This month is B Corp Month, so some of the Storythings team have been attending B Lab UK events, and it’s been great getting to know the community of companies working to make business better. I also attended a fascinating afternoon of workshops about AI, and one of the takeaways, from Peter Chamberlin at Public Digital, stuck in my mind: organisations of the past rewarded hoarding knowledge. The organisations of the future will reward people who share knowledge and apply it together. I wrote a bit more on LinkedIn, if you’re interested.

💻 DATA POINT: AI uptake is on the up with B2B marketers, as one would expect, but in Demand Gen’s 2026 B2B Trends Report, we also find that 19% of content marketers struggle to scale their content, and 17% struggle with the lack of a cohesive strategy. This is where Storythings can come in, so give us a call if this is you. We work with client teams on workflow specifically, to reduce the likelihood of this.

The Brand Age (39-min read)

100 Conversations Later (14-min read)

Happy Map (cool data viz)

Grammarly Turned Me Into An AI Editor Against My Will And I Hate It (10-min read)

UK Society Of Authors Launches Logo To Identify Books Written By Humans Not AI (3-min read)

Why The Paid/Owned/Earned Model Was Always About Finance, Not Audiences (LinkedIn post)

How Industry Curated The Best Soundtrack On TV (26-min read)

Why ATMs Didn’t Kill Bank Teller Jobs, But The iPhone Did (21-min read)

Channel Surfer (YouTube programming)

📣 A World With Land Reparations (10-min listen) 📣

The Brand Age (39-min read)
This epic thesis from veteran technologist and writer Paul Graham examines the growth of brand using the luxury watch industry as a case study: in particular, the “"holy trinity" of Patek Philippe, Vacheron Constantin, and Audemars Piguet”. Ultimately, what we need to do is stop thinking about brand and work on good problems. When enough of us work on good problems, it becomes a golden age in retrospect - you can’t try to make one along as you go.

100 Conversations Later (14-min read)
Francis Zierer from the Creator Spotlight podcast recently published his 100th episode, and summarised his top 10 lessons learnt through the process. We often say at Storythings that clients need to visualise what the 100th episode of something they produce will look like. The reason is that you learn a lot in the process about how to make your content better and how to make it a long staying product - just like Zierer did.

Happy Map (cool data viz)
From our favourite The Pudding, is this data visualization of what makes people happy. It’s really detailed - take the time to click through, up and down. It’s based on a 2017 research project where more than 10,000 people told researchers what made them happy. The typical bell curve where people are happy in youth, less happy in middle age, and happier in old age is no longer true for the younger generations - which Alvin Chang rightly calls worrying.

Grammarly Turned Me Into An AI Editor Against My Will And I Hate It (10-min read)
The Grammarly debacle has been all over the internet this week: they have been advertising that their work uses input from well-known writers and journalists like Casey Newton, who authored this piece, and Kara Swisher, but actually they are not, nor are the writers getting any money or giving any consent. And they are livid.

UK Society Of Authors Launches Logo To Identify Books Written By Humans Not AI (3-min read)
And as a result of events like the Grammarly situation above, humans will get their revenge. Or at the very least a logo to distinguish human-written work from AI-written ones - unfortunately rather necessary in these times. Expect more of this in the months to come.

Why The Paid/Owned/Earned Model Was Always About Finance, Not Audiences (LinkedIn post)
G Douglas-Kilgannon, CEO of Stitchy, writes about the traditional media industry framework of Paid/Owned/Earned/Shared and how Stitchy’s work intentionally goes against that: ‘When the organising principle is funding rather than memory, the structure being optimised is the wrong one.’

How Industry Curated The Best Soundtrack On TV (26-min read)
I came across this a couple of weeks ago, but it has spoilers! So I didn’t read it till I finished watching all of Industry Season 4 earlier this week. Having done that, this piece is a brilliant read on how the music was curated and makes the show doubly impactful. There’s also a list of the best needle drops in the show, from Daft Punk to Talking Heads and Tinie Tempah, so do read till the end!

Why ATMs Didn’t Kill Bank Teller Jobs, But The iPhone Did (21-min read)
David Oks explains his central thesis with this bank teller vs. iPhone analogy: replacing a job is much harder than just introducing a technology that can do some of it.

Channel Surfer (YouTube programming)
Via Kottke, watch YouTube as if it was old-school TV: “a retro TV guide that turns YouTube into live cable TV. Each channel plays videos on a deterministic schedule — like real TV, you tune in mid-show.”

📣A World With Land Reparations (10-min listen) 📣
Episode 2 of our podcast A World With for Futures in Draft has UK-based organiser and writer Sam Sivapragasam talking about how land reparations would serve as a climate justice solution that demands the remaking of the world.

Toby Barnes, Design Director at Shopify, has started a new Substack which features a field guide to building personal tools with Claude, and he’s been talking about it on LinkedIn. This is Week 3 of his project.

READ HIS LATEST LINKEDIN POST 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