Why I Built StoryCraft

After twenty-plus years inside newsrooms — the AP wire during the financial crisis, page one at the Journal, the business desk at the Los Angeles Times — I kept getting the same phone call. A CEO, a founder, a comms chief. Off the record. The question was always some version of: “What would a reporter actually do with this?”

They weren’t asking their PR agency. That’s worth sitting with. They were paying an agency, and calling a journalist.

The reason is simple and a little uncomfortable: most of the communications industry was built to manage the press, not to understand it. It optimizes for control — approved messages, polished spokespeople, volume. But newsrooms don’t respond to control. They respond to stories. And the ability to recognize a story, to know what survives the morning meeting and what gets spiked by 9:15, is a craft you learn by doing it for decades. It doesn’t transfer by osmosis.

StoryCraft is my answer to that phone call, made into a practice. Media strategy, executive counsel, investor narratives, content systems — all of it running on the same engine: editorial judgment, applied on behalf of the company instead of the byline.

This page is where I’ll write it down. Expect dispatches on how newsrooms actually decide, what AI is doing to the content economy, why trust keeps falling while output keeps rising, and what companies can do about it — the thinking behind the work, published the way I’d want to read it.

The wire is open. First editions to follow.