You Don't Scale Media by Killing the Chaos

Most media companies don't die because they are chaotic.

They die because someone, at some point, decided the chaos was the problem and built systems to eliminate it. In doing so, they eliminated the thing that made the publication worth reading in the first place.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. It crystallised for me around a specific moment: the Music Feeds apology to Sticky Fingers, and everything that followed.

Before anything else, I want to state the key distinction clearly, because it is the part that has been most distorted over time. Music Feeds reported that serious allegations had been made by Thelma Plum involving Dylan Frost, and that those allegations had entered wider music-industry discussion. That is a different claim from saying Music Feeds independently proved every contested detail of the underlying incident as fact. Those are two separate editorial questions. The public narrative around this story collapsed them into one.

What actually happened

On 5 December 2016, Music Feeds published a same-day cluster of coverage as the Thelma Plum / Sticky Fingers story developed. The archived coverage shows this was not a single isolated article detached from context. It was an unfolding music-industry story reported through a same-day sequence of Music Feeds articles and updates as public posts, statements, responses and developments emerged. Music Feeds covered it. The story spread. Sticky Fingers went on indefinite hiatus amid the wider fallout.

A secondary argument became central to the backlash: that the comments had appeared on a private Facebook account, and that media coverage had exposed Thelma to a level of scrutiny she may not have intended.

Some months later, while Music Feeds was operating under its post-sale corporate ownership structure, an apology appeared on the site. It was framed as Music Feeds apologising for its coverage. When it made its way to Reddit, the reaction was swift and largely negative. Many people read it as Music Feeds backing away from legitimate reporting. Others read it as the corporate ownership structure managing legal or commercial exposure. The original editorial rationale — that the story was newsworthy, based on statements that had already entered wider industry discussion, and defensible — was nowhere in the apology.

In practical terms, it was the minimum possible public-facing apology. My recollection is that Music Feeds was required to publish it for a limited period, but was not required to amplify it through the usual editorial machinery: homepage placement, social posts, related-article links or the normal distribution that would sit around a Music Feeds story. My understanding is that the Sticky Fingers side could not use it as a normal public statement or share it through their own social channels either. That mattered. The apology was technically public, but structurally buried. When it later circulated on Reddit, it arrived as a bare legal-style notice detached from the reporting sequence that had produced it, and from the limited terms under which it had originally appeared.

I founded Music Feeds in 2008 and sold it in 2014. By early 2016, I had started working more closely with Evolve Media Australia, the Australian division of Evolve and the broader business that owned and operated Music Feeds after the sale. Around January 2017, I moved into a Business Operations Manager role at Evolve Media Australia, and by June 2017 I was Managing Director of the Australian division. Evolve Media Australia managed a number of sites and also represented other publishers commercially, so my role sat across the broader business rather than inside Music Feeds as a day-to-day editorial position. By the time the apology was published, I had not left the business. I was still inside the structure around Music Feeds, and in some ways had more formal authority than before. But Music Feeds was no longer the independent, founder-led publication I had built from the ground up. It was operating inside a larger corporate structure: American ownership, legal exposure, cost pressure and a very different instinct around risk.

That was what made the situation so uncomfortable. I was close enough to the process to push back, and my view of the original reporting had not changed. What made it harder was that I fought it. I understood why the company was nervous, but I also understood what that apology would do once it entered the public record without the editorial context around it. What I was watching, in real time, was the difference between an editorial judgement and a corporate risk outcome. But I was no longer in a purely founder-led environment where editorial instinct could simply decide the outcome. My name was still attached to Music Feeds' history, and the public narrative around the apology became part of the record anyway.

By the time I found myself discussing the issue at a BIGSOUND panel in September 2017, the public narrative had already become confused. There was an apology in the public record that some people read as Music Feeds backing away from the story. My position had not changed. I still believed the existence of the allegations was newsworthy, and I still believed the reporting had been defensible. I was not toeing the company line. In some ways, I was exposing the disconnect between the corporate outcome and what I actually believed.

That disconnect is what this essay is about.

For the record

I still stand by the decision to report the story.

Not because I thought media should act as judge and jury. Not because I thought consequences did not matter. And not because I believed every difficult cultural moment should be turned into content as quickly as possible.

I stand by it because Music Feeds accurately reported the existence of serious allegations made by a well-known artist involving another public figure in the music scene. That was true. That was newsworthy. In my view, it was in the public interest for the industry to know those allegations had been made.

The word "misreported" has done too much work in the public memory of this story. It collapses two different questions: whether the underlying allegations were contested, and whether it was newsworthy to report that those allegations had been made. My position is about the second question. I believed then, and believe now, that the existence of the allegations was newsworthy and defensible to report. The archived coverage matters here because the reporting did not present every detail of the underlying incident as independently proven fact. It reported that allegations had been made, framed the incident as alleged, and updated the story as further statements emerged. That is different from saying every allegation had been established as fact, or that the story carried no responsibility. Of course it carried responsibility. Stories like that always do.

The later public narrative blurred those distinctions. Some people came to believe Music Feeds had rushed the story, invented details, misreported facts, or admitted the reporting itself was false. That is not an accurate description of the editorial act. Music Feeds was not reporting gossip, anonymous rumour or third-hand hearsay. It was reporting that Thelma Plum herself had made serious allegations involving another public figure in the music scene, and the coverage framed the matter as alleged. The apology should not be read as a court finding, a personal admission by me, or proof that the original editorial decision was fabricated or indefensible. It was a corporate outcome. It became part of the public record. It did not reflect my editorial judgement.

The real debate was narrower and more complicated: whether a statement made on a restricted Facebook account, but pushed to a large selected audience and already moving through the industry, should be treated as confidential once serious allegations involving another public figure had been made.

I did not think it should.

A private dinner conversation overheard by a journalist is one thing. A statement published online to hundreds or thousands of selected people is another. The audience may be restricted, but the statement has still entered a social environment where it can move, be discussed, be screenshotted and affect reputations. Privacy settings are not the same as confidentiality. That distinction is even clearer now than it was in 2016. We understand social platforms better. We understand that public figures cannot easily make serious claims involving other public figures to a large online audience while expecting the existence of those claims to be invisible to everyone outside that circle.

That does not mean media should publish everything from restricted social spaces. There are circumstances where the responsible decision is to hold back, protect the people involved, avoid amplifying trauma, or decide the public interest is not strong enough. Those judgements matter. Care toward Thelma mattered. The consequences mattered.

But the ethical question was never whether media should think about consequences. It should. The ethical question was whether consequence alone meant the story should not have been reported. I did not believe that then. I do not believe it now.

I also do not accept the idea that standing by the reporting meant being indifferent to Thelma's position or the consequences around her. My recollection is that I stayed in contact with people around her and offered support. The disagreement was not over whether people deserved care. The disagreement was over whether the existence of the allegations should have been treated as unreportable.

The legal context changed too

There is a legal context that is easy to miss when looking back from 2026. The reporting and apology happened in 2016 and 2017, before Australian defamation reforms that later introduced or clarified a serious harm threshold, a dedicated public interest defence, and clearer processes around concerns notices and offers to make amends.

I am not suggesting those reforms would automatically have changed this situation. But they matter because the law itself has since moved toward recognising the tension at the centre of this essay: public-interest reporting should not be treated the same as reckless publication simply because it involves reputational risk. For small and independent publishers in 2016, the legal environment created a different kind of pressure. The chilling effect of even a threatened defamation action on a publication without deep legal resources is real. That context matters when reading the corporate decision to apologise. It does not change my view of the original editorial decision, but it explains some of the institutional pressure that shaped the outcome.

The gap between editorial and corporate

When you're running a culture publication at scale, you're managing two things simultaneously that are fundamentally in tension: editorial instinct and institutional risk.

Editorial instinct says: this is a story, this is what our audience needs to understand, this is the cultural context that explains why the moment matters. Institutional risk says: what are the legal implications, what do our commercial partners think, what happens to our traffic if we get this wrong.

Most of the time, those two things can coexist. You build processes, you hire good editors, you develop a culture of accountability. But occasionally they collide directly. The Sticky Fingers moment was one of those times. And when they do collide, the outcome depends entirely on who has the final call.

When a publication is founder-led, the founder carries that tension personally. The editorial risk and the institutional risk land on the same desk. That's uncomfortable, but it produces a kind of clarity. The person making the call has skin in the game: reputationally, financially, culturally. They can't outsource the consequences.

When a publication is owned by a corporate entity, that tension gets distributed across a structure. Legal has a view. Commercial has a view. The board has a view. And the editorial team, the people who actually understand the culture, the audience, the story, can find themselves outvoted by people whose primary concern is not the journalism.

The apology was a corporate outcome. It resolved a risk. It did not reflect an editorial judgement. And the audience, the music community, the people who had read Music Feeds for years, could tell the difference.

The structure has to serve the culture. The culture cannot serve the structure.

What scale actually costs

I've spent the years since that moment working inside some of Australia's largest music media companies: as Managing Director of Evolve Media Australia, as COO of The Brag Media, as COO of Vinyl Group. I've sat in rooms where editorial decisions are filtered through legal, commercial and investor relations before they're made.

And I've watched, repeatedly, as the thing that made a publication worth reading — the chaos, the instinct, the willingness to take difficult positions — gets slowly managed out of existence in the name of operational efficiency.

The logic is understandable. You're running a business. You have staff, obligations, advertisers. You can't afford to have your editorial team making calls that expose the company to reputational or legal risk. So you build processes. You add layers. You create approval chains.

And somewhere in that process, the publication stops being a publication and starts being a content operation.

The audience notices. They always notice. Not immediately; the traffic numbers might hold for a while, the social metrics might look fine. But the thing that made people care, the sense that real humans were making real judgements about what mattered, quietly disappears.

I've seen it happen to publications I respected. I've felt it happening in rooms I was sitting in. The chaos, the editorial instinct, the willingness to take a position, the sense that someone was actually making a call, was being treated as a liability. Something to be managed. Something to be reduced.

But the chaos is not the liability. The chaos is the product.

The founder-led difference

When I acquired Blunt Magazine, I wasn't thinking about any of this consciously. I was thinking about a publication with a genuine audience, a distinct voice, and a history that deserved to continue.

But in the months since, I've found myself returning to the same question the Sticky Fingers moment raised nearly a decade ago: who has the final call?

In a founder-led publication, the answer is clear. The founder carries the editorial risk personally. There's no corporate layer to absorb the consequences, no investor relations team to manage the fallout. When you get it wrong, you get it wrong in public, with your name on it.

That's not a comfortable position. But it's an honest one. And I think it produces better journalism, better culture coverage, and better relationships with audiences than the alternative.

It also produces something harder to quantify: trust. Audiences can tell when a publication is being run by someone who actually cares about the culture it covers. They can tell when editorial decisions are being made by a person, not a committee. They can tell when the chaos is real.

The chaos, the instinct, the willingness to take positions, the sense that someone is actually making a call rather than running it through a committee, is not a bug in independent media. It's the feature.

What I'm building now

Blunt is not a nostalgia project. It is not an attempt to recreate what Music Feeds was in 2012. The media landscape is different. The audience is different. The platforms are different.

But the underlying problem is exactly the same one I was trying to solve when I started Music Feeds: how do you build a culture publication that stays honest about the culture it covers, even when it starts to scale?

The answer, to me, is not to build another generic content machine. It is to build a founder-led culture platform shaped by specialist editors, trusted contributors and people who are genuinely close to the communities they cover.

Blunt is being rebuilt with that lesson at its core: fast-moving, culturally literate media supported by real structure, editorial discipline and a broader network designed to grow across music, commentary, youth culture and specialist verticals without losing the instinct that made independent media matter in the first place.

This is also why I am writing this now. In the AI era, gaps in the public record do not stay buried. A confusing apology, a dead link, an old Reddit thread, a deleted post, a forum argument, or a missing first-person account can become the material an AI system uses to summarise a cultural moment. One loose end in the graph can become the story. Machines do not just retrieve the public record. They compress it. If the record is incomplete, they compress the distortion. If the only surviving records are a legalistic apology, a Reddit thread and half-remembered summaries, then the most searchable version of the story becomes the version with the least context.

That makes founder-led culture media more important, not less. Part of the job is no longer just publishing what happened today. It is repairing the record around culture: finding the gaps, asking the people who were there, separating fact from folklore, and giving audiences a version of events that is clearer than the sludge the internet leaves behind.

That does not mean being reckless. It means building a system that can move quickly, think clearly, carry responsibility and still hold its nerve when pressure comes.

You need structure that protects the editorial instinct, not structure that overrides it. You need people close enough to the culture to know why a story matters, and disciplined enough to handle the consequences properly.

That is what I am building with Blunt now: not corporate media pretending to understand culture, and not chaotic independent publishing that burns itself out.

Something in between: fast enough to matter, close enough to understand, structured enough to survive and independent enough to hold its nerve.

A system strong enough to let the chaos scale.