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There’s an air of panic in the media world. The specter of AI has been looming large for a couple of years now, but the threat now appears to be solidifying. Publishers are reporting that search traffic is in free fall, and there’s overwhelming evidence that AI chatbots give very little in terms of referrals. What to do about “Google Zero” has gone from a theoretical destination to a reality that the media world must contend with. Of course, panicking is never a good strategy. But pivoting can be, and there’s been no shortage of that lately. Both Wired and The Verge announced this week a stronger push into newsletters, one of the more reliable ways to connect directly with readers. When Business Insider recently announced layoffs, it also said it would invest in live events. And even publishers that already charge for subscriptions are doubling down on them: Newsweek will launch new types for both consumers and businesses, and The Guardian now has a new, cheaper tier for readers who want to opt out of personalized ads. While AI may be the impetus behind a lot of these changes, they’re all directionally pushing toward building direct relationships with audience members. That is smart, but at a more basic level, they’re appealing to human desires that go beyond just getting informationa task AI fulfills very effectively. Offerings like newsletters, memberships, and events give a sense of belonging, encourage reading habits through consistency, and emphasize voiceeither that of the brand or the individual writer. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Within all this is the beginnings of a post-Google content strategy for media. But really, it’s only half a strategy because it only accounts for humans. Much of internet activity in the future will be the result of bots, whether they’re hoovering up data to inform AI models or acting as agents on behalf of individual users. Data from TollBit indicates bot crawling is already comparable to what the big (non-AI) search engines dowhen everyone has their own AI agent, I would wager it will be the majority. Any forward-looking content strategy needs to take into account both humans and machines. The new organic audience Let’s start with the people. A few months ago, I hosted a webinar on the types of content that are most resilient to AI summarization. AI does a great job of summarizing news, but it struggles with voice and unique perspectives. The consequence: If you want good opinion and analysis, you’ll need to click through. Visual and interactive content is poorly conveyed by AI. And because AI is well known to hallucinate sometimes, anything that might inform a crucial decision for a readerlike context for health, legal, or financial decisionswill likely motivate readers to check the original source. Certainly, memberships and subscriptions are important mechanisms to build a loyal audience, but they also need to be centered around something readers can’t get anywhere else. That usually means narrowing the lens of focus rather than widening it. Niche subjectseven within a more general brandwill typically see higher engagement and more loyalty than general ones. Then there’s the stickiness of interactivity. One thing that emerging media platforms like Substack and TikTok do well is encouraging direct conversation between content creators and audience members. But being interactive doesn’t always have to be so hands-on: Semi-automated features like polls, quizzes, and games are all effective habit-buildersand cannot be substituted by AI. Rise of the machines If you think about it, there’s a kind of a “well, duh” quality to all the reports that confirm people don’t click through to sources when they use AI. (Pew Research just put out another, by the way.) That’s because removing the need to click is largely the point. Why go and read a whole bunch of articles when bots can do it for you? But that reveals the other side of the coin: Bots are now doing the searching and the clicking, and that activity is traceable, measurable, and potentially monetizable. In other words, the inevitable rise in bot traffic represents both an unprecedented threat and a massive opportunity. First, there’s the obvious idea of charging bots to scrape your site. Putting in paywalled endpointswhere AI bot operators pay a small fee to access contentmay work, especially now that Cloudflare is leading the charge in empowering website owners to block bots. However, it greatly depends on the scrapers acting in good faithand even if they do, it’s doubtful if the fee per scrape that publishers charge would ever be enough to build a sustainable business. What could help is winning the next SEO war: AIEO, or artificial intelligence engine optimization. Being one of the primary sources in an AI Overview or a ChatGPT answer might not seem like much of a prize, given the low click-through rates. But if you pair it with both a pay-per-crawl mechanism and a content strategy that focuses on the AI-resilient content types discussed earlierthe ones that have a higher chance of audiences seeking them outthe benefits could end up being more than mere bragging rights. This kind of AI-first content strategy does require a more sophisticated approach. You’d have to make use of the full search and AI toolbox, including things like Google snippets to ensure AI crawlers highlight the most enticing parts of your content without giving the store away, and MCP servers that can ensure bots have diect access to the content you green-light for them. While that can be technically cumbersome, the market is already adapting, with AIEO specialists like Scrunch AI offering one-stop-shop packages that essentially make a bot-friendly copy of your website so that crawlers can feast while humans enjoy your regular site. Smaller, better . . . robot-ier? The truth about the future of media is that the audience, the human audience, will be smaller for pretty much everyone. As more people get their information from AI portals, publishers will need to make the most of the few people who come directly to them. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Going small can ultimately be part of a healthier brand of journalism, as I argued in my very first column. But the parallel trend is that the bot audience is rising fast, and it undoubtedly will be a dominant force in the way information is distributed. Harnessing that force will be essential for the media. And though there are still a lot of unknownsthe best practices, the legal framework, even the potential rewardsat least it’s easy to see what not to do: wait. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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Its true that personal ambition fuels success. But we can reach a dangerous tipping point when healthy drive becomes hyper-ambitiona compulsive cycle of excessive striving that becomes self-defeating. Unlike healthy ambition that energizes you, hyper-ambition can leave you perpetually unsatisfied, overextended, and grinding to exhaustion. The cost isnt just personalhyper-ambition eventually undermines the very professional success it promises. Heres how to recognize if youve crossed into the danger zoneand take practical steps to realign toward healthy ambition. 1. You Feel Like Youve Never Achieved Enough and Are Never Satisfied Are you on a professional achievement treadmill, immediately shifting focus to your next goal after hitting a milestone? While accomplishments and rewards can provide short-term satisfaction, the challenge to getting into such a rhythm is that you may pursue goals without considering what you truly want. This can catch up to you when you realize youve met external expectations but never connected to your internal motivation, leaving you dissatisfied. Putting all your attention against the pursuit of professional validation can also lead to ignoring key areas of ones life that affect long-term happiness and well-being, such as your personal relationships, your health, and activities that fulfill and restore you. To realign to healthy ambition, orient your goals toward internal motivation firstits a better predictor of engagement and success. Research has shown that putting attention and focus on personal success linked to fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness begets external success, while the opposite focus doesnt hold true. Start with your values: test if a goal is aligned with what is important and matters to you, rather than solely meeting external expectations. Academic studies have shown that aligning our goals with our values leads to more satisfaction, higher persistence, and more goal attainment. Expand your ambition to include meaningful life goals and challenge what success truly means in your life. Studies confirm that once our basic needs are met, more income, wealth, or possessions dont correlate with lifelong happiness. Plus, Gallup research finds that well-being isnt tied just to career or finances, but also encompasses physical, social, and community well-being. 2. You Feel Constantly Over-Extended and Frustrated You Cant ‘Do It All’ Do you say yes to every opportunity without strategic prioritization, then feel stretched thin and frustrated by your inability to pursue them all effectively? This suggests you either think more is always better, leading to overload and overwhelm, or you may not have an approach to help you choose where to put your time and attention when faced with seemingly equally valid goals. To shift toward focusing on what matters, use strategic methods to make conscious choices. Create and visualize a goal system by identifying your core priorities and mapping how other goals connect. This can reveal if youre pursuing too much, show how aligned actions serve multiple goals, and reduce perceived friction between supposedly competing goals. You can maximize goal attainment by creating these positive connections, minimizing conflicts, and better understanding trade-offs you may make. When faced with choices, apply the urgencyenergy filter. Ask, What has urgency, and do I have energy for it? This reveals several strategies: Prioritize: Commit to high-urgency, high-energy ambitions Reinterpret: For high-urgency, low-energy goals, find ways to achieve the same outcome with less time and effort Postpone: Back-burner lower-priority ambitions Let go: With self-compassion, release goals that no longer serve you Learn to compromise wisely by focusing on what matters at this time rather than trying to do everything. 3. Youre Grinding Hard All the Time Without Recovery How often do you find yourself compulsively working, putting in excessive hours without recovery time, leaving you exhausted? Operating in a persistent high-performance mode leads to unproductive stress, causing your physical and mental health to suffer. Ironically, your productivity declines and your work suffers, too. To break this pattern, be strategic about managing your effort and prioritizing recovery. Our ambitions arent created equal. Be discerning about the effort put against your goals by asking three key questions: Aspiration: How good do I want to be at this? Determination: What is worth the hard work? Motivation: How much effort do I want to put in and whats required? Additionally, manage perfectionism. Be conscious about where you apply excellence and give yourself permission to say this is good enough for lower-stakes areas. Finally, make recovery a leadership imperative. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the celebrated presidential biographer, has said: The most underappreciated leadership strength is the ability to relax and replenish energy. Research shows we paradoxically neglect recovery practices when we need them most. We need a deliberate plan to sustain ourselves for the work that matters and to prioritize time to psychologically disconnect from work. Sustainable success comes from strategic ambition, not hyper-ambition. The idea that you have to choose between being ambitious and being well is a false choice. The goal shouldnt be to eliminate ambition, but to keep it in a healthy zone where it energizes rather than depletes youallowing you to achieve what you really want both professionally and personally.
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The YIMBY (yes in my backyard) movement has achieved remarkable growth in the past few years, uniting people across the political spectrum who share a common belief: It should be easy to build more housing. You can find shared interests among unlikely alliances when you step out of political tribes. People who label themselves as socialists and capitalists are standing at town hall podiums to support and promote abundant housing. High fives! Hooray for unity, right? Insert record scratch. Socialists and capitalists have economic worldviews that are incompatible with each other. There’s definitely consensus about the ends (plenty of homes), but the means will be hotly debated. The clash was inevitable, and the recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance, has keyboard warriors starting to realize there are a host of competing opinions on how to get past the gatekeepers who would have homes remain scarce. You might think something as apolitical as a townhouse wouldnt be a lightning rod for a populist left-versus-right debate. The reason is economics. Considering the surge in populism in recent years, its worth understanding why economics, not neighborhood character, is at the heart of the argument. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"green","redirectUrl":""}} The Socialist YIMBY Socialist YIMBY advocates believe housing should be universally accessible, treated fundamentally as a human right rather than a commodity to be bought and sold for profit. Prominent democratic socialists, like New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, argue for “decommodifying” housing, where the government would guarantee homes. Market forces are not part of the equation. A socialist YIMBY is going to want state-managed housing solutions, price controls, rent freezes, and strict regulations on private ownership. Mamdani even said hed be open to the abolition of private property if it meant getting people places to live. Socialist YIMBYs build their case on fairness, social justice, and community stability. They argue that a free market creates disparities, displaces vulnerable populations, and commodifies essential human needs. The belief here is that removing profit motives from housing reduces speculation, stabilizes communities, and ensures housing stability and equity, prioritizing human dignity and communal well-being above private gain. The Capitalist YIMBY Capitalist YIMBY advocates believe in leveraging market mechanisms. To them, the root cause of housing shortages lies in artificial restrictions imposed by zoning laws, burdensome permitting processes, and other bureaucratic interference. Their economic rationale hinges on the concept of supply and demand, and prices as crucial signals. Capitalist YIMBYs argue that when the price of a type of home goes up in an area, it signals to developers, investors, and builders that demand is high and supply low. Rather than suppressing these signals through artificial price controls, they propose getting rid of laws that prohibit housing and streamline approval processes in order to spur rapid and flexible housing production. They argue that robust competition among builders and investors inherently leads to diverse housing options, lower overall costs, and more innovation in housing solutions. The Perplexed YIMBY A person is standing at the philosophical crossroads to abundant housing and two fellow YIMBYs are giving conflicting directions: We have to go left. No, we have to go right. Socialists look at capitalist solutions as inherently exploitative, always creating more inequalities, and they believe profit motives are what make homes too expensive. Capitalists look at socialist solutions as inevitably leading to inefficiencies, housing shortages, and stagnation. When Ive asked people about their take on this conflict, a common response is something like Well have enough homes for everyone if building regulations are relaxed and the government is in charge of low-income housing. I believe thats wishful thinking, since it brings us right back to the fundamental disagreement on economics. A capitalist will say, There is a market for small and modest housing, so get the government out of the way. The socialist will say, We dont believe you. I truly believe that populists on the left and the right want there to be enough homes for everyone. But its also clear that the populist left and right will forever treat each other like theyre living in a cartoon or comic book. Im the good guy and youre the bad guy. In spite of their shared interest in abundant housing, the socialist YIMBYs and capitalist YIMBYs are never going to agree on the means to the end. The best first step is something both sides claim to support: getting rid of the local regulatory barriers that are preventing anyone from building a granny flat, a townhouse, a duplex, etc. Legalize housing and lets see where that takes us. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"","headline":"Urbanism Speakeasy","description":"Join Andy Boenau as he explores ideas that the infrastructure status quo would rather keep quiet. To learn more, visit urbanismspeakeasy.com.","substackDomain":"https:\/\/www.urbanismspeakeasy.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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