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: 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…
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…
You can make the fastest, most readable website with the perfect design, elegant search features, and your own custom GPT and it still won’t be more convenient than a generic AI chatbot — because your readers’ workflow has fundamentally changed. Here’s the old workflow. Search, click, scroll, skim, avoid ads, extract the answer from a…
Most people seem to have this vague idea that science advances when a new theory comes along that explains the facts better. The new theory is so compelling, or so we imagine, that people abandon the old orthodoxy and adopt the new one. Following the facts, and all that sciency stuff. According to Thomas Kuhn’s…
One overlooked aspect of audience engagement is “trust anchors” — the foundations people rely on to interpret information, such as science, authority, community, or lived experience. To get better engagement with your audience, identify and align your trust anchors with the ones used by your audience. Charlie Kirk is either a hero or a villain,…
[This is the main article from the August issue of The Krehbiel Letter.] I keep hearing that AI will steal jobs, but also that AI-generated content is substandard, and humans are still better at …. something. That’s the theme of this month’s issue. Where do humans fit in as AI takes over? Hope for humans…
Summary: The partisan divide in the country, in which we all live in our own epistemic bubbles, isn’t a cultural or political shift — it’s a consequence of the technologies that make it easy for anyone to become a content creator. Attention is limited, but content is almost unlimited. In that situation, content that provokes…
Summary: Our obsessions shape how we see the world. Instead of resisting them, we can harness them—finding what’s interesting to build an audience and what’s actionable to create value. Are you ready for the flood of posts, videos, and tweets about “Marketing Lessons from the Big Game,” or “Why the Halftime Show is a Branding…
Summary: Listening to Beowulf exposes you to “kennings,” which are vivid, unexpected expressions — usually a pair of words — that put a different spin on a name or concept. Unlike AI’s predictable phrasing, creative language like kennings breaks linguistic patterns, making content more engaging, memorable, and uniquely human. While I was heating the pan…
Summary: For now, excellent content requires a human writer, but creative teams are being downsized in hopes that AI can fill the gap. When Moses told Pharoah to let his people go, Pharoah said, “I guess these guys have too much time on their hands. From now on they have to make the same quota…