Back when I used to work on print magazines, my colleagues would occasionally explain why print media is really very much better than digital media.

Given that team sizes and budgets were forever dwindling, they'd usually deliver this argument in the same strained tone that someone might use to tell you that, actually, they'd rather live in a damp, crumbling ruin than a modern apartment building.

"Our readers will read every page of the magazine", they'd sometimes say. Even at the time, this struck me as deeply, deeply optimistic. My working theory was that while most of our subscribers probably wanted to read every page, they'd likely manage 30-50 of them before casting the issue aside.

If you were making a movie and you wanted to quickly convey to the audience that the main character is a talented chef, you'd probably show them cutting an onion.

There's something about the way that a chef cuts a vegetable - that distinctive, claw-like grip and the relentless, precise cuts - that is completely compelling to the average home cook. It's like a magic trick, something that marks them out as another breed and is even liable to generate unprompted 'oohs' from non-chef observers.

But if we stop and think about it, we all know there's nothing magical about knife skills. It's simply the result of hundreds or thousands of hours of practice at a single task. More specifically, it's the kind of practice you most often get when something is a routine part of your 40ish hour work week.

One upside of working in more niche or specialist forms of marketing and media is that you are very likely to share an interest in common with your teammates.

Back when I worked on gaming magazines, for instance, it tended to be pretty darn straightforward to round up enough people for a lunchtime game of Towerfall. I can't help but think finding a fourth player might have been harder if I'd been writing for the New York Times.

But there are also notable drawbacks to this kind of close overlapping of interest.

You've just read something that has left you slack-jawed.

It might have been a news story that transformed your understanding of a political issue; it might have been a long-form feature that completely flipped your perspective on a conflict; it might have been an interview that made you suspect that your favourite musician is actually a bit of a dick.

And then you try to explain it to somebody else. As you talk, you struggle to recall the salient statistics, convincing lines of argument, or even the names of people and places relevant to the topic at hand. What sounded so convincing on the page is sapped of any persuasive power, like a barrister bleeding out during closing arguments.

Back when I worked as part of a creative agency, there was one question that clients would ask more than any other. It was an oddly specific social media query that cropped up over and over again.

Our clients wanted to know: what's the best time of day to publish a social media post?

For some reason, each of them was separately convinced that there must be a perfectly optimum time to post to each social media platform. They weren't looking for a broad span of time - the late afternoon, say, or from 9-10am PST. No, they believed there had to be a moment each day that represented the peak of potential engagement.

There's one debate that I’ve found myself having pretty often when managing teams of writers.

It would typically begin when I asked a writer to simplify something they'd written - to strip out jargon, to spell out an abbreviation, or add an explanatory sentence somewhere.

“Everybody knows that term”, the writer might say, “and that abbreviation is actually really common”. They might argue that the publication’s audience doesn’t need any extra explanation - the readership has been following this developing story for weeks.