I woke up on a Monday morning and did what most of us do before our feet hit the floor — I opened LinkedIn.

The first post that caught my attention was from Emily Anne Epstein, sharing that brands are no longer hiring writers or editors — they’re hiring storytellers. She framed it as a shift in how companies think about content, insight, and narrative. And at first glance, I agreed. Completely.

Storytelling matters. Always has.

But by the third paragraph, I felt that familiar disappointment settle in — not because Emily was wrong, but because the conversation was already being aimed at the unimaginative.

What she was really describing wasn’t a revolution in marketing. It was an evolution of blogging expectations.

Brands, she argued — citing a Wall Street Journal article titled “Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’” by Katie Deighton — now want people who can turn a single insight into a blog post, a social clip, a case study, a podcast episode, and an executive talking point. Same story. Different surfaces. Connected.

And yes — that is more demanding than hiring a copywriter.

But it’s still missing the point.

Because brands don’t have a storytelling problem.
They have a customer engagement problem.

And no amount of better blogging fixes that.


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The Henry Ford Problem, Revisited

Henry Ford famously said that if he had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. What they actually needed was a car.

Today’s brands are asking for better storytellers when what they need is a different system altogether.

Hiring journalists, bloggers, editors, or rebranding them as “storytellers” doesn’t solve the core issue. It just polishes the same top-down narrative approach companies have relied on for decades — one voice, speaking at many people, hoping for engagement.

That model worked when mass media worked.

It doesn’t work anymore.

The Wall Street Journal article makes this painfully clear, even if unintentionally. It outlines how brands are inflating job descriptions, merging roles, asking one person to do the work of five, and calling it “storytelling.” It documents how print journalism has collapsed, how earned media has shrunk, and how brands now have to publish for themselves.

All true.

But the conclusion is off.

Because brands don’t need more people telling stories.
They need to stop trying to control the narrative altogether.


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The Real Shift Isn’t Storytelling — It’s Story Ownership

Since 2012, I’ve been building social media platforms.

Not accounts.
Not content calendars.
Platforms.

In 2021, I began developing user-generated content digital magazines — media platforms built on the same principles that power social networks. Platforms where the customer isn’t the audience.

They’re the author.

This is not testimonial marketing. It’s not PR. And it’s definitely not handcrafted journalistic storytelling.

It’s system design.

A user-generated content (UGC) digital magazine allows customers to be interviewed, not written about. They choose from a curated set of questions. They answer in their own words. The platform structures the story, formats it professionally, and publishes it under a trusted brand.

What emerges is something incredibly powerful:
A story the customer is proud to share.

Not because it was written about them — but because it was written by them.

That’s the difference.


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Why UGC Digital Magazines Work Better Than “Storytellers”

Traditional print magazines sat at one end of the spectrum: high editorial control, strong journalistic integrity, limited access, and slow publishing cycles.

Social media sits at the other end: instant publishing, full self-promotion, constant editing, and zero friction — but little credibility or longevity.

User-generated content digital magazines sit between those two worlds.

They borrow credibility from traditional media and distribution mechanics from social platforms — without the gatekeeping.

There are no editorial bottlenecks. No bias toward the loudest voice. No single narrative being forced downstream.

Instead, brands create a container — a platform — that makes it easy for customers to tell their own stories in a way that feels elevated, permanent, and shareable.

And when customers share those stories, they don’t just promote themselves.

They promote the brand that gave them the platform.


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This Is Customer-Centric Marketing, Not Content Marketing

What brands are really reacting to — whether they realize it or not — is a loss of trust.

AI-generated content floods the internet. Press releases feel hollow. Influencer campaigns feel transactional. And audiences have learned to tune out corporate voice entirely.

The Wall Street Journal article even acknowledges this, citing CEOs who say they need more “authentic” and “human” narratives.

But authenticity doesn’t come from better writing.

It comes from letting go.

Customer-centric marketing flips the equation. Instead of brands speaking for customers, customers speak for themselves — using the brand’s platform.

This leverages the same self-promotion instinct that made Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok dominant. Those companies didn’t succeed because they hired better storytellers.

They succeeded because they built systems that made people want to tell their own stories.


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Why This Scales — and Why Brands Are Missing It

The irony is that brands already understand this instinctually. They see it on social media every day. They just haven’t applied it to their own owned platforms.

A UGC digital magazine scales infinitely because it doesn’t depend on one voice. It doesn’t burn out writers. It doesn’t bottleneck creativity.

It grows as fast as the community grows.

It also solves several problems at once:

It creates content without inflating headcount.
It distributes itself through customer sharing.
It builds trust through peer stories.
It replaces testimonials with narratives.
It turns customers into marketers — willingly.

And most importantly, it shifts brands from controlling narratives to facilitating conversations.


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Brands Don’t Need Better Storytellers

They Need Better Systems

The rush to hire “storytellers” is understandable. It feels like progress. It feels modern. It feels like action.

But it’s still rooted in an outdated idea: that brands should be the primary voice in their own story.

The brands that will win over the next decade won’t be the ones with the best copy. They’ll be the ones with the strongest communities — and the platforms that allow those communities to speak.

That’s why I’ve launched multiple user-generated content digital magazines. Not because brands need more content.

But because they need to get out of the way.

And let their customers do what humans have always done best — tell their own stories.