It’s been going on for more than a dozen years as part and parcel of Web information architecture (see: “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” by Rosenfeld and Morville, 1st Edition – 1998) but around about 2007 it burst to the surface in the embrace of several new practitioners who capitalized it into a job title and articulated it and promoted it in books and articles. Kristina Halvorson was and still is a prominent leader of that “new wave” content strategy. Here’s how she deftly summed it up in A List Apart (2008):
“Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place. Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants.”