Summary: AI companies increasingly claim they can build “moral AI” by training systems on human values, but human morality is rooted in value-laden perception of the world and lived emotional experience, not just patterns of language or rules. Because AI lacks the embodied experience that gives moral concepts their meaning, its “morality” will always require…
Summary: AI licensing deals may look like easy money, but they follow a familiar pattern: platforms take content and end up owning the customer relationship. By training systems that answer questions directly, publishers risk accelerating their own replacement unless they prioritize owning the audience and protecting the content that drives their business. It’s Groundhog Day…
Summary: This article is based on a talk I gave at the Niche Media Conference in Orlando. You can read it, or you can skip to the video at the bottom of the page. This is not a happy article. This is not positive, rah-rah stuff. This is reality. And it’s scary. If you’re willing…
Summary: I re-recorded the presentation I gave at the 2026 Niche Media Conference on Registration, Subscription, and Membership. If you’d like to listen and see the slides, go to the bottom of this article. This article is based on that presentation. Most publishers today are wrestling with the same fundamental problem: search traffic is declining,…
To become an expert on membership, registration, and subscription, study these companies that got it right. They offered a clear value for registration, a relationship based on trust for a subscription, or a meaningful identity for membership. New York Times How The New York Times’ Digital Bundle Strategy Is Winning Subscribers A master class in…
Summary: “Digital-first” workflows often assume content is independent of format. It isn’t. The medium shapes the idea. Treating content too abstractly leads to weak results; effective publishing requires respecting the constraints and creative influence of each format. I’m afraid I misled the Chinese about publishing workflows. I’m not sure their economy will recover. A friend…
Del Spooner (Will Smith) lived a life of guilt and regret because an unfeeling robot chose to save him rather than a child. “Any human would know better!” Are we making the mistake that Asimov predicted? Science fiction is full of dystopian futures with “thinking machines.” Is there a good future? Can we imagine the…
Summary: Search used to give publishers reach with very little friction, even if they didn’t own the audience. Today every channel involves a trade-off between reach, ownership, and user friction, and understanding that three-way balance can help you design a smarter publishing strategy. For years, publishers could rely on search engines to deliver reach with…
Summary: AI is not a mind that thinks like a human, but it’s also far more than a simple autocomplete engine predicting the next word. Its outputs come from layers of statistical processes, pattern recognition, and structured systems that make the results surprisingly sophisticated — even though the underlying mechanism is still just math. Social…
Summary: When I rewrote part of my own book by hand, the slower process forced me to focus on the core ideas and sharpen the argument. At a time when AI can generate text instantly, the secret to more compelling writing may simply be slowing down and picking up a pen. Why do we Americans…
Thirty years ago a mediocre article quietly died on an editor’s desk. Today it goes straight to Substack. The internet was built on this strategy: spend 20 percent of your effort to get something to 80 percent (“good enough”) and hit publish. Sometimes it gets lost in the noise, but occasionally a piece catches fire….
Bo Sacks recently highlighted a problem we’re going to have to face in the near future: AI feeding on itself. If AI is trained on content from the internet then as AI displaces human authors, AI will be training on AI-created content. It’s not quite Ouroboros – the mythical snake eating its own tail –…
I’m frustrated. If you weren’t already aware of the AI-powered calamity in our near future, Matt Shumer gave it a good intro in “Something Big is Coming.” We’ve been warned, but we’re not taking the warning seriously. AI is already causing mass layoffs, and reports estimate anywhere from 10 to 50% of jobs could be…
Publishing is under threat from many angles, but that begs a question: what do we mean by “publishing” and “publishers”? Are you a publisher if you have a blog, or a podcast? Is AI a publisher? Will it become one? Maybe, to all those questions, but I think a more rigorous definition is in order….
Summary: The publishing industry has historically relied on the “write once, sell many times” model, incurring high fixed costs for creation but recovering them through low-marginal-cost distribution — a system amplified by digital media like podcasts and videos. AI disrupts this by enabling personalized content generation for each user, but this new model contradicts the…