Julian Serra

I've never had a traditional "first journalism job" in the conventional sense — my path came through internet advertising and marketing, then digital content and affiliate marketing, and eventually founding SlotsMansion in 2005. If there's a moment that functions as my "first," it's not a job title, it's the decision to rebuild how the site verified and disclosed information rather than just publish it. That's closer to when I started doing the actual work of journalism, even without ever holding the title.

No — I've only ever known keyboards and screens. Which feels a little ironic for someone who spends most of his week arguing that slower, more careful work produces better results.

In my corner of publishing, the honest answer is: it's made the gap between fast and accurate a lot more visible, and a lot more costly to ignore. Affiliate and review content has always had a speed incentive — get the page up, rank for the keyword, worry about accuracy later if at all. Social platforms accelerated that further, because a claim can spread and get repeated as fact within hours, long before anyone checks whether the licensing claim or the bonus terms it's built on were actually true. What's changed more recently is that readers have gotten better at spotting when something feels templated versus actually reviewed — a copy-pasted disclaimer that doesn't match the platform's actual market, a superlative with nothing behind it. Social media didn't create that skepticism, but it gave it somewhere to be voiced immediately and publicly, which is a real check on publishers that didn't used to exist in the same way. For us, that's been a reason to slow down, not speed up — verify licensing independently, disclose real complaint patterns instead of only the positive, and stop defaulting to claims the research doesn't support. It's more work per page. But in a space where trust is the entire product, I think that's the standard readers are increasingly able to tell the difference on.