David Strom is a veteran technology journalist and content strategist who has been covering enterprise technology for over three decades.
He has held editorial management positions for both print and online properties including as the editor-in-chief of Network Computing (in print), Digital Landing.com, and Tom's Hardware, and his work has appeared in numerous other publications, including ITworld.com, TechTarget.com, Internet.com, Network World, InfoWorld, eWeek, and many others. He currently writes about cybersecurity and emerging technologies for CSOonline.com. Through his consulting practice, David helps B2B technology companies develop authoritative content that cuts through marketing noise.
I've known David for many years and have long admired his ability to synthesize complex technical information into clear, compelling narratives.
When he provided feedback on my recent research report about content creation, he challenged my characterization of collaborative writing as a "team sport"—and that critique led to this conversation about the real challenges of content collaboration.
This is the latest in a series of interviews I'm doing with top content creators, editors, and writers.
Dylan Tweney: You objected to my calling collaborative writing a "team sport." It was good feedback, and I fixed it before publishing my report. But tell me more about why you objected.
David Strom: The problem is that when we think of collaborating, there’s no defined playing field, no rules, and often no referee. The term expands infinitely to meet the task. You and I are collaborating on this interview, but there are going to be times when I work alone and you work alone. That's just the nature of collaboration. It's not like you turn it on, then you turn it off once the thing is done.
Even after we publish it, people are going to be giving us helpful or unhelpful hints. We're going to go back and forth, turning this collaboration on and off. It's a process, not a game with clear rules and boundaries.
But also, there are a lot of problems with editorial collaboration that people haven't figured out yet. Too many editors, too many rewrites. In some cases, the rewrites go on for infinity, which is just frustrating and eats up time. Somebody has to be in charge at key points, whether that's the editor, the VP of content marketing, or the lonely freelancer like me.
Dylan: What are some other problems you see with collaborative content creation?
David: There's often no clear direction at the beginning of an assignment. We've all been in that situation where we want to do X, and we float that idea to somebody and they say, "No, you're crazy. That's not what we want. We want Y." It's not necessarily not X, but it's something with a different spin.
Also, the workflow has completely changed. It used to be that we had copy desks and a team of people that actually worked together to hone and publish a single piece of copy. Remember that era at InfoWorld? The copy desk was the ultimate arbiter of what went and what didn't go. If you skated over something, they immediately zeroed in on it. You couldn’t get away with being sloppy.
We don't have that anymore in the online world. We're lucky if we even have a copy editor who sees it before you hit the “post” button.
“Eventually the ref has to blow the whistle. The play must resume.”
Dylan: Have you found ways of addressing these problems with your clients?
David: I often say I'm only going to produce one draft and make minor changes. Then I have a really high price tag for subsequent drafts. The power of the purse usually convinces them! Also, I write a pretty damn good draft. I have been doing this for a few years.
I also think it's important to have a specific editor who's going to consolidate all the input into one final piece. That gets over the problem that everybody thinks they're an editor, and we both know that's not true. Eventually the ref has to blow the whistle. The play must resume.
Dylan: That editor has to be empowered, though. They have to have the power to say to various stakeholders, "I hear you, but this is how it's going to be."
David: Right. Or when the CEO is just spouting BS for a 700-word opinion piece—and 400 of those words are garbage—we're just going to trim all that.
Dylan: You do need to know how to do that diplomatically. For instance, by including something the CEO wants, so they feel heard, but not including 90% of the BS.
David: Back in the day when CEOs actually left their offices and flew to meetings, I would take meetings with them and say, "You have four PowerPoint slides for this meeting. You can't do any more than that." This got them off their script. If they wanted to tell me the company history and go into detail about their 85 continuous quarters of revenue increases, I'd cut that down to a minimum.
Dylan: What about the tools people use for collaboration?
David: If you're still using yesterday's tools, such as serial email where I send you an email, you send me back a comment, and three other people send contradictory feedback, you’re wasting a lot of time. That didn’t work back in the day, and doesn’t work now. Google Docs, where you can collaborate in real time, is much better. I don't think people realize that's a relatively recent innovation. When Google Docs first came out, only one person could work on it at a time.
There's also a difference between creating an editorial product and running a successful meeting to get stakeholders to feel like they're contributing. Those are two completely different skill sets. If you've got five people on a call talking about an op-ed that only two people are actually going to write, why are we having this meeting at all? We're wasting everybody's time.
Dylan: Let’s talk about AI tools. How are you using AI in your work?
David: I'm still experimenting with it. I did an experiment this week with a programmer colleague that was amazingly efficient. We had an hour-long call, and then he took it through Claude and various tools. He's trained his Claude to think and talk like himself, and then he had an extra step where he trained it to think and talk like me. After all, my content goes back 30-plus years. It worked reasonably well—a little scary to see the AI actually talking like the real me. Maybe we both spent another 30 minutes cleaning it up, and that became a 2,500-word article.
Dylan: We’re doing something similar here. I’m using Claude to help edit the transcript of our conversation, but it’s closely tied to the words we’re actually saying. Do you anticipate a time when AIs will replace writers like us completely, though?
David: I don't think we're there yet, and maybe it's going to be a couple of years. But the real question is whether human creators get worse at doing their jobs while they’re busy using these things. There's going to be a point where the AI gets better and people get worse, and when we get to that crossing point, it's going to be a sad moment for everyone involved.
But if you and I can continue to maintain our quality—and I have no reason to suspect we won't, because that's what we get off on, being authoritative voices in our fields—there might still be a market for quality.
“The best writing comes out of a lot of hard work and a lot of rewriting.”
Dylan: What about training the next generation of writers? How do you do that if AI has replaced all the entry level jobs?
David: It's really hard to figure that out because everybody comes in through a different path. I didn't learn how to write well until I was 25, well after graduate school. It was shocking how badly I wrote up until that point. Fortunately, I had somebody who took me under their wing and mentored me.
I think there will always be places that will accept content. It may not be the major publications, but there'll be scrappy tech blogs and local papers that will still exist.
The best writing comes out of a lot of hard work and a lot of rewriting. Too often writers just start writing because it's so easy—you can dictate and not even touch a keyboard. I think that's giving people a false sense of power and quality.
You have to develop your own voice as a writer. Those first early pieces when I was 25 were abominable. But you need someone to push you, to point out that here you need a better description, there you need better sentence structure.
Dylan: Any final thoughts on the state of content creation?
David: I think part of the problem is that too much content on the internet right now is designed to elicit outrage. You're considered an effective content creator if you get somebody to do something, and the best way to do that is to scare them or make them angry. Is that what we want AI to be trained to do? I don't think so.
The motivation is often wrong. Too many writers are trying to promote what the client does rather than staking out an authoritative point of view.
Content that has authoritative points of view gets read because you're saying something meaningful, not just promoting your product.
