Ren sits down with Mark Pepper — information architect, knowledge engineer, and founder of Crimson Sage Softworks — to talk about a career that started in journalism and music before landing in structured authoring and taxonomy work. Mark shares how he built a full content operations framework (audits, channel modeling, taxonomy, metadata, reuse, governance) from 25+ years of consulting, and how he's now turning that framework into AI agents — starting with a content audit agent built as a Claude skill. The conversation moves from practical pitfalls in content management to a bigger idea: that content practices haven't changed much since 19th-century newspapers, they've just gotten new tools.
In this episode:
Mark's winding path from musician to soldier to journalist to tech writer to independent information architect
Why journalism skills — research and interviewing — transfer directly into tech writing and SME interviews
The content ecosystem framework Mark built: content audits, channel modeling, taxonomy design, metadata, reuse models, workflows, and content standards, all under a governance umbrella
The two most common pitfalls companies hit: "buy a tool and it solves everything," and cherry-picking which parts of the framework to implement
How Mark is building AI agents for tedious framework steps, starting with a content audit agent (built by feeding his own process documentation into Claude and asking it to generate a skill)
The "new Gutenberg" analogy: how the writer → editor → layout → publisher workflow of old-school publishing maps onto structured content today, with a detour through the messy desktop-publishing era in between
Why standardization (DITA, DocBook, S1000D, and now AI tools like Claude, OpenAI, Gemini) tends to emerge in any maturing field
Designing content around user relevance, not just reuse — including an early example of device-aware, dynamically assembled help content
Rapid-fire: what makes documentation great, what good docs look like in practice, best career advice, and the hill Mark will die on (write for the user, not the writer)
