by James Clive-Matthews | 20 Jan, 2026 | Structures & Models
I’m vaguely pondering starting up a newsletter/podcast/etc exploring media/marketing received wisdom and groupthink…
The Superbowl, Davos, and ChatGPT’s announcement it’s running ads means media/marketing LinkedIn will be swamped with lukewarm hot takes this week.
This industry herd mentality is increasingly fascinating to me – the need to comment on the same things everyone else is talking about is rarely “thought leadership”, and is very far from the old advertising mantra “When the world zigs, zag”.
I’ve spent a decade in marketing, more than double that in publishing. In all that time I’ve rarely encountered many convincing new ideas – even during major platform shifts. And usually when I have, the evidence for “best practice” has lacked much substance – or blatantly originated in some tech company’s hype (as with the first, second, and third pivots to video, and certainly with the “everything needs to be optimised for Alexa now” fad).
It feels like we’ve now all got so used to running with the latest fad for fear of missing out or – worse! – looking out of touch, we’ve lost all sense of critical thinking, or desire to question industry norms.
But is this something in which enough people would be sufficiently interested to make it worthwhile? And will it cut through the algorithm – another idea we’ve all unthinkingly adopted?
by James Clive-Matthews | 16 Jan, 2026 | Systems & Technology
This. My biggest data lessons from 25 years in digital publishing / marketing to add to the efficiency/effectiveness debate:
1) There’s an important distinction between being data-driven and data-informed; more organisations need to lean towards the latter, because…
2) No numbers mean anything without context – almost everything measurable needs multiple other datapoints, timescales, and points of comparison to have any meaning
3) Most data tracked by marketing departments are vanity metrics with almost zero long-term value for the business as a whole
4) Pick the wrong KPIs (pageviews being the most obvious, revenue growth perhaps the least) you’re more likely to harm the business than help it by focusing on improving the *indicator* rather than the business-wide performance, because…
5) Almost every metric can be gamed or significantly impacted by outliers or picking the wrong points of comparison, but…
6) Not enough people check to see if this is what’s happening, especially if the results are looking good
7) Equally, just because you *think* you can measure something doesn’t mean this is what you’re actually measuring, or that it’s helpful to do so, but…
8) Tables of numbers and nice pretty charts (especially with trend lines) are addictive, while cross-referencing multiple metrics and trying to make sense of it all is difficult – not helped by most of the tools available being deeply unintuitive, so…
9) Most laypeople don’t bother asking about the methodology for fear of looking stupid, and just nod along, so…
10) Keep on questioning the data – who compiled it, how, when, where, why, and what could we be missing? Data interpretation is as much art as science – the more we question what we’re seeing, the more likely it is someone will have one of those sparks of inspiration that help you find something genuinely meaningful
—
What have I missed?
What have I got wrong?
by James Clive-Matthews | 12 Nov, 2025 | Marginalia
GenAI content is neither good nor bad:
– Bad AI content is bad.
– Good AI content is good.
We were having the same arguments 20 years ago about blog content from actual humans.
The problem is not with how the sausage is made but, as Sturgeon’s Law states, that “Ninety percent of everything is crap”.
(Of course, on Linkedin this quite simple – and surely obvious – statement led to lots of debate about the *ethics* of AI content rather than the quality. That’s a different matter altogether…)
by James Clive-Matthews | 28 Oct, 2025 | Systems & Technology
“45% of the AI responses studied contained at least one significant issue, with 81% having some form of problem”
I’m a big fan of using GenAI to assist in research, ideation, and even sense-checking – asking it to help me with my own critical and lateral thinking. I use these tools multiple times a day, and am constantly encouraging the journalists I work with at Today Digital o use GenAI more to help them boost both their productivity and the impact of their work.
But it’s *vital* to keep fully aware of GenAI’s limitations when using it for anything where facts are important.
No matter how often we remind ourselves that LLMs have no true understanding, no real intelligence, no concept of what a “fact” actually is, the more you use them the easier it is to be taken in by their very, very convincing pastiche of true intelligence.
As this Reuters study shows, despite the apparent progress of the last couple of years, there are still fundamental challenges – which are unlikely to ever be fully overcome using this form of AI. (And which is why LLMs weren’t even classified as AI until very recently…)
The good news? With GenAI’s limitations increasingly becoming more widely appreciated, this could ultimately be a good thing for news orgs – because why go to an unreliable intermediary when you can go direct to the journalistic source?
Journalistic scepticism and fundamental critical thinking skills are becoming more important than ever.
by James Clive-Matthews | 30 Aug, 2025 | Narratives & Meanings
This:
The question of what AI does to publishing has much more to do with why people are reading than how you wrote. Do they care who you are? About your voice or your story? Or are they looking for a database output?
Benedict Evans, on LinkedIn
Context is (usually) more important to the success of content than the content itself. And that context depends on the reader/viewer/listener.
It’s the classic journalistic questioning model, but about the audience, not the story:
- Who are they?
- What are they looking for?
- Why are they looking for it?
- Where are they looking for it?
- When do they need it by?
- How else could they get the same results?
- Which options will best meet their needs?
Every one of these questions impacts that individual’s perceptions of what type of content will be most valuable to them, and therefore their choice of preferred format / platform for that specific moment in time. Sometimes they’ll want a snappy overview, other times a deep dive, yet other times to hear direct from or talk with an expert.
GenAI enables format flexibility, and chatbot interfaces encourage audience interaction through follow-up Q&As that can help make answers increasingly specific and relevant. This means it will have some pretty wide applications – but it still won’t be appropriate to every context / audience need state.
The real question is which audience needs can publishers – and human content creators – meet better than GenAI?
It’s easy to criticise “AI slop” – but the internet has been awash with utterly bland, characterless human-created slop for years. If GenAI forces those of us in the media to try a bit harder, then it’s all for the good.
by James Clive-Matthews | 30 Nov, 2024 | Systems & Technology
Fascinating, if predictable, findings on ChatGPT source attribution, via TechCrunch – with significant implications for the emerging “Generative Engine Optimisation” successor to SEO that should concern anyone publishing online.
Short version – ChatGPT’s ability to provide accurate citations for the sources of its information remains extremely hit and miss, despite the rise of GenAI search:
“the fundamental issue is OpenAI’s technology is treating journalism ‘as decontextualized content’, with apparently little regard for the circumstances of its original production”
In other words, GenAI focuses on the substance, not the source. It doesn’t matter where a story / insight actually originated – only where the GenAI tool considers is most plausible for it to have originated.
This isn’t just a question of lost traffic due to the lack of a link – there are far more serious implications here.
For example, if you’re a corporate brand producing a big chunky piece of thought leadership based on months of research, this means you could find your work misattributed to a direct competitor if the GenAI algorithms decide a competitor is more likely to have produced something like this. Equally, someone else’s work – or opinion – may be attributed to you.
This is, of course, a potentially huge liability for any brand – especially as hostile actors could use this flaw in the way these tools work to game the system, similar to the old days of Googlebombing, and make it look like your brand has said something it hasn’t.
But it gets worse – there’s nothing* you can do about it:
“Nor does completely blocking crawlers mean publishers can save themselves from reputational damage risks by avoiding any mention of their stories in ChatGPT. The study found the bot still incorrectly attributed articles to the New York Times despite the ongoing lawsuit, for example.”
Welcome to the age of GenAI…
(* well, nothing guaranteed to work all the time, at least…)
by James Clive-Matthews | 1 Aug, 2024 | Systems & Technology
The decline in news audiences reported here – 43%, or 11 million daily views – is shockingly high. This follows Canada’s ill-considered battle with Meta, which led to Meta pulling news from its platforms, including Facebook, in the Canadian market last year, rather than arrange content licensing agreements with news publishers.
This amply demonstrates the vast power these tech platforms have in society and over the media industry, and so justifies the Canadian government’s worries. But it also more than shows – once again – how utterly dependent the online content ecosystem is on these channels for distribution.
Meta/Facebook obviously isn’t a monopoly, but a 43% decline in news consumption thanks to the shutting down of one set of distribution channels? It’s a safe bet that much of the rest of the traffic will be from Google, so it’s more of a duopoly.
What impact is this level of reliance on a couple of gatekeeping tech platforms – who can change their policies on a whim at any time – going to have on public awareness of current events and society at large
Elsewhere in the article we have an answer: “just 22 per cent of Canadians are aware a ban is in place”.
Shut down access to news, little wonder that awareness of news stories stays low.
Both Canada (with Meta) and Australia (with Google and Meta) have tried forcing the tech giants into doing licensing deals for content that their platforms promote. In both cases, this has – predictably – backfired, and led to the opposite effect to that intended.
But what’s the solution?
This question is becoming more urgent now that GenAI is in the mix, and starting to provide summaries of stories rather than just provide a headline, image, and link.
Meta/Google were effectively acting like a newsstand – showing passing punters a range of headlines to attract their attention and pull in an audience.
GenAI’s summarisation approach, meanwhile, is much closer to what Meta and Google were being (unfairly) accused of doing by the Canadian and Australian governments: Taking traffic away from news sites by providing an overview of the story on their own platforms.
But the GenAI Pandora’s Box has already been opened. Publishers need to move away from wishful thinking – the main cause of the failed Australian/Canadian experiments – and back to harsh reality.
Unlike the Meta news withdrawal – which could be reversed – this new threat to content distribution models isn’t going away.
by James Clive-Matthews | 31 Jul, 2024 | Systems & Technology
“If your website is referenced in a Perplexity search result where the company earns advertising revenue, you’ll be eligible for revenue share.”
How many qualifiers can be fitted into one sentence, all while providing next to no information?
To be clear, I’ve loved WordPress ever since I migrated my old blog to it [checks archives] *18* years ago [damn…] I also fully get why they’re doing this – some money is better than none, it may work out, and it may actually lead to more traffic / engagement / visibility for WordPress sites.
But this all feels a little like promises of scraps falling from the table of people who are getting scraps falling from an even higher table.
Perplexity currently claims to be making US$20 million from paid subscriptions to its pro service – about the only source of income it currently seems to have, despite its $2.5-3 billion valuation. If they’re now giving away some of that limited income, I can’t see an obvious path to profitability, given the hefty running costs of GenAI.
This doesn’t just go for Perplexity, but for all these GenAI tools:
- What’s the path to a sustainable content publishing-based business model (and all these GenAI companies are content companies) when being able to produce infinite content on demand means the traditional route for making money for these kinds of companies – advertising inventory – is also infinite?
- Value comes from scarcity. Content / as inventory is no longer scarce. How do you make something that’s not scarce seem valuable enough to get people to pay for it?
- And when all GenAI models offer more or less the same output, and more or less the same level of reliability, and successful features and approaches can be replicated by the competition in next to no time, how do you stand out from the crowd?
Being a content/tech geek I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the last couple of years. Perplexity’s approach is one I like (I did history at university, so I love a good list of sources, even if they’ve mostly just been added to make your work look more credible and most of them are irrelevant, as is often the case with Perplexity) – but I’m far from convinced it has money-making potential. As Wired has put it, Perplexity is a bullshit machine. How valuable is bullshit?
Basically, we’re firmly in the destruction phase of creative destruction. The creative part is yet to come
But still – at least the providers of the raw material these LLMs are so reliant on are starting to get thrown a few bones. That’s a step in the right direction – because as that recent Nature study made clear, the proliferation of AI-generated content risks surprisingly rapid synthetic data-induced model collapse.
Human-created content may no longer be king, but it remains vitally important. Without it – and a hefty dose of critical thinking – the whole system comes tumbling down.
by James Clive-Matthews | 3 Apr, 2020 | Marginalia
Despite loving the near limitless possibilities of digital publishing, my first love is books. I’ve written two, reviewed them, and even worked at a book publisher for a while. Part bibliophile, part tsundoku, I buy books almost obsessively – and usually have dozens on the go at any one time. My flat could easily be mistaken for a secondhand bookshop.
So it’s probably unsurprising that I’m a big fan of the idea of collecting previously ephemeral digital content into book form to extend its (literal) shelf life. Great to see the New York Times agrees:
“Reporters leave a ton in their notebooks… The book form really gives us a chance to expand the journalism and include a lot more of the detail and texture that is never going to make it into the daily report.”
More brands – especially B2B ones – should consider following the NYT’s lead and mine their content archives to curate thematic ebooks (and even physical ones) of their best pieces.
Repackaging ideas in book form offers opportunities to expand and elaborate on points in more depth in the perfect lean-back format. Because there’s nothing better than a book for encouraging deep engagement with and deliberation over someone else’s thinking. If you’re selling ideas, the book is the perfect format.
by James Clive-Matthews | 27 Jan, 2020 | Marginalia
Great to see a copy of the Culture Trip magazine in the flesh on Eurostar. A slick, matt finish cover and perfect-bound spine screams quality, while the prominence of adverts for other Culture Trip formats (and lack of much other advertising) reveals this to be a piece of brand awareness marketing more than just a shift to a new, retro format for an established digital publisher.
Getting a travel magazine on Eurostar is quite the distribution coup as well – finely targeted to a (likely) receptive audience.
I’d not be surprised to see more digital ventures going physical for ad hoc print editions like this in the coming years. The shift towards longform and digital editions, the revival of vinyl, plus the growth in sales of physical books and independent publications suggests a rising demand for tactile, physical content formats alongside the convenience of digital.
With good design and production values, a print magazine or book can be something to both treasure and show off – a powerful, prestigious tool for driving brand loyalty.
Don’t get me wrong – digital is great. But every format is worth considering in the marketing mix – if it’s got potential to drive results rather than being mere vanity.
by James Clive-Matthews | 4 Sep, 2014 | Marginalia
I loved the concept when I first heard about it, and love that it seems to be working. Proof of concept done – now it’s time to take that concept and expand. Preferably globally.
In short, it’s a cunning system that allows you to pay for individual articles from publications, thus avoiding the constant fustration of not being able to read that great piece from the likes of the FT, Times or Economist because it’s hiding behind a paywall.
If this sort of thing takes off, it could be a whole new business-model – making paywalls more viable, while allowing monetisable ways around them.
But there’s also an interesting quote from Blendle’s founder:
“People want to read articles or want to follow specific journalists but aren’t particularly interested in the newspaper that it comes from anymore.”
This is especially true in the age of social, where URL-shorteners are so endemic that half the time you have no idea which site you’ll end up on.
I’ve got used to reading content that’s been de-branded via a hefty RSS addiction. That’s been replaced in recent years with an addiction to aggregation apps like Zite, Flipboard and Feedly, where what matters is the content itself, not the packaging, or where it’s from.
If the content is good enough, it will stand on its own – it won’t need to hide behind the brand. In fact, the brand can sometimes be a disadvantage, because it leads to preconceptions that can skew the reader’s opinion before they’ve even started to read a piece. There are some publications I avoid simply because I assume that they have nothing to offer me, for reasons of politics, prejudices, or whatever – and I know I’m far from being alone in this.
Remove the publication’s branding and present me with their content as is, would my preconceptions be different? Of course. And if I like the content, this could win them a new long-term reader.
by James Clive-Matthews | 2 Sep, 2014 | Marginalia
Useful look at how detailed, adaptable, *tailored* performance data (and people who know how to analyse and explain it) is essential if you want to be successful in modern media. As so often, Buzzfeed seems to be ahead of the curve.
It never ceases to amaze how often online publishers get het up about the wrong metrics. Tools like Omniture are obscenely powerful, yet all we tend to use them for is to find PVs, UUs, occasionally time spent, and sometimes how particular headlines are performing. Used properly, web analytics can help us keep our sites in a state of constant evolution, adapting to the tiniest shifts in user behaviour through minor design/code tweaks.
This isn’t about becoming Keanu Reeves and learning how to read the Matrix – it’s just knowing how to use the tools that are available to us.
by James Clive-Matthews | 29 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
Useful study on metrics vs journalistic pride, but leaves out a key aspect: the sales guys – because this is how the money is made and the metrics are ultimately determined.
Time was, quality audiences would be worth more to advertisers than quantity. Why hasn’t online ad selling (and buying) caught up yet? Only when it does will there be incentive to move beyond page views and unique users as the key metric. Programmatic ad sales could be the answer, or could worsen the situation further – too early to tell.
Anyway, worth a read:
“Online media is made of clicks.
Readers click from one article to the next. Advertising revenue is based on the number of unique visitors for each site. Editors always keep in mind their traffic targets to secure the survival of their publications. Writers and bloggers interpret clicks as a signal of popularity.
The economic realities underpinning the click-based web are well documented. Yet much work remains to be done on the cultural consequences of the growing importance of Internet metrics.
I conducted two years of ethnographic research (observing newsrooms and interviewing journalists, editors, and bloggers) exploring whether web analytics are changing newsroom cultures. The answer is a qualified yes, but in ways that differ from the ones we might expect.”
by James Clive-Matthews | 26 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
Oh yes please!
I’m a massive CMS geek, yet in well over a decade and a half of online publishing, I still haven’t found one I truly adore. Mid-period WordPress came close, but now it’s too complex and chunky. Buzzfeed’s seems decent, from what I’ve seen. The one they have at ITV News looks great, from the screenshots. But I hear truly great things about the Vox Chorus CMS.
Want!
by James Clive-Matthews | 25 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
Lots to agree with here:
“by some measures, journalism has never been healthier. And there’s every reason to believe that it is actually getting stronger because of the web, not weaker — regardless of what’s happening to print”
Are jobs being lost? Yep. Are publications shutting down? Yep. But are readers getting more of what they want? Yep.
My only worry with this optimistic take on the current situation is that, despite years of worrying about it, and over a decade of confident assertions that hyperlocal “citizen journalism” will fill the void left as uneconomic newspapers shut down, there is still a major risk that many communities will be left without a reliable source of local news coverage.
I’m based in London, so there are any number of hyperlocal Twitter accounts and small blogs covering the area, but none of these are comprehensive, even combined, and few have the skills or abilities to dig deeper into what’s going on in the local council. Local newspapers were never especially economically worthwhile, but they did (well, sometimes) provide a valuable public service in holding local government to account – something they were only really able to do because of the level of access they were afforded by their permanent, professional position.
On a local level, as local papers shut, the most common publication to fill the void isn’t a blogger, it’s an official local government publication – we’re replacing public service for propaganda.
by James Clive-Matthews | 21 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
People are starting to fully wake up to this now – in the mobile-first age, competitors are no longer just other publishers, it’s *everything*, so we all need to start thinking bigger. Good piece as ever from Mathew Ingram on Gigaom:
“very few news apps take advantage of the qualities of a smartphone — things like GPS geo-targeting, which could use the location of a reader to augment the information they are getting, the way the Breaking News app does. Or the brain inside the phone itself, which could compute how long it took a reader to get through a story, how many times they returned to it, what other news they’ve been consuming, and so on”
A number of sites and apps have started to do *some* of this, but very few have managed to pull it all together. Give it a couple of years, and we may finally have a *properly* disruptive news delivery system that combines the best of everything. Combined with increasingly intelligent algorithms and reams of data on individual user preferences, this could get rid of the need for editor selecting stories altogether. But despite ongoing experiments in code-written stories, to do this really well will still take humans producing the copy and vetting the info. The journalist isn’t obsolete yet.
by James Clive-Matthews | 20 Aug, 2014 | Marginalia
Worth a read: “the future of the daily newspaper is one of the few certainties in the current landscape: Most of them are going away, in this decade”
by James Clive-Matthews | 16 Aug, 2014 | Systems & Technology
Nothing new, but this is worth a read on web writing and hate-reading – that old trick of being as controversial as possible in order to get an extreme response, purely because extremes get more attention, and in a pageview-driven business model, controversy is seen as good purely because, based on the metrics, it’s the controversial stuff that’s driving engagement.
This infantile attitude of provocation to get attention is increasingly being combined with ream upon ream of cheap content, because the more content you’ve got, the more potential PVs you can attract. We end up with the most depressing (and false) equation of online publishing:
Cheap content + Controversy = Clicks = Cash
It’s an attitude that’s lazy *and* massively short-termist in thinking – over the long term, quality can and should trump quantity. But even if it doesn’t, cheap, crappy content is a turn-off for audiences. The more sites that start to rely on hastily-produced, poorly-checked copy, or lazy semi-plagiarisms of things that desperate teams of poorly-paid hacks with deadlines and quotas to hit have found elsewhere, the less distinctive sites get, and the fewer returning visitors you’ll get. As that linked article puts it:
“With a business model based on a ton of cheap content, Web publishers can rely too heavily on acid-reflux-style aggregation, in which young writers destroy the savor of interesting stories and an interesting world by constantly regurgitating the news with added bile.”
There’s also an interesting point made from John Waters in the Irish Times (now behind a paywall), on the impact of comment sections under online articles:
“Because everything written specifically for online consumption is written in the expectation of addressing a hostile community, the writing process demands, as a prerequisite, either a defensive or antagonistic demeanor.”
Having learned my online publishing trade in the realm of message boards, chatrooms and blogs, I’m incredibly aware of the vast levels of bile that exist in comment sections. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With careful community management, it’s perfectly possible to build online communities that are supportive, friendly, and constructive, rather than the supposed default of objectionable and offensive. Check out the likes of b3ta, imgur and Metafilter for some prime examples of sites with vast *positive* communities of commenters. And then contrast those with the comments sections of pretty much any national newspaper site – packed with trolls and maniacs.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
by James Clive-Matthews | 6 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia
There’s a perfect quote in this piece that I’m surprised doesn’t appear more often in discussions of online journalism’s monetisation potential: “Ultimately, the problem might be one of unrealistic expectations“
by James Clive-Matthews | 5 Jul, 2014 | Marginalia
We still don’t know why, though…
“There are many more listicles of length 10 published compared to other numbers. This is primarily because BuzzFeed is selling the 10-length listicle to partner brands, such as the Michael J. Fox Show, Nordstrom Topman, and Buick. The second most popular length is 15, followed by 12. Listicle length drops off quite rapidly in the 20’s, although surprisingly, lengths 11-21 are far more popular than those under 10…
“If we look the bar chart by audience score we see a completely different picture — odd number length listicles… tend to have a higher audience score on average, where in our dataset, the number 29 tends to have an advantage over the rest.”
