Story: Blogs make for competence? | Tobias Column
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Competence through three blog articles
Or: How to simulate maximum ambition with minimum effort

The new standard: three articles, zero content
It's a familiar phenomenon: as soon as an online wine store opens its doors to the digital world, the menu proudly displays “Magazine”. Anyone who clicks on it in joyful anticipation of profoundly researched content will find... three blog articles. One about rosé in summer (“Fruity-fresh and perfect for a barbecue!”), one about food pairing (“Pizza goes with everything!”) and a final attempt to finally exhaust the topic of wine storage with the phrase “Cool, dark, lying down”. The “competently researched in-house magazine” is finished.

All “SEO-optimized”, of course. The headlines were lovingly generated by an algorithm based on the principle of “Google first, reader last”. The content? A hastily cobbled-together mix of AI-generated mishmash and Wikipedia remix - spiced up with a few half-baked technical terms to at least pretend that someone knows what they're writing about.

Welcome to the world of premium content
These three texts are then seriously considered a “content strategy”. Premium content, mind you! Content with “added value”. The operators talk earnestly about “storytelling” and “digital brand loyalty”, while readers wonder whether a text about Pinot Grigio that begins with “Pinot Grigio is a wine” was really necessary.

So the bar for competence is now low - somewhere between keyword stuffing and copy-paste poetry. It seems that anyone who can spell “minerality” correctly is almost a sommelier. And anyone who can google the difference between Chardonnay and Sauvignon blanc can call themselves a “wine editor”.

1,300 articles later: what we do differently
Things are a little different for us. We don't have “three articles”, we have over 1,300 - all written in-house. And no, that doesn't mean clicking on “Generate text” three times. Our process is time-consuming, sometimes absurdly thorough:

- Research through specialist sources and literature
- Information consolidation across several levels
- Raw text with a common thread - without AI
- Correction by people with knowledge
- Concentration of information through iteration of the process
Only then: AI support for smoothing or formatting
The result is articles that either entertain or inform - ideally both. And not just for Google, but also for real people with a genuine interest in wine.

Anyone who still relies on three articles today...
...has not understood the signs of the times. The future demands narrative skill, expertise and authenticity. What we need is not more half-baked copywriting, but real content with depth - written for an audience that expects more than cork-flavored SEO platitudes.

Because competence is not shown by how quickly you get three blog articles online - but by what you still have to say after the three hundredth. - Tobias Gerhard Strunz [TS05/25]