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With little more than a laptop and a ChatGPT subscription, almost anybody can now produce content that sounds plausible and vaguely authoritative. While AI can help accelerate the writing process, it cannot (yet) replace the editorial judgement that shapes great stories. The thinking behind the writing matters more than ever.
The problem is that audiences, inundated with content, are increasingly adept at filtering out noise. Earning attention is bloody difficult. And if anybody can teach us about the mechanics of sharp storytelling in an unforgiving attention economy, it is journalists. As the media landscape has evolved, journalists have honed their craft, developing an intuitive instinct for separating newsworthy stories from forgettable ones. By consciously applying some of that same journalistic thinking to your own work, you immediately give yourself a better chance of producing better, more distinctive and more impactful content.
One of the first questions journalists ask is: why now? Timeliness is what gives content urgency and relevance. The strongest stories are connected to wider trends, industry developments or emerging tensions that make them feel immediate and important. Context is key. Content that lacks urgency often struggles to resonate because audiences are constantly looking for signals that something matters. Like, right now.
Perhaps the biggest shift of all is moving away from asking, “What do we want out of this?” and instead scrutinising every piece of content through the lens of “What does our audience need?”.
The strongest content starts with audience interests, something journalists understand intuitively. They develop a deep understanding of what their audiences care about, what is most relevant to them and what genuinely earns their attention. The best content is anchored in audience needs and gives people something worthwhile in return: a takeaway, an insight, a useful perspective, a lesson or simply entertainment value.
Bland content, meanwhile, tends to prioritise the interests of the sender over the needs of the audience. While we’re all driven by commercial interests to some extent, it’s better to temper that desire for self-promotion and focus on giving audiences something genuinely useful.
The latter approach is far more conducive to building trust, credibility and goodwill. Your promotional angle can be in the mix somewhere, but approach with caution. Audiences will quickly spot when something is self-promotion disguised as insight.
When creating content, it can be tempting to play it safe and avoid saying anything too challenging or provocative. But once everybody starts echoing the same accepted opinions and recycled talking points, there is no tension. Without tension, you end up with fifty shades of beige.
Great stories contain contradictions, surprises or perspectives that challenge conventional thinking in some way, without being contrarian for the sake of it. It is about contributing something genuinely thought-provoking to the conversation. Because in a world where everybody has opinions, the perspectives that stand out are the ones that stick.
Journalists are heavily reliant on expert sources, which means they have to be discerning about who they quote. There needs to be a genuine sense that the person speaking is a bona fide expert rather than somebody with an opinion but little of real substance to offer.
Opinions alone carry very little weight. What distinguishes genuinely stand-out content are clear authority signals: privileged insight, specialist expertise, hard-to-access data or direct experience within a particular domain.
Brands should think about their own content in the same way. Try to be an expert in everything and you quickly become an expert in nothing. The people and organisations producing the most compelling content are usually the ones with a clearly defined sphere of expertise and a commitment to depth over surface-level commentary.
By applying journalistic principles, we become far more intentional about what we create and why we are creating it in the first place. This is not about rigidly sticking to a formula. Instead, it is about taking a critical view of whether something is timely, relevant, insightful and genuinely worthy of attention. These traits give content a far greater chance of being read, remembered and acted upon. Otherwise, you risk investing significant time and resource into polished but forgettable content that gets lost in the noise.
In a world saturated with content, that level of intentionality matters more than ever because the bar for earning attention is now incredibly high. And speaking of bars, mine’s a Guinness.
