Big news from Storythings: we’ve launched a new in-house podcast this week! Creative Crush sees us talking to B2B CMOs about the book, movie, music album, theatre show, or creative individuals that have inspired them along their careers. In Episode 1, Hugh talks to SQE Chief Experience Officer Glyn Britton about Glyn’s creative crush on Prince’s album Parade. Get in touch if you’d like to recommend B2B CMOs for us to interview.

Storythings is a signatory of the Better Business Act, and on May 29th next week we’d love for as many of you as possible to petition the government to amend Section 172 of the Companies Act to legally empower UK businesses to balance the long-term interests of people, profit and planet. If you’re a UK business and haven’t signed the Better Business Act yet, you can do so here.

💻 DATA POINT: Sabreen Haziq from Buffer on why most people’s LinkedIn reach has probably been tanking: they’ve implemented a new tool called 360Brew with the intention to move from reach-based to relevance-based distribution. As Matt says, we are in the era of the hard-to-reach web.

Too Long Didn’t Listen (7-min listen)

After The Feed: Trust, Connection And The Next Era Of Social Technology (research report)

Shall We Play A Game? (20-min read)

The Banality Of The Video Podcast (Collection of screenshots with some context)

The Last Six Months In LLMs In Five Minutes (LLM experiments with context)

The Economist Prepares For A Two-Track Internet: One For Humans And One For AI Agents (7-min read)

5 Things I Learned At The Newsletter Conference This Year (11-min read)

Dear Vibe-Coding CEO, Please Stop (7-min read)

Your Name in Landsat (online tool)

📣 On Displacement, Reclamation And Land (12-min read) 📣

Too Long Didn’t Listen (7-min listen)
Storythings mentored Josh Craggs last year, and he’s brought out a new podcast this week. Too Long Didn’t Listen brings together trusted voices from across podcasting and asks them the questions the industry still can't agree on. It was inspired by Josh’s own experience of trying to improve his podcasting skills and not really getting useful advice. LinkedIn didn’t help!

After The Feed: Trust, Connection And The Next Era Of Social Technology (research report)
Eli Pariser coined the term ‘filter bubble’ back in 2011. Here, he shares research by his team at New Public that looks at what we can expect after the algorithmic social feed gives way to the AI environment - and the opportunities for a better society that lie within.

Shall We Play A Game? (20-min read)
Historian Jon Peterson, who studies the history of war games and role-playing games, talks to Angela Chen and Clara Collier about ‘how advances in statistics and cartography made wargaming possible, the journey from 18th century Prussian military officers to Midwestern hobbyists, how RAND played an instrumental role in the birth of D&D, and how little the core debates on game design have changed in the past 200 years’. It is as fascinating as it sounds.

The Banality Of The Video Podcast (Collection of screenshots with some context)
Kyle Chayka collects screenshots from video podcasts of all kinds and asks: what do they really say, if, as Marshall McLuhan would say, they are the content itself?

The Last Six Months In LLMs In Five Minutes (LLM experiments with context)
Simon Willison did this presentation at PyCon 2026. He used various models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google to execute the command ‘generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle’. Read through to see how the output steadily progressed as the models improved over 6 months from November 2025 to April 2026.

The Economist Prepares For A Two-Track Internet: One For Humans And One For AI Agents (7-min read)
For those of you interested in how the publishers are dealing with AI - as LLMs are widely thought to be a possible death-knell of sorts to them - this will be interesting. At the recent PPA Festival in London, The Economist spoke about how they are structuring content to be read by agents because AI is increasingly surfacing and summarising news - and they need to be visible outside the paywall. But the bigger issue, as this article says, is not just discoverability - it is gaining audience trust.

5 Things I Learned At The Newsletter Conference This Year (11-min read)
The Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky on some key takeaways from year 3 of The Newsletter Conference in New York, from scale being second to quality, to events being a core growth tool.

Dear Vibe-Coding CEO, Please Stop (7-min read)
Rich Ziade, CEO of Aboard, makes an appeal to modern CEO’s: “We can talk all about how great it is that you’re able to prototype, all the ways you can exercise your leadership using AI, and how it’s bringing you closer to the core product. But all I can say is: Cut it out. Seriously, cut it out.”

Your Name in Landsat (online tool)
As a fun thing to do before you close your laptop for the weekend, here’s how you can use Landsat images to create a graphic of your name. 😀

📣 On Displacement, Reclamation And Land (12-min read) 📣.
Every week we publish a new story in Futures in Draft. This week, community organiser Amahra Spence on the impact of regeneration in Birmingham and how her organisation Hood Futures is building a space for connection.

Blair Enns is someone the Storythings Directors follow a lot because he has wise words to say about running agencies. In this LinkedIn post however, he frames The Expert’s AI Manifesto. I think it is good reading for anyone who uses AI, i.e probably most of you? And us!

READ BLAIR’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