Creative Grief, Corner Shops, and Conspiracy Pipelines

Hey all,

First an invite. We're testing a new half-day workshop on understanding audiences and content formats in partnership with our good friend The Content Technologist. The workshop will be in New York on Tuesday 26th September. It will cover understanding and measuring audience attention, developing content formats, getting your workflow right, and measuring success. We'll have booking live next week, but if you want more details and early access, drop us a message and we'll send you the link before it goes live.

Also, we’ve submitted a proposal for a session at SXSW 2024. The session will get the audience to collectively develop a content format, live, using our Formats Unpacked process. We’d really appreciate your vote so we can make it happen. We have until August 20th.

And one more thing: we’d love for you to join us for our next Proper Fancy on Thursday 31st August. It’s a creative show-and-tell that’s open to everyone. Sign up and we’ll send you a link.

OK. Enjoy today’s stories. Hugh will be back next week.

Chloe

The Wellness-to-Conspiracy Pipeline (33 min listen)

What Can the Humble Water Fountain Tell Us About Society? (34 min read)

Tribute to the Corner Shop (3 min read)

The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973-2023) (29 min watch)

Formats Unpacked: Not a Newsletter (5 min read)

A Glimpse Inside Delhi’s Punk Scene (2 min read, photographs)

Barbie: What Is at Stake When a Film Veers Directly into Commercial Territory? (9 min read)

Why Subway Surfers Find It So Hard To Quit (7 min read)

How To Deal with Creative Grief (12 min read)

An Illustrated Reading List of Groundbreaking Mixed-Media Literature (illustration)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Berlin, and Ibiza. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Strategy – Do you struggle to understand constantly changing audience behaviours, and what strategies you need to reach them?2. Content Format Development – Do you want to develop and test content formats that give you a direct relationship with your audience? (e.g. videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc).3. Production – Do you need help creating and running an existing or new content format?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

The Wellness-to-Conspiracy PipelineYoga and meditation can be great relievers of stress. But for a small minority of practitioners, the world of wellness content has provided a gateway into the realm of conspiracy theories. This Today in Focus podcast from The Guardian addresses this phenomenon and considers the question: how do you pull a loved one back?

What Can the Humble Water Fountain Tell Us About Society?Professor of Media Studies Shannon Mattern takes a deep dive into the history of this unsung public amenity. The piece encompasses ancient wells and water bottles, arguing that the drinking fountain reveals much about the charged politics of public spaces: “Public things furnish the world of democratic life.”

Tribute to the Corner ShopLondon-based illustrator Alisha Kruse’s latest project Corner Shop: A Visual Archive explores the visual language and culture of your local convenience store and its connections to family and community. The colourful, ongoing collection – which includes photographs of food packaging, shop signs, receipts, and produce, as well as interviews with people in her community – will inspire a newfound appreciation for your neighbourhood staple.

The Most Iconic Hip-Hop Sample of Every Year (1973-2023) 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of hip-hop. On August 11th 1973, DJ Kool Herc worked two turntables to create continuous break-beats during a party in the Bronx, and this occasion is widely considered the birthplace of the genre. What better way to celebrate it than with these iconic samples accompanied by visualisations that show the incredible skill of hip-hop producers.

Formats Unpacked: Not a NewsletterThe latest Formats Unpacked is written by our own Matt Locke and looks at the magic of Not a Newsletter run by Dan Oshinksy, who was previously Director of Newsletters at both the New Yorker and Buzzfeed. It’s a brilliant resource for anyone who runs newsletters. Although you can subscribe and get an email every month, the format itself lives on a Google Doc.

A Glimpse Inside Delhi’s Punk SceneThis photo series from photographer Vivek Vadoliya and stylist James Lalthanzuala explore the idea of punk – “the merging of old and new” – by capturing Delhi’s dancers and metalheads dressed in secondhand and found objects. The DIY ethos of punk reimagines discarded objects as treasure, not trash.

Barbie: What Is at Stake When a Film Veers Directly into Commercial Territory? Rebecca Liu provides a thoughtful analysis of self-awareness in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, noting that the 45 Mattel toy films in development will most likely, and worryingly, be conceived alongside company executives. “A group truly assured of its own power not only permits protest, but also sets the parameters for acceptable opposition, politely humouring its dissenters safe in the knowledge that they, too, will inevitably be eclipsed by the machine.”

Why Subway Surfers Find It So Hard To Quit Subway surfing has been around in NYC since at least the 1980s. But TikTok and Instagram are bringing in a whole new generation of teens. Using images taken on subway surfer’s phones while they are in the most dangerous and precarious places you can imagine, this piece examines this fatal subculture (there have been four deaths so far this year) in a visceral way.

How To Deal with Creative GriefWhat do you do when a project ends? Sometimes an ending can be accompanied by a sense of loss, emptiness, or panic. A psychologist and three creatives give some advice on how to handle it. “Today it’s so easy to numb ourselves with any amount of distractions, but if we shine a light into the darkest corners of our lives, we can find some of the most profound lessons there. This deep hurt or pain can really help us locate what is important to us if we have the bravery and support to look at it in the cold light of day and be honest about what we find.”

An Illustrated Reading List of Groundbreaking Mixed-Media Literature (illustration)Author Nathan Holic on some of his favourite graphic texts, including Cycle of the Werewolf and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. “While online ‘listicles’ are perhaps my least favorite article genre, I’ve always loved the practice of sharing reading lists, tracing our own trajectory through a subject or style.”

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend, you can subscribe below and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.