One overlooked aspect of audience engagement is “trust anchors” — the foundations people rely on to interpret information, such as science, authority, community, or lived experience. To get better engagement with your audience, identify and align your trust anchors with the ones used by your audience. Charlie Kirk is either a hero or a villain,…
[This is the main article from the August issue of The Krehbiel Letter.] I keep hearing that AI will steal jobs, but also that AI-generated content is substandard, and humans are still better at …. something. That’s the theme of this month’s issue. Where do humans fit in as AI takes over? Hope for humans…
Summary: The partisan divide in the country, in which we all live in our own epistemic bubbles, isn’t a cultural or political shift — it’s a consequence of the technologies that make it easy for anyone to become a content creator. Attention is limited, but content is almost unlimited. In that situation, content that provokes…
Summary: Our obsessions shape how we see the world. Instead of resisting them, we can harness them—finding what’s interesting to build an audience and what’s actionable to create value. Are you ready for the flood of posts, videos, and tweets about “Marketing Lessons from the Big Game,” or “Why the Halftime Show is a Branding…
Summary: Listening to Beowulf exposes you to “kennings,” which are vivid, unexpected expressions — usually a pair of words — that put a different spin on a name or concept. Unlike AI’s predictable phrasing, creative language like kennings breaks linguistic patterns, making content more engaging, memorable, and uniquely human. While I was heating the pan…
Summary: For now, excellent content requires a human writer, but creative teams are being downsized in hopes that AI can fill the gap. When Moses told Pharoah to let his people go, Pharoah said, “I guess these guys have too much time on their hands. From now on they have to make the same quota…
Summary: You can create reusable tools with ChatGPT to help streamline idea generation and content creation. You’re staring at a blank page, and it’s staring back at you. How do you move forward? Today I’m going to explain a great tool you can use with ChatGPT to help you with content creation. My son does…
Summary: There are rules and patterns that define and describe compelling content. Here’s an overview. The Babylon Bee had a great bit where a husband is complaining that his wife wants to have a deep conversation but she won’t even listen to his podcast. That’s essentially the message of “Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t”…
Summary: A 16-point, step-by-step guide to using AI to write a book. Today I’m going to give you a simple technique to help you write a book quickly. There’s one prerequisite. You have to have already produced a lot of content on the subject. That content could be blog posts, articles, podcasts – even documentation,…
Summary: There are many ways to restrict access to content, and there are a lot of issues to consider when developing such a strategy. Here’s a start. When advertising revenue declines, as it has been, publishers start to think about paywalls, as they have been. I was talking with a client about this the other…
Summary: To establish trust with your audience, your content strategy should focus on these five pillars: transparency, credibility, habitual product, relevant language, and specificity. At Omeda’s OX7 meeting in Chicago, Adam Ryan from Workweek gave a talk on 5 pillars of trust. They are … Transparency Credibility Habitual product Relevant language Specificity My notes from…
Summary: To make your content stand out in a crowded field, consider these nine concepts: voice, focus, frameworks, recurring segments, vocabulary, message, favorites, characters, and skits. Publishers spend a lot of time and money developing their own brand image, which can include typography, colors, logos, and stylized art. Think of the dot-matrix images in The…
Summary: To create a solid content-based business, don’t focus on the “flyby” traffic. Use high-quality, relevant content to attract an engaged audience, then create a robust database around that audience. At MACMA Industry Day last week, Amanda Landsaw said “flyby visitors don’t create robust databases.” There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. Let’s start…
Summary: Publishers don’t lose their rights to their content when they post it online. Also, bullet points are nice, but we learn through stories. I like the people vs. algorithms podcast. It’s an entertaining mix of insight and quirky personalities. The interactions between Alex, Troy and Brian are amusing. In today’s podcast I’m going to…
Summary: The article explores the evolution of content recommendations from “related articles” to sophisticated methods tailored to user preferences and behavior. The author debates the balance between editorial and algorithmic curation, and the varying objectives behind recommendations, such as enhancing user experience or maximizing ad revenue, emphasizing the importance of aligning recommendation strategies with business…