🔴 Content = sushi

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Three years ago, I went out for sushi. We ordered the omakase, or the tasting menu. I was struck by the number of different fish, the knowledge needed to source and slice them, the thoughtfulness in their sequencing, and especially the fact that I had no work to do as a diner.

Because I’m a workaholic, I kept thinking that this is exactly how I aspire to produce content of any kind. I finally wrote about it for today’s issue.

— Francis Zierer, Editor

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Imagine you are in a restaurant.

The waiter places a steak in front of you. It has not been sliced. You have a fork and a butter knife. You try to slice it, but the blade is not sharp enough. You don’t know how to carve a steak anyway, and you end up with a mangled and messy pile of dry steak on your plate. You will never return to this restaurant.

As a creator, your publication, your YouTube channel, your newsletter — your entire media business — is run a lot like a vertically integrated sushi restaurant.

Consider an omakase meal: there will be at least a dozen different pieces of sushi, almost all featuring different fish. You need to source these fish responsibly and present them expertly. The consumer does not need the entirety of each fish; they need only one perfect piece from each, sliced and treated to perfection.

It’s our job as creators (writers, videographers, producers, etc.) to serve our audience the best experience possible. Media is a hospitality industry! Consumers have a heaving surplus of media providers to turn to besides you; how do you make them stay?

There were 15.6 billion emails sent through beehiiv alone last year. There are 34 million TikToks posted every day. We only have a brief window to capture a consumer’s attention; we’re only ever one boring sentence or moment of friction away from losing it.

As creators, our job is to:

Great creators aren’t usually the source of the information they distribute; they’re master curators and information processors. They know where to find it, how much to share with their audience, and when.

“Omakase” is a Japanese word that translates to “I’ll leave it up to you.” These meals are expensive; diners place a great deal of trust in these chefs to deliver quality. It’s a good analogy for how creators should approach media production. How do you deliver an engaging, high-quality, well-sequenced piece of content to your audience?

Original information is always an edge. Sushi restaurants need to source high-quality fish; creators need to source high-quality, original information.

The best tuna come from Japan’s Tsugaru Strait; the best salmon come from The Faroe Islands. It’s the same with information — the best information about how workers are affected by layoffs, for example, comes from recently-laid-off workers.

Consider Melanie Ehrenkranz, recent Spotlight guest and creator of the newsletter Laid Off. She started with a simple Typeform survey about layoffs, expecting a few dozen responses. She got 500.

She discovered a thriving fishery! A niche with abundant stories that weren’t being told and an audience hungry for those stories.

If I gave you an entire tuna, what would you do with it? Would you know how to break it down? What cuts to perform to create a perfect slice of fish for a piece of sushi? I sure wouldn’t.

Raw information is the same. An earnings report, a research study, a long-form investigative story — these are your whole fish. Your job is to break them down into perfect, digestible pieces.

Casey Lewis, who we featured in this newsletter last year, is an excellent example of this. Her near-daily newsletter typically features four or five headlines from recent news in her niche (Gen Z culture and trends), accompanied by a brief paragraph that contextualizes each.

This is the mark of a skilled chef; you can go to the market, select the finest ingredients, and break them down into perfect, bite-sized pieces a less knowledgeable person would never be able to process.

This is what creators do — curate the most relevant information and teach audiences why it matters.

At a great sushi restaurant, you're not just paying for fish. You're paying for the room, the lighting, the service, the sequence, the timing. The chef's knife skills matter, but so do the temperature of the rice, the quality of the soy sauce, and the warmth of the towel you may’ve been handed to clean your hands with on walking in.

It's about how you say it as much as what you say.

In the creator economy, presentation isn't about copying traditional media's aesthetic choices. It's about understanding what your specific audience perceives as quality and care.

Quality and thoughtfulness of presentation are of the utmost importance as the creator economy grows more crowded and sophisticated. I don’t mean that creators need to use the signifiers of quality from traditional media — it’s about attentiveness to the details your specific audience sees as quality signifiers.

Consider recent Spotlight guest Adam Biddlecombe. When he and his business partner entered the market with their newsletter covering AI news and advice, it was already crowded. How did they differentiate? Quality. Attention to detail. Thoughtful editorial. A human touch, a low word count. Beautiful graphics.

This approach to quality kept their audience coming back, grew that audience, and helped them sell to a major tech company only 17 months in.

It’s another day, and you are sitting at the chef’s counter in a small Japanese restaurant. You’re celebrating.

The chef places a single piece of sushi on the plate in front of you. You have no utensils at your setting, no chopsticks, but you do not need them. Everything has been done for you, your ever need predicted. You lift the morsel — perfectly sliced tuna, brushed with soy sauce, draped over pearlescent rice lightly seasoned with vinegar — between your index finger and your thumb. You eat.

The chef wipes your plate clean with a small cloth and prepares another piece.

I live in New York City, where restaurants are required to display letter grades based on the results of food safety inspections by a municipal organization. A, B, or C. Do you want to eat at a C-grade sushi restaurant? How many hands do you think the fish has passed through? How many times has it been thawed and re-frozen?

We don’t have a grading system like this in the creator economy. But we do rely on what trust we can build with our audience. Tell them where your information comes from. Show the effort you’ve put into it. Find a way to prove the A grade.

In media, the analog is to have good, ethical practices. Disclose your biases. Vet your sources. Check your facts.

Are you fishing in the right waters? Are those waters overfished? Are you skilled enough at identifying the choicest, most compelling pieces of the information you’re surfacing? Are you presenting it in a way your audience can understand? Are you structuring it such that they’ll learn to understand it as they consume it?