We gave everything a new name and called it progress

If you have tried recently to hire someone to lead your organization's content work, you already know the problem. The job descriptions blur. The titles multiply. The candidates arrive speaking different dialects of what sounds like the same language. Content strategist. Content designer. UX writer. UX content strategist. Content marketer.

Each tribe comes with a distinct LinkedIn following and a distinct conference circuit. Each also has strong opinions about where the others fall short.

We all value clarity, communication, structure, and meaning. But, we've made ourselves nearly impossible to understand from the outside.

This is not semantic nitpicking or a taxonomical debate. Title confusion can create real organizational dysfunction. It leads to misaligned hires, poor budgeting, and structures that reflect turf wars rather than business needs. Senior leaders default to whoever speaks loudest or whoever showed up first, rather than whoever sees the problem most clearly. And I can't say I blame them.

The confusion isn't an inconvenience. It can be expensive.

Where it started

The content field wasn't always this complicated. For its early history it had two poles and a reasonable amount of space between them.

One side was copywriting—a traditional craft with real lineage. It came from the ad agencies, the direct mail houses, and the brand voice specialists. They understood that words do work and that doing that work well requires genuine skill.

The other side was built in response to a new medium—the web. Content development became a catch-all for people producing written material that wasn't advertising. Documentation, web content, technical communication, and the like.

The titles were functional rather than aspirational. You wrote things, or you wrote things for ads.

When organizations started taking the internet seriously, the problem got more complicated.

The discipline that was already there

What gets called the origin of content strategy is usually told as a story about a seminal book and a conference. That version of history is tidy and not particularly accurate. Not that it makes the book and the conference less important.

The discipline already existed. And it had its name. Enterprise practitioners worked through hard organizational problems well before it had a public brand.

It happened at various places independently as early as 1998 (even though the actual work was being done in pieces before then). Information architects, technical writers, and content strategists at early digital agencies were doing the work then: auditing content at scale and modeling information architecture across complex digital properties. The problems they were solving were genuine and difficult. The approach they developed was real. And it still applies.

By the time content strategy had a recognizable conference circuit and a canonical book, it already had at least a decade of practice behind it.

Popularization and origination are different things. Conflating them flattens the discipline's actual roots and obscures where it came from and why it matters. Content strategy didn't emerge from a community of practitioners looking for an identity. It emerged from organizations with serious content problems that needed solving at scale.

That distinction matters because it points toward what content strategy actually is: an organizational capability, not a job title or a methodology or a personal brand.

Proliferation cascades into confusion

Once content strategy had a name and a community, the splintering began in earnest.

Content marketing arrived first, staking out the channel and funnel territory—publishing, distribution, audience building, lead generation. When the buyer was a traditional CMO, the language had to follow. It borrowed content strategy's audience-first posture and attached it to marketing department metrics.

Content design emerged from the product and UX world, claiming the interface layer—the content that lives inside products, that guides users through flows, that makes software legible. Different lineage, different methods, genuinely different problems. It was a reasonable differentiation, if an aggressive one. And some of the agencies that helped build content strategy pivoted here. I know, because I disagreed at the time. Not everything is a product.

UX writing carved out microcopy as its own domain—the button labels, the error messages, the onboarding flows. It is also a useful specialization, serving the overall experience, In practice, it became another flag.

Then came the compounds: UX content strategy, UX content design, product content strategy. Attempts to reconcile the above that mostly succeeded in adding more titles to the fog without resolving any of the underlying overlap.

Each new designation claimed differentiation. None resolved the fundamental question of where one practice ends and another begins. The org chart absorbed all of it and hoped for the best.

So we have been shooting ourselves in the foot again and again and again.

It's all content, which at the end of the day is anything that carries meaning.

And we wonder why we are the first against the wall in a re-org or downturn.

And copywriting now?

Traditional copywriting held its ground through most of this—TV, print, brand, direct response all still have their place. It had enough craft tradition and enough distance from the digital content world to maintain a distinct identity.

But digital copywriting is a different matter. A digital copywriter is doing serious work in audience modeling, mapping customer journeys, and making decisions about messaging hierarchy. That is content strategy. The label is different. The work is not.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: how many of these distinctions are methodological and how many are territorial?

How many of these titles describe different kinds of work, and how many describe the same work claimed by different communities with different origin stories and different conference affiliations?

The honest answer is: some of both. But the territorial share is larger than the field likes to admit.

Who benefited from the confusion

The title proliferation wasn't only intellectual drift. It had organizational incentives behind it.

Marketing departments watched through the 2000s and 2010s as content sprawled across their organizations—from IT into product, customer experience and communications. Content was everywhere, and ownership of it was contested. Content marketing was, among other things, a territorial claim. It said: this part is ours. It lives in our budget, reports to our CMO, and gets measured by our metrics.

The titles that followed were partly the same move made by different organizational actors. Each practice that named itself was also staking a claim to a budget line and a reporting structure. The title proliferation reflected every department that wanted to own content, but without any organizational framework, it became a collection of competing fiefdoms.

The cost of that fragmentation rarely gets named directly.

he confusion didn't come from one direction. Vendors, consultants, and practitioners all told different stories. Meanwhile, organizations fought internally over who owned content. Confusion fueled more confusion.

What coherence would look like

The different titles are not going away. That ship has sailed. Too many practitioners have too much career investment in their particular label for consolidation to be realistic.

But titles are not the real problem. The real problem is the absence of a shared theory of what content does inside an organization. A shared understanding would apply across channels, functions, and job titles without turf disputes. One that gives the C-level a stable answer to the question: what is content actually for and what has to be true for it to do that work reliably.

That theory exists. It just doesn't fit neatly on this or that conference lanyard. It comes from treating content as an organizational capability—something that has to be architected, governed, and connected to the systems and decisions it's meant to support. Treating it like a platform, not a production line.

The field gave everything a new name and called it progress. The organizations that actually move forward will be the ones that stop asking what to call it and start asking what it needs to do.

Cross posted from rubicon.cx.