Hello again! How are you doing?

Welcome to another lovely Friday. The weather has taken a biblical turn in Brighton after the August Bank Holiday. On the plus side, if we’re in autumn now, it means I can add casserole and crumble back onto the weekly meal rota.

I know we have a lot of subscribers who run content strategy for B2B brands, so you might be interested in our new Storythings’ Content As A Service product. It’s based on our years of experience running content formats for major brands like ADP and Gates Foundation. If you’d like our help creating a pipeline of great content formats, hit the button below:

Finally, a cheeky personal plug. The second book in the series about Colin the Vampire written and illustrated by my uber-talented wife Holly Swain came out this week. If you know any small humans who would love a silly and thrilling picture book for Halloween, get your copies now!

Right then - on to the links!

(Psst - read to the end for a great crumble recipe.)

Matt

Actual Facts - A New Hip-Hop Newsletter (recommended subscribe)

A Short History of The Business Card (5-min read)

Is AI in The Trough of Disillusionment? (5-min read)

How AI Drove an Indie Agency Out of Business (4-min read)

Why BlueSky is the Social Platform of Choice for Science (7-min read)

NASCAR joins Substack (4-min read)

How The Avalanches Built Since I Left You (15-min watch)

For Starters - Ace Newsletter About Running a Small Business (another recommended subscribe)

How Morning Brew Used Referrals to get to 1.5m Subscribers (10-min read)

The Ingredients of a Great Show (5-min read)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

Actual Facts - A New Hip-Hop Newsletter (recommended subscribe)
Storythings’ own Chris Mitchell is launching a new monthly newsletter sharing his love (and deep deep knowledge) about hip-hop. If you love music, this is a must subscribe. I also really love the way he’s structured the newsletter format, around lots of plays on the word ‘facts’.

A Short History of The Business Card (5-min read)
Anjali shared this lovely post in the Storythings Slack, with some great illustrations of historical business cards. I hadn’t heard about the Malin Journal before, and found out it’s an online publication about work from a NYC co-working space. It’s really good!

Is AI in The Trough of Disillusionment? (5-min read)
I’ve linked to Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting newsletter a lot in this newsletter, as he is a deeply experienced voice in the world of media and tech. So this measured post about whether AI is living up to the hype is a good summary of how I feel right now. If you’re not familiar with the Trough of Disillusionment, it’s part of Gartner’s famous Hype Cycle, which maps out the way we fall for hype about new tech every single damn time.

How AI Drove an Indie Agency Out of Business (4-min read)
Related to the above - this inside account of how using AI led to the downfall of a small animation studio is eye-opening. I don’t think AI was really responsible for them going out of business, but you can see how it affected the decisions of the creative founder, especially in the comment about how it affected his own drawing at the end: “He had a lovely quality of line… but what was underneath it was dead.”

Why BlueSky is the Social Platform of Choice for Science (7-min read)
We are beyond the era of dominant social platforms now, with audiences fragmenting across multiple platforms. So it’s interesting to see some niche communities starting to get critical mass in unexpected places, and - shock horror! - actually driving traffic back to websites.

NASCAR joins Substack (4-min read)
Talking of fragmenting audiences, brands are starting to see Substack as a space to build audiences, with NASCAR being the latest, and first major sports brand, to hitch their wagon to the newsletter platform/nazi bar. The problem is, there’s already a few independent NASCAR newsletters on the platform, who had been doing well up until now. Is this the next stage of Substack’s enshittification, with brands coming in to take over the audiences independent journalists have painstakingly created?

How The Avalanches Built Since I Left You (15-min watch)
Let’s take a break from AI and Platforms to immerse ourselves in a fantastic story about obsessive human creativity. The Loop Kitchen creates really strong YouTube formats, and I loved this one about the samples used in this ground-breaking track. The three pieces of advice at the end are perfect, too.

For Starters - Ace Newsletter About Running a Small Business (another recommended subscribe)
Hugh just shared this, and it seems like a really good resource if you are starting, or even thinking of starting, your own business. It’s got a really good, Semafor-style structure, with lots of mini formats making up each newsletter.

How Morning Brew Used Referrals to get to 1.5m Subscribers (10-min read)
This is behind a membership paywall on Medium, but worth it to unlock a really detailed breakdown from Beehiiv founder Tyler Denk on how they built a referral platform to drive growh at Morning Brew. It shows the length of planning and detail you have to put in to build audiences now. Which is good! Building loyal audiences should be hard work!

The Ingredients of a Great Show (5-min read)
Finally, a post from our friend John Peabody that could almost be an episode of our Formats Unpacked newsletter. There’s some great insights as he breaks down two of my favourite social video formats - Subway Takes and Keep The Meter Running: “You can shoot a show on your iPhone, and as long as you have a clever idea and execute well, you have a better chance of getting viewers than if you had tons of money and mediocre ideas.”

So that’s another ten links full of inspiration to take you into the weekend. My go-to crumble recipe is taken from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat. I don’t add the walnuts, but always put it in the fridge for at least 30mins before adding it on top the fruit and baking. Like a shortcrust pie base, the chilling stops the butter from melting out before it can bake into really short and crisp clumps.

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings