Hi everyone!

Another week, time for another newsletter from us at Storythings! A shout-out to Chris Mitchell, whose narrative podcast Redemption Man, about a mysterious man who was seen carrying a large white cross throughout West London for almost 35 years - and then disappeared, was shortlisted for a Whickers Podcast Pitch Award!

This week has been a busy one at Storythings - and we’re looking forward to busier ones in the months to come. If you’re a brand or company who has an idea - or desire -to do something interesting with their content (and believe me, most companies that think they’re boring have pretty interesting stories they’re sitting on - they just need to be found), give us a shout.

Enjoy the spring,

Anjali

How American Rapper Tony Yayo Helped Create Hot Ones (1-min watch)

How People Are Really Using GenAI In 2025 (13-min read)

How ‘Secret’ Radio Stations Have Survived The Move To Digital (7-min read)

A Love Letter To The People Who Believe in People (7-min read)

Test-and-Learn: A Playbook For Mission-Driven Government (playbook)

Video Podcasts Might Be Coming to Netflix (3-min read)

Actors on Actors Broadway: Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook (36-min watch)

This Blog Is Hosted On A Nintendo Wii (12-min read)

Formats Unpacked: Sort Your Life Out (6-min read)

On The Challenge Of Writing A Sequel To A Twenty-Year-Old Novel (6-min read)

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How American Rapper Tony Yayo Helped Create Hot Ones (1-min watch)
YouTube show Hot Ones is one of our favourite formats at Storythings. Resident Storythings rap expert Chris Mitchell shared this interesting tidbit of news with us this week, which I thought was pretty cool: G-Unit’s Tony Yayo was instrumental in creating the idea that eventually became Hot Ones!

How People Are Really Using GenAI In 2025 (13-min read)
A year ago Marc Zao-Sanders wrote about how people are using GenAI for the Harvard Business Review. So much has changed in a mere 12 months, that he’s released a look at how those habits have changed in that time. There are also some neat data visualisations. In 2025, new use cases include ‘organising my life’ and ‘finding purpose’, with ‘therapy/companionship’ going to the top. How has GenAI changed your life? Write in and let us know. Personally, I’m definitely using it to get me to think more creatively, and also for basic things like ‘I have X days, 2 kids, and Y budget - please suggest a few holiday destinations that might suit us’. Though apparently using ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ could be costing millions, according to Sam Altman!

How ‘Secret’ Radio Stations Have Survived The Move To Digital (7-min read)
A rather heartwarming piece about radio reading services in the US, made possible by hundreds of volunteers who read newspapers, magazines, and books on the radio for people who have blindness or vision loss: “The stations are “super-secret” because they are designed to be used by people with vision impairments and other disabilities that can make reading or turning pages difficult. Thanks to a provision in copyright law, copyrighted materials like books, magazines, and newspapers can be reproduced for free for the sake of accessibility.”

A Love Letter To The People Who Believe in People (7-min read)
Tina Roth Eisenberg, or Swiss Miss, is no stranger to many of us in the creative world. Founder of Creative Mornings, TeuxDeux and co-working community Friends Work Here in Brooklyn, she has written a ‘love letter’ to people who are fans. People who inspire and motivate other people - particularly those who made her many creative endeavours possible. And people who very simply, bring enthusiasm. Because we all definitely need more of those kinds of people right now - we need hope, and sparkles and glitter.

Test-and-Learn: A Playbook For Mission-Driven Government (playbook)
This playbook echoes so much of our own philosophy of prototyping at Storythings, we couldn’t not share it. Nesta, working with their Behavioural Insights Team, have created a playbook that ‘explains in detail how to build and run public policies and services using a test-and-learn approach, setting out a wide range of specific methodologies that practitioners can draw on at each stage of the innovation cycle.’ We particularly like the ‘diffuse and scale’ part of the flywheel they’ve written about in the playbook.

Video Podcasts Might Be Coming to Netflix (3-min read)
At the Time100 Summit this week, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gave the audience a preview of what the streaming giant has lined up for the future. Instead of subscriber count, they will now look at engagement, revenue, and profit. “…those three pillars are supported by four buttresses. “We call them the four C’s,” he explained, proceeding to break that C quartet down as content, choosing, conversation, and commerce. “We added that later,” Sarandos noted about the last C. “If you do all three of those well, then the commerce part comes.”” And bringing video podcasts to Netflix could be a way of luring viewers away from YouTube.

Actors on Actors Broadway: Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook (36-min watch)
Honestly this is one for you to bookmark and watch when you have the time, but watching these two Succession greats talk to each other about their experience on Broadway is brilliant (Snook is in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Culkin in Glengarry Glen Ross currently). They also play a ‘Succession or Broadway Musical’ game at the end, where each actor reads out a line and the other has to guess if it’s from - yep - Succession or a Broadway musical. I was smiling through most of this conversation!

This Blog Is Hosted On A Nintendo Wii (12-min read)
This is actually for the gaming geeks out there, but the real reason I wanted to include it is because it reimagines what a blog can be used for and by. And some of the best formats are created in that way. Security Engineer Alex Haddock wanted to do an experiment with his idea of ‘running general-purpose operating systems on decidedly not-general-purpose hardware.’ He said there have been examples in the past, with the PS2 and PS3 in particular, that have worked, but nothing lately. But then he found the Wii option one day: “As soon as I discovered this was fully supported and maintained, I knew I had to try deploying an actual production workload on it. That workload is the blog you’re reading now.”

Formats Unpacked: Sort Your Life Out (6-min read)
Storythings Executive Producer Christopher Mitchell has taken the Formats Unpacked microphone this week, and with it he breaks down the magic behind the BBC show Sort Your Life Out, which I am delighted to have discovered, and equally surprised I hadn’t discovered earlier! Chris weaves a lovely personal anecdote about one of the show’s participants into this post about why the show, hosted by 2009 X-Factor finalist Stacey Solomon, is so watchable.

On The Challenge Of Writing A Sequel To A Twenty-Year-Old Novel (6-min read)
We often talk about the creative process behind stories at Storythings. So, ‘how can you write a meaningful follow-up piece to something that is over a decade old?’ is something worth thinking about in that context. That’s why this piece by Lee Martin, the author of the twenty-year-old novel The Bright Forever, came to my attention: “The risk with a sequel is it becomes too familiar to the first book and tempts you to spend too much time with that book to the point where it overshadows the new book you’re writing. The balance between the two can try your patience.”

Au revoir for now - congratulations, you’ve reached the end of this newsletter! We hope you like it so much that you share it with everyone you know (yes, everyone - be that generous soul!).

See you next week!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings