The First Creators Weren't on Youtube
How technical writers and content strategists were running the creator playbook years before it had a name
The creator economy looks like a new phenomenon of the social media age but technical writers and content strategists have been running the same playbook for decades ... giving away useful knowledge to build trust. This piece traces that history from Robert Horn’s modular content to Ann Rockley’s “intelligent content,” and shows how the original creators also built the structured content today’s AI depends on.
Part 2 of a series. Part 1 asked whether AI is killing your professional association.
AI isn’t the biggest disruptor in today’s knowledge environments.
That’s a case I’ve made informally for a while.
The creator economy is more disruptive than AI, but often goes unaccounted for.
In part one, I argued that AI didn’t kill the Society for Technical Communication ... or any of the other numerous professional associations that are struggling or even gone at this point. For example, STC had been losing members for twenty years before ChatGPT existed.
In this post, I’m going to make a case for what I think has been killing professional associations.
In short, people changed where they went to learn their craft, and who they trusted to teach it.
As knowledge and content has become easier to create, share, and find through the internet and social media, professional communities have been quietly gathering around “creators,” or professionals who create useful content direct to audiences, often for free.
We call it the creator economy, though you may or may not have heard that term.
Associations and institutions that adapt to this new economy survive, even thrive. Those who don’t, disappear.
That’s my theory anyway.
What is a “creator”
When I say creator, I don’t mean influencer.
The two get lumped together, but they are opposites in a lot of ways.
An influencer grabs attention and rents it out to businesses, often posting about products in exchange for a fee or a discount code.
A creator makes something people actually want, like a newsletter, a podcast, a video series, a course. The audience forms around the usefulness of the work itself, as well as the “ethos” or credibility of the creator.
Ethos is just an old rhetorical word for earned trust. A creator builds it by giving useful work away, not by holding a title or charging dues.
The creator economy is now an entire ecosystem of these independent producers in spaces like YouTube, Substack, Patreon, Linkedin, and many other spaces.
Goldman Sachs sized the creator economy at roughly 250 billion dollars in 2023, with tens of millions of people creating for a living. It has only grown since then.
No single platform holds it together. Instead of going to an institution or an association, people follow a person who has been generous with what they know.
You might think this is a phenomenon of the social media age with YouTube stars and the first full-time bloggers.
But if you look a little earlier, being a creator has been around for much longer.
Content strategy and the creator mindset
Tech writers are creators at heart ... actually all writers are, really. That’s what we do. Create useful content for specific audiences.
That’s most visible in the discipline of content strategy, which is the work of planning, writing, structuring, and maintaining everything an organization publishes so that it stays useful instead of collapsing into a mess.
Kristina Halvorson, who helped name the field, called it planning for “the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.”
Someone has to decide what a company’s help articles, product guides, manuals, and support pages should say, how they’re organized, how the same explanation gets reused across a website and an app and a printed guide, and how all of it stays accurate over years.
That person is a content strategist, and at the heart of every content strategist is a creator.
If you’ve never touched a content team, stay with me. This is really a story about how expertise earns trust now, in any field.
All businesses and institutions need to grapple with how the creator economy changes the ways people engage with information.
Creators before there were creators
Go looking for where content strategy came from and you find something that resembles the creator economy, only earlier and mostly offline.
Rahel Anne Bailie, a content strategist who wrote the field’s own history, traces its founders, and I would argue that their credentials and association memberships have little to do with their success.
If you are not in the field, you’ve probably never heard of these people. That’s kind of the point.
We sometimes called these people technical writers. But they were are just technical writers. That’s why we keep changing the title: information developer, content strategist, content designer, content engineer.
The work keeps outgrowing the word for it.
Ann Rockley, Scott Abel , Kristina Halvorson all wrote self-published books, ran their own consultancies, and started conferences that people paid their own way to attend.
They earned trust the way a creator does now, by giving useful work away until people came to depend on it.
For example, Rockley is called the mother of content strategy because she showed up year after year teaching people how to manage mountains of content. That’s how you build ethos in the creator economy.
Or take Scott Abel. Since 2003 he has run something called The Content Wrangler ... more than a hundred free webinars a year, over sixty thousand subscribers, no membership card and no dues. Just a person who kept showing up with something useful, until an audience gathered around him.
Trust used to be handed to you by an institution, a credential or an association or a byline in the right journal. Now you earn it in public by being useful.
Let’s go even further back.
In the 1960s a researcher named Robert Horn built a method he called Information Mapping. Instead of writing documents as long unbroken prose, he broke knowledge into small, labeled, reusable blocks, so a reader could find exactly the piece they needed.
Around the same stretch of years, Vannevar Bush had already imagined a personal machine for linking and sharing trails of knowledge, and Ted Nelson had coined the word hypertext for writing that readers move through by their own path rather than start to finish.
These were people treating content as something modular and connected, built for an audience to use on its own terms. Decades before anyone uploaded a video, technical communicators and other content professionals were designing knowledge to be reused and shared.
We sometimes called these people technical writers. But they were are just technical writers. That’s why we keep changing the title: information developer, content strategist, content designer, content engineer.
The work keeps outgrowing the word for it.
Sell without selling
Content people have a phrase for the core move used by creators ... sell without selling.
You make something so useful that nobody feels sold to. This could be a troubleshooting guide, a clear walkthrough, a genuinely good explainer. No pitch. The trust does the work, and the sale takes care of itself later.
It’s the whole logic of the creator economy, and it was being studied inside technical communication years before creators turned it into a business model.
In the 1990s a writing scholar named Johndan Johnson-Eilola argued that technical writers had been badly miscast as support staff, when their real work was creating and shaping knowledge, the same high-value work economists were celebrating everywhere else.
More recently, two researchers, Amanda Wall and Clay Spinuzzi, looked closely at how content marketing actually persuades and found that it works precisely by not pitching, for example a set of genuinely useful documents that walk a reader toward a decision on their own.
Content marketing isn’t the same as “content strategy” in the tech writing world, but that’s exactly how many of these influential thinkers have built the communities around their work.
“Give value first” is a creator mantra now ... but a whole profession had it worked out a generation earlier.
Building content for machines
The same instinct that made content people early creators also made them the people who taught content how to talk to machines.
Remember Horn’s modular blocks? I’ve been talking about it for a while. That idea matured over several decades.
By the 2000s it had hardened into a formal standard called DITA, a way of writing content in structured, labeled chunks that software can sort, assemble, and deliver on its own.
This is a field already trained to see writing as a system. You design content with users, not only for them, and you work inside a network of templates, tools, and now models that help assemble the final thing.
Write something once, structure it well, and it can then flow into a manual, a help page, a printed guide, or a search result. Content people call this single-sourcing, and creators reinvent a version of it every time they turn one idea into a post, a thread, and a video.
Ann Rockley gave this the name intelligent content. Content that is both human-friendly and machine-processable. Modular, structured, and rich enough that a machine can find it, recombine it, and reuse it.
Decades before generative AI, a group of technical writers were deliberately building knowledge that machines could read and reassemble. That turns out to be a large part of why today’s AI systems work at all, and it’s close to my own research. Structured content is what makes these tools genuinely useful instead of merely fluent.
It’s also why, when AI writing tools arrived, many content people dug right into testing while other writers braced for a threat.
This is a field already trained to see writing as a system. You design content with users, not only for them, and you work inside a network of templates, tools, and now models that help assemble the final thing.
If your craft already treats writing as something built with technology and other people, a tool that drafts and remixes is just one more part of the network. Another node.
But a language model can be fluent. It cannot earn ethos.
Trust still comes from a person who shows up again and again, giving something useful before asking for anything back.
That was always the real product … and its pretty difficult to automate.
Evolve or die
Everyone will need to adapt to the creator economy before they adapt to AI.
Content people built audiences on free, useful work. They theorized the give-value model of content. They engineered workflows. They spent decades preparing knowledge for machines to read, a valuable asset today that is often overlooked.
Nearly every attribute we now call “creator” was ordinary practice in a field most people picture as the writers of dull instruction manuals.
And it’s not just their story anymore. Every professional is now being asked to do what these people always did ... build trust by giving knowledge away.
If technical writers and content strategists were the original creators, why did the institutions built around them, like STC, fall apart, while creator-style communities in the very same field grew?
That’s the question I’m digging into for my current research project ... and part 3 of this series.