Thanks to everyone who shared or gave us feedback on our new podcast format Creative Crush. We’re looking for new CMOs/content heads for future episodes, so if you’re interested in sharing your creative passion, hit reply and let us know!

💻 DATA POINT: Audience Management company Omeda have released their latest State of Audience in Media report for 2026. There’s lots of good stats in there, but the big theme is media companies moving from social to owned audience strategies. 67% said email or newsletters had driven the biggest audience growth in the last year, and 68% said newsletters where their most effective audience retention strategy. As you’d expect from a company that has run this newsletter for over 13 years, we agree! If you’d like help with your newsletters or on audience growth and retention, we’d love to talk.

Who Owns Your Face? (1.5-min watch)

The AI Hangover Will Be Delightful (4-min read)

The Boring Internet (10-min read)

Trevor Paglan and Holly Herndon on Making Art With AI (7-min read)

Window Swap (Inspiration/procrastination tool)

Stop Building Innovation Labs (4-min read)

You Couldn’t Make A More Anti-News Internet If You Tried (5-min read)

Recreation Of A 2018 iPod In The Browser (collection of songs and photos)

You Are Loved Here (collection of letters supporting the trans community)

📣 I Let IBM’s Robot Cook Tell Me What To Cook For a Week (5-min read) 📣

Who Owns Your Face? (1.5-min watch)
This is the first in a series of a great format from document tool Scribd, produced by friend of Storythings Steve Bryant. I love the way the format explores the Scribd brand proposition - digging into archives of documents unearths great stories.

The AI Hangover Will Be Delightful (4-min read)
I make no apologies for sharing another newsletter from Paul Ford’s Aboard startup. As someone who has seen a couple of tech bubbles pop in my career, this post rings true, and is creatively optimistic (which I always try to be too!) “In a year or two, we can go back to talking about literally anything else on our podcasts. I think it’s safe to start planning your post-hype lifestyle. For me, in addition to building our AI-focused software consultancy with Rich and our amazing team (which is work I love), I plan to reread Middlemarch and focus on climate models again, inshallah. Maybe more bike rides.”

The Boring Internet (10-min read)
I gave a talk at the excellent KIKK festival in Belgium last year, about reasons why I was optimistic about the future of the internet. One of my reasons was that the biggest media trends of the last few years - newsletters and podcasts - were built on decades-old technology. In this great visual essay, Terry Godier makes the same argument in a lot more detail, with a really useful breakdown of how important the protocol layer is. Protocols (and regulation) will make the internet great again!

Trevor Paglan and Holly Herndon on Making Art With AI (7-min read)
More creative optimism! I’m a big fan of both Trevor Paglan and Holly Herndon, and the way they bend and mutate surveillance tech to interrogate the politics under the surface. I love the way their piece The Call involved participants in the construction of training data: “The process was like, “Okay, we need to make this dataset, but we also want to illustrate it to a visitor. So how do we bring that very real activity that happened in the real world into the gallery space as a beautiful experience?”

Window Swap (Inspiration/procrastination tool)
As the old joke goes: ‘Why doesn’t the writer look out the window in the morning? Because then they’d have nothing to do in the afternoon!’ So here is a very lovely site that lets you do just that, with windows around the world. I got a very beautiful view out of a window in Basel, and another in La Rochelle.

Stop Building Innovation Labs (4-min read)
Anjali posted this to the Storythings slack, as both her and I have run Innovation Labs in previous roles - her at PHD and me at the BBC. This piece by Jack Strachan, talking about innovation labs in government digital services, feels very true. The real challenge is not creating a space for ideas to emerge, it’s changing the environment around them so they can grow and scale.

You Couldn’t Make A More Anti-News Internet If You Tried (5-min read)
This is a super-smart, insightful, and slightly depressing piece on how difficult it is to create digital public spaces that help people stay informed. The two biggest challenges are economic and social - most people don’t actually care about the news. The brief period in the second half of the 20th C when everyone watched highly regulated broadcast platforms in which news was essential is, sadly, looking more and more like the exception rather than the norm.

Recreation Of A 2018 iPod In The Browser (collection of songs and photos)
I saw this link on Kottke, and went to play around because it looked fun. Then I read the notes that this is a recreation of his dad’s iPod just before he died in 2018, and what I first thought was just a nice fun web toy is now a beautiful, melancholy, act of remembrance.

You Are Loved Here (collection of letters supporting the trans community)
I have a lot of LGBTQ+ people as friends, relatives and colleagues, and trans people in particular are being subject to horrific media coverage and truly inept policy making decisions. It’s important we stand and let our friends now we support them - this site is a great way to do that.

📣 I Let IBM’s Robot Cook Tell Me What To Cook For a Week (5-min read) 📣
I’ve read a few pieces recently looking at what ordinary users are doing with AI chatbots, and outside of therapy (seriously?) planning recipes is very common. Which reminded me that we were very early to that game, commissioning a piece back in 2015 for our How We Get To Next publication in which our writer asked IBM’s Watson decide what he should cook for a week. Over a decade later, the results feel very familiar.

Today I had a lovely catch up with my old friend and digital narrative pioneer Tim Wright. His 2000 web drama project Online Caroline has just been added to the BFI’s National Archive, along with other seminal early internet video projects (including BADGER BADGER BADGER!)

READ TIM’S 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