Great storytelling is still the job. But now it has to be found. And it has to be trusted.

It was classic for the age. Reeves left university looking for a permanent role and started at the B2B publisher Centaur selling advertising space, his first entry into magazine media. He moved to EMAP in the mid-1990s, in what he calls the halcyon days for magazines. On the commercial side he worked with the editorial teams on Q, Arena and The Face, and the passion that exuded from the editors and storytellers is what drove the experience.

It was fast-paced, a mix of weeklies and monthlies, in an analog world. He worked on music magazines when Britpop kicked off, when the title was like an extension of the record label and the bands. Magazines were driving a lot of the cultural narratives, and there was real passion between the audience and their brand.

It started with the web. Some publishers now wonder whether they could put the genie back in the bottle and not given their content away. Copy sales were a huge revenue source, and once the freemium model took hold it changed both the financials and the distribution model. Then social media put it on steroids, changing what was produced, who produced it and how it was delivered. We are still within that change, and now AI search and discovery has brought another fundamental change.

Brands want to engage audiences beyond the transactional, and content marketing changed how they position themselves and create a dialogue with customers. They are talking to a very savvy audience, so they must produce content at the level a serious publisher would. Reeves launched his first company with his business partner Ben on exactly that premise, taking content, editorial skills and networks to clients and delivering publishing excellence.

Publishing excellence means being multimodal: digital, experiential, podcasts, using every medium to produce content that resonates while owning topical authority and delivering trustworthy narratives. Reeves points to Ramp, a multi-billion-valued financial operator in the States that has taken content marketing to an amazing degree, driving both customer engagement and acquisition.

Reeves and Ben incubated a natural language processing product, Loyal AI, for richer archive search, funded through Google Digital News Initiative and innovate grants rather than equity. What they learnt brought them to Subjct. It is great that you can produce content, he says, but it needs to be found and discovered, and publishers were struggling to scale the optimisation needed to be found in both classic and AI search.

Where Google owned the deterministic crawl, rank and index monopoly, that has shifted at great speed in the last eighteen months. The machines use query fan-outs, passage-level extraction and synthesis to go to the live web, but they have to return content that answers a question and intent with truth, authority and trust.

The risk is AI slop. Reeves genuinely believes in great storytelling that comes from a human, and while AI can assist, it is the human element that makes it sing. He cites a photographer friend now at an agency called Enmatic, who shoots live footage and augments it with AI, keeping the human at the core and expanding it with the technology.

Combining integrity with commercial objectives comes back to topical authority, trust and authority, and Reeves thinks that will win out, because without it the systems collapse in on themselves. From a brand perspective, they have a customer relationship to keep, so they must remain true to their products and services and to that relationship.

Because AI systems depend on trustworthy content, Reeves hopes for a transactional agreement in which publishers and creators are remunerated for the content they produce, because it creates a web and an experience that has to be truthful and authentic.

The vision began with scalable optimisation for publishers and broadened to B2B customers who see AI search as an opportunity, not a threat. Subjct is not a platform that generates AI content, it optimises it, human first. It offers API-first delivery for large archives, MCP connectors for agentic workflows, and a web app for smaller companies.

Technically it uses semantic natural language processing, breaking passages into vectors and embeddings in a 3D vector space, matching to retrieve the right article for automated internal linking with a human in the loop. For AI search it adds passage extraction, prompt-to-passage matching and scoring, automated tagging and schema markup, so a piece can publish straight to a CMS.

The key for publishers is driving the first-party relationship, building recurring revenue and subscriptions to replace copy-sales revenue. With traffic decline the arbitrage ad models are disappearing, but new models are emerging and publishers are resilient. They have an amazing relationship with their audience, so monetising that relationship is how they survive and thrive.

Niche communities have always been there and will become even more important, whether it is Kerrang! for a Gen Z rock kid, Mixmag for dance music, or a domain built around marathon running. Those relationships continue with great content, and you adapt to the platforms of delivery.

Reeves would not look ahead more than a year, because it is moving so fast and the last 12 months have been a watershed moment. There is an innate sense of what people want to interact with, and that will drive things. How content is delivered and consumed will change, but it is about great stories and the human condition.

On brands, he picked Ramp because they excel, but the majority of digital brands and big FMCG names like Nike keep making fantastic content as an experience. Going back to his roots, EMAP is now Bauer and still has fantastic brands, The Week still delivers brilliantly week in, week out, and he loves Channel 4 as content creators.