Writing

Notes on evidence, not forecasts.

Working notes from client engagements, published when the reasoning is worth more than the conclusion. No newsletters, no predictions, no vendor commentary.

The ledger
11 NOTES
Licensing
4
Audience
3
Newsroom
2
Governance
1
Method
1
Published since November 2025. Licensing questions arrive first; governance questions arrive last.
All notes Licensing Audience Newsroom Governance
11 notes
Latest
July 2026 · Licensing · 12 min
What an archive is worth when the buyer already has a copy

Three valuation methods, applied to the same twenty-year archive, produce numbers a factor of four apart. Only one of them survives a buyer's due diligence, and it is not the one most publishers open with. A walk through the arithmetic, and where the leverage actually sits.

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COST TO REPLACE COMPARABLE DEALS FORGONE TRAFFIC
Three methods, one archive. The spread is the negotiation.
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Archive
2025—2026
JUN 2026
Referral decline is not a marketing problem
Why the forecast, not the funnel, is where this shows up first — and what happens to next year's budget if the modelling stays with the audience team.
AUDIENCE
MAY 2026
A stopping rule for every pilot
Pilots without an exit condition become budget lines. A short template for writing the condition before the work starts.
METHOD
APR 2026
Disclosure standards that survive a correction
What a broadcaster's synthetic-audio policy had to say before legal, editorial, and the union would all sign it.
GOVERNANCE
MAR 2026
Eleven tools, three approvals
The audit we run on newsroom tooling, and the four questions that retired eight of them in an afternoon.
NEWSROOM
JAN 2026
Term length is the whole negotiation
Publishers argue about price and concede on duration. The two are not independent, and one of them compounds.
LICENSING
NOV 2025
The baseline problem
Most AI business cases are measured against a counterfactual nobody wrote down. How to write it down.
METHOD
Earlier notes