In a world of mass produced media, less can be more

Publishing fewer articles but enjoying greater success. Has The Times achieved digital alchemy?

by Rob Corbidge

Published: 15:02, 09 April 2026

Guinness is not a good stout, by good stout standards. This is a fact well-known to lovers of the true dark beer (they would say), who can direct you to any number of superior brands, many at around the same price point.

The reason for this is simple. To produce the quantity of beer that a globally-dominant brand such as Guinness is required to make, means making compromises in the manufacturing process that ultimately result in a slightly inferior product to those produced to the true stout-making tradition.

"You can have it to specification, or you can have it now", as one of our engineers once told me.

Now, direct analogies to beer making and content production aren't fully valid, as a physical product requires physical availability and that is where Guinness excels. However, when pondering quality versus quantity, it does serve some illustrative purpose.

The Times (of London) explained this week that it has been publishing fewer stories,  and consequently seen an uptick in audience. This is, on the face of it, counter-intuitive. The Times is paywalled of course, and features the what-is-now-usual blend of guest reads and gifted articles in order to spread its content net.

Once you have an audience within the bounds of your paywalled garden, it might be tempting to think "We've got them, let's give them everything they could ever want so they don't leave". The classic attention economy play, in other words.

With the adoption of AI systems in editorial production flows, quantity is available in, well, vast quantity. No doubt you will have seen the statistics pointing to the majority of the content on the web now being the product of such systems. Competing on quantity is therefore largely a particular type of content game, and a highly fickle one when it comes to audience, particularly a repeat audience.

Realising that sheer quantity wasn't the key to their title's success in such a publishing landscape, The Times recently adopted a "less is more" strategy, a strategy that has yielded rewards.

“We’ve had three consecutive months of all-time, record-breaking audience growth at The Times and we’re publishing fewer stories than we ever have,” according to Deputy Head of Digital Anna Sbuttoni.

That's not something you would have heard someone say a few years back.

The cut in production rate is not overly dramatic, but it's not insignificant at around 25% per day, from 200 pieces of content down to 150.

Having extensive newsroom experience, I can say that such a change in raw content demand would have an environmental effect over the people working there. I don't think The Times could ever have been accused of "churnalism", however the additional head space that a reduction in quantity makes available, should mean, if the newsroom is run well, an increase in quality. Especially, if, as in the case here, such a reduction hasn't been used as an excuse to fire people.

Sbuttoni in particular noted that the newspaper had abandoned "incremental stories you could get anywhere else”, going on to describe them as "one-fact stories".

In the war against the bland, full featured facts are king.

In a similar vein, the scientific publication Nature recently ran a piece entitled "Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done?"

For those of us looking for the genuine benefits of the processing possibilities that AI systems make possible, the entire arena of scientific research is of great interest. However, Nature's story is really a publishing story, and anyone with knowledge of how academic science works will understand just how much of it is driven by the pressing need to publish papers, even to the point of being detrimental to ongoing research.

However, the best and simplest response I read to the concerns raised by the Nature article was straightforward: "If the research literature can be polluted in such a way, then the science isn't good enough."

Well, I'd argue that if the journalism can be polluted in such a way, then maybe the journalism isn't good enough. 

A deeper less is better than endless more.