David Cohn has worked on the intersection of journalism and tech for most of his career, spanning the past 15 years. His background is very much in journalism, with a degree from the renowned Colombia Journalism School. Yet, David is a somewhat entrepreneurial type, so he founded a startup and afterward worked in several product-led roles, most recently as Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer for Subtext, a text communication platform that connects creators, entertainers, media companies, brands, political and thought leaders with their audiences.
Given all of David’s activities, he has been covered, quoted, and mentioned many times in the press. Plus, David is a seasoned speaker at events and conferences, so that adds to the publicity he generates. Last but not least, David publishes a column or an opinion piece every now and then in different publications. All of this publicity is great for David’s “personal brand” as a thought leader in the news industry.
However, what to do with all these content pieces that mention him? How to turn them into something that reflects his expertise and truly helps him?
This was something David had always been struggling with: finding and maintaining a place where he could easily collect all content about himself and then use it further.
As obnoxious as it sounds, being a "thought leader" and showing all the fields you're thinking about and digesting and bringing into your work is important.
The problem: How to archive and showcase all content mentioning yourself
Years and years ago, David maintained a blog where he’d post links to interviews he did or articles where he was mentioned. That was a lot of manual work, and while it looked good in 2007, it became outdated and out of fashion over time.
What were the alternatives?
Twitter is too fleeting, LinkedIn doesn't showcase it well, Facebook isn't the place for it, etc., etc. I started to revamp my blog, I tried organizing LinkedIn better, and finally, I started creating a public Notion page. All of it felt like too much work and still wouldn't really capture the tone I wanted.
All options required David to post links to his content manually, so he needed first to find it and then post it. All in all, there was lots of work, and nothing was proving to fulfill David’s use case properly.
The solution: A central place that automatically collects all content that’s been created about you
After David started using Authory, archiving and showcasing content became a breeze for him. To begin with, Authory automatically found, imported, and indexed all of the content that David had created: his columns, blog posts, and videos.
It was then easy for David to turn his content into a beautiful portfolio page:
But that was only half of what David wanted. What about the content that’s been created about him? The content where he has been quoted and mentioned?
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Authory offers a straightforward solution for David’s non-bylined content: He can copy & paste the URLs of the respective pieces, and they’ll be added to his account instantly. That includes articles, podcasts, videos, and even social media posts.
Content BY and Content ABOUT: An important distinction
Now that both the content about himself and by himself was in David’s account, the question was how to make clear to anybody looking up his portfolio page what is what. Luckily, Authory’s built-in collections feature can cover this use case very well: David simply created three separate collections:
- Bylined: For the content by him
- Quoted and Mentioned: For the content about him
- Speaking: For videos of his work as a speaker
He then added these collections to his portfolio while keeping the main page of his portfolio a continuous flow of all his content, both by and about him. That way, anybody interested in David can easily distinguish between what David created and where David was the topic of interest.
For me, Authory is about looking at your career through the lens of a long arc. It will capture what I've done and turn it into something I can point to. I wish Authory had been around earlier. I've had several distinct career phases which I could clearly label.
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Now, Authory goes beyond simply displaying links to David’s content. Besides the incredible ease that Authory offers when it comes to collecting content, it also provides real archive functionality. Every piece of content that’s imported into David’s Authory means that a 1:1 copy of the original is created in his account.
In other words, no matter what happens to the original, David will always have the copy at his fingertips. That is a big deal because it means David doesn’t have to worry about his content (both by him and about him) will go offline in the future.
I LOVE that on Authory, not only am I saving the links in a formatted way, but the content itself is being saved. Some of my bylines go back to 2004. I can't find them anymore, and so they are lost forever. Link degradation happens, and now I don't worry about it.
Authory offers even more
David’s use case highlights very nicely how Authory can help content creators be more successful when it comes to pitching their work.
The good news? That’s only part of what Authory does.
In fact, Authory is a real all-you-need solution helping content creators automatically handle everything that’s important after their content has been published. Besides amazing curation features, Authory also offers the following:
- Detailed social media analytics
- Extensive search and filtering options
- An integrated newsletter system
- … and much more!
Join David and thousands of other content creators and be on top of your content game while saving countless hours of manual work every month: Try Authory for free!
