Content Strategy in the Age of AI
The forthcoming AI-enabled ubiquity of knowledge will ultimately impact every publisher’s visibility. But focusing on your differentiators and gaining first-hand knowledge of AI will enable you to continue promoting your brand’s unique value to your readers.
By Ed McKinley & Jeff Joseph
In April 2023, two German creatives used the generative AI platforms ChatGPT and Midjourney to create a 136-page publication called PANTA RHAI. In just five days, they produced the first print consumer magazine created entirely by AI.
It won’t be the last.
Since the dramatic November 2022 debut of ChatGPT, the OpenAI plat- form’s user count has grown to more than 180 million. Thousands of generative AI applications have materialized in the past year, and the technology has placed the business of content on the cusp of an unprecedented realignment.
The Data-Inspired Editor
A magazine worth making is worth measuring. Kellogg editor LeeAnn Shelton shares how she learned to love data analytics and approach the magazine with a strategist’s eye.
By LeeAnn Shelton
I took a deep breath and clicked “Join Meeting.” It was the spring of 2021, and since we were all still working from our kitchen tables and guest bedrooms, I was thankful the hiring panel on the other side of the Zoom call couldn’t see me nervously fidgeting with my hands.
My laptop was perched on a rickety card table squeezed in next to our bed—my makeshift office during the blur of lockdowns and the new (ab)normal that came after. (This was prime real estate, actually: Lockdown had tested the limits of our two-bedroom apartment, and my husband good-naturedly retreated to work from a card table in our toddler’s nursery.) The red webcam light flickered on. It was go time.
Over the next 30 minutes, I proceeded to lay out why the Kellogg School of Management’s flagship alumni periodical, Kellogg magazine, should return to print and why I was the woman to lead it.
Break the Rules
This regional startup does, and it’s thriving.
By Gia Miller
When my 15-year-old daughter Talia was in third grade, she came home upset because her teacher, Mrs. G., took points off her essay for starting a sentence with the word “and.” Talia approached Mrs. G. and asked why, arguing that she’d done it correctly. Her teacher responded, “Because I haven’t taught that yet.” Shocked, Talia just stared at her, which gave Mrs. G. the time she needed to reconsider. “Okay,” she finally replied. “I’ll return the points but don’t do it again. Students don’t learn that skill until high school.”
Instead of encouraging Talia’s advanced skills, Mrs. G. wanted her to follow the rules, even if that weakened her writing. But here’s the thing: Once you understand why a rule exists, you can, depending on the rule, intentionally defy it to create something better and possibly even extraordinary. I’ve repeatedly challenged my children, now teenagers, to think this way, and it’s a philosophy my business partner Justin Negard and I have embraced with our magazine.
Spring / Summer 2024 Departments
Five Moves for Remaining Relevant in a Google-Takes-All World
By Kate Hand
Last fall, I gave a presentation to Gardner Business Media’s content creators and sales teams about an as-yet-unknown Google Labs project: a new AI-powered search interface dubbed “Search Generative Experience”—since renamed AI Overviews.
AI Overviews is Google’s reaction to ChatGPT and Bing’s inclusion of AI in search (picture a panicked boardroom with someone slamming a table declaring, “We can’t be outdone by Bing!”). It is essentially an enormous, top-of-the-page summarization feature.
I’ll wait here while you go check it out, if you haven’t already.
Unfolding and Unfolding …
By Holly Neumann & Erin Dixon
The editorial team at UT Journal, the alumni magazine of The University of Tampa, spent months planning how to cover the career of the university president, who retired after nearly 30 years. The main challenge? There was so much to say and only so much space to say it. Plus, we needed to present the story in a new way, as the Journal’s audience was already well familiar with this president and his accomplishments.
Enter the double gatefold timeline.
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