🔔 This has been a big week for Storythings. Futures in Draft, an editorial project we’ve been working on for nearly 2 years with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, went live on Monday. It aims to help galvanise the people and movements building transformative futures. There is a long history of transformative work reimagining systems in the UK and globally. Our goal is to showcase the progress being made while also highlighting opportunities for others to join - things we were told during research that the community really wanted. I’ve written more about the process and thinking behind the project in this blog post for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Please do subscribe to the newsletter, and follow Futures in Draft on Instagram and LinkedIn. We’d love to talk to more clients interested in building audiences through long-term platforms - give us a shout if that’s you.

💻 DATA POINT: According to Edison Research’s Share of Ear survey, podcasts have overtaken AM/FM radio as the more popular medium for spoken-word audio.

Welcome To The Group Chat (8-min read)

Letters To A Young Creator (collection of letters online)

Backrooms: A New Film By A24 (1-min trailer)

Good COP, Bad COP: A Data Investigation (cool dataviz)

Art UK: Ten Years On - The Art Of Collaboration (9-min read)

25 Years Of iPod Brain (8-min read)

Different Views Of The Winter Olympics (stunning image gallery)

Why YouTube Has Become Key For Brand GEO Strategies (5-min read)

How 'Articles of Interest’ Became A Go-To Podcast For The Fashion History (3-min read)

📣 Making A New B2B Format: Why Archives Are Like Compound Interest (5-min read) 📣

There’s A New Member In Your Group Chat (8-min read)
I laughed out loud when I went through this ‘chat transcript’ that Matt shared in our Slack channel. It’s hilarious - not just because of the AI named Taurus who kept butting in, but because humans are humans?! Something like that 😅

Letters To A Young Creator (Collection of letters online)
From the Steve Jobs Archive, a collection of letters inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters To Young Poet, which was one of Steve Jobs’ favourite books. The letters are written by renowned creatives who’ve been there and done that: people like Dieter Rams, Ben Okri, Es Devlin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tadao Ando, Ed Catmull, David Guggenheim, Jony Ive, Alan Kay, Alice Rawsthorn and Cindy Sherman. The collection was originally for Fellows of the Steve Jobs Archive, published in separate books in 2024 and 2025, but now it is for us all ❤️

Backrooms: A New Film By A24 (1-min trailer)
This is the trailer for the upcoming May 2026 horror/sci-fi film Backrooms directed by Kane Parsons. It is based on the series of YouTube videos that Parsons published on his channel Kane Pixels back in 2022 - creepypasta, if you will. The movie stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve. 🧟

Good COP, Bad COP: A Data Investigation (cool dataviz)
Futurity Systems looked at all the data from 30 COP conferences from 1995-2025, resulting in this data story of its exponential growth. From 4000 attendees at the first conference to 97,000 at the most recent, the total cost of hosting those conferences so far has been $17.8 billion, with global CO2 emissions rising 52% since the first COP. Food for thought. 🏭

Art UK: Ten Years On - The Art Of Collaboration (9-min read)
We did a detailed piece of audience research for Art UK last year, and it turns out this is their 10th anniversary. For those who love art and don’t know about Art UK, you really should: it hosts an online collection of a million artworks from collections all over the UK, and truly democratises access. Here, CEO Andrew Ellis reflects on what that means, and what a great result of collaboration it is: “The success that Art UK and UK public institutions have achieved in uniting the national collection should not be underestimated. Indeed, I have often been told that getting museums to collaborate across a single state in the USA would be impossible, let alone the whole country. Art UK is a unique resource.” Also, congratulations to friend of Storythings Ben Terrett, who is their new Chair! 🖼️

25 Years Of iPod Brain (8-min read)
Molly Mary O’Brien in Dirt Magazine writes about how listening to ‘1,000 songs in your pocket' on hardware that had its own limitations truly changed your relationship with music. Nostalgia x 1000. 🍎

Different Views Of The Winter Olympics (stunning image gallery)
Take some time out to look at these gorgeous images of athletes and staff in action at the Winter Olympics. 📷

Why YouTube Has Become Key For Brand GEO Strategies (5-min read)
Read this and then read Matt’s post about archives being like compound interest (below) and you’ll see why it's important to pay attention to what you’re giving LLM's to crawl: “because it’s the transcripts of videos that are being digested by LLMs, marketers need to pay attention to their words.” It's why we spend so much time on scripts when we shoot videos for clients like ADP and BCG. 📹

How 'Articles of Interest’ Became A Go-To Podcast For The Fashion History (3-min read)
I love how Avery Trufelman speaks about why her podcast ‘Articles of Interest’ works. It began as a spin-off of the popular 99% Invisible podcast in 2016, and is now mostly socio-political commentary through the lens of fashion, with some episodes being years in the making. It's quite timeless, in a sense, which a lot of Storythings projects are. If you haven’t listened to it, please do! 🎧

📣 Making A New B2B Format: Why Archives Are Like Compound Interest (5-min read) 📣
Matt's written about something we talk about so often at Storythings that has taken on a new relevance as we go deeper into a world of GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): the need for brands to build archives. This is because, as he says, “a lot of research shows that if you have a deep bank of archive content, you are more likely to show up in an AI search. And interestingly, it doesn’t matter if your archive has had break out ‘viral’ success - the AI agents are looking for lots of content, not a few hits.”

Sophia Parker is the Director of Emerging Futures at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. Last week she published a detailed and thought-provoking report on what it means to support the emergence of alternatives that gesture towards a more positive future for us all. Of course I’m biased as we’re working with her so closely on Futures in Draft, but that aside, if you’re interested in how to make the world better, do read it.

READ HER LINKEDIN POST AND REPORT HERE →

Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!

Have a great weekend!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team