office and walk by a corner cubicle that was home to the web team. There were two of them. No one knew what they were doing over there.
Turns out, despite the print team’s unfounded distrust of that tiny, nascent web team, their work was important; they were laying the groundwork for this very article you’re (hopefully still) reading today. They were diversifying the way we tell stories and the way people consume information. The internet — “emerging technology” at the time — met people where they were and opened doors for anyone to become a publisher.
Fast forward five years. LaunchSquad latched onto this “everyone is a publisher” approach as an opportunity. The idea was that we could help clients utilize their growing online presence as another mechanism for storytelling. No more relying solely on reporters at established publications to do it, but rather, we could stand up editorial properties for brands ourselves. The internet democratized media (for better or worse, of course), and we were ready to help our partners capitalize on that.
It was tough work to convince brands they could become the creators, editors, and publishers at the start. But today the tides have shifted. Many career editors at well-known publications are in-house editors-in-chief for leading brands. Just check out this excerpt from Stacker CEO Noah Greenberg's recent LinkedIn post:
Over the past decade, that two-person cubicle of a web team I experienced at Boston Magazine has manifested in countless new ways. Influencer teams. Substack writers. TikTok creators. AI search optimization. It’s growing and changing at a faster pace than ever.
“Anyone can be a publisher” has reached a critical mass. While that means we can now access any type of information we want when we want it, it also means the path for one story to rise to the top is far less clear.
For one, content (almost) never lives in one place. If you’re not reading it here, you’re consuming it somewhere. Secondly, it all comes back to quality. There was a reason we were so worried about the web team at Boston Magazine: we thought the quality of reporting (yes, even about umbrellas) would suffer as the reporters were forced to keep pace. In some ways, it did (the rise of ‘clickbait’ is evidence alone for that). But in others, the democratization of publishing meant storytelling now had infinite space to expand and deepen. Despite the ever-widening pool of content out there, the good stuff is what will always rise to the top (see: the countless brands hiring career journalists).
Despite my optimism, I’ve felt many moments of apprehension about all of the ‘more and faster’ that’s come to the fore over the last few years, but I think the most important thing I can do is embrace the positive change. Although I didn’t necessarily recognize it immediately at Boston Magazine, I now know these emerging channels are simply new ways for us to access information and share our stories — there are no gatekeepers.
The truth is, we might consume them differently, but we all love a good story.