Everywhere I look, the most interesting work in publishing and search is not coming from the big publisher titles. It is coming from individuals.
Do individuals now hold all the power, and is the future of content to be found on Substack?
When I spoke with Harry Clarkson-Bennett recently about publishers surviving AI, I put forward the theory about individuals, and how historically, the brand made the journalist, but now the journalist makes the brand. Harry called it the reverse halo effect.
“There was a point in time where you could work for the Telegraph, the Times, BBC, whatever it would be, and the brand would bring you up. Whereas I think it would be like the reverse halo effect now. What you’d have now is the brand working with the individual.”
Looking closely at this shift applies not just to news publishers, but to all brands, because SEO and AI search are dependent on content and publishing.
The Talent Is Leaving The Building
The migration is well underway. Some journalists have been pushed out by rounds of cuts as publisher revenue collapses. Others have walked, choosing Substack because it is the one place they can produce their best work without an editor, a traffic target, or a format squeezing the life out of it.
Paul Krugman left The New York Times after 25 years and now publishes daily on Substack. Jim Acosta walked away from CNN and took his audience with him. Dave Jorgenson built The Washington Post’s TikTok presence to nearly 2 million, then left and was outperforming his old employer within months.
I’m seeing this replicated in our industry with a shift to Substack from Kevin Indig, Duane Forrester, and Harry Clarkson-Bennett, alongside others leading the way with deep research and, in some cases, unique data.
In this new ‘reputation not rankings world‘, it makes me think back to Google’s push for Authorship as a ranking signal and the short-lived Google+. It feels like authorship finally has come to fruition, albeit in a different way, accelerated by their own failings to address spam and with the disruptive launch of LLM chatbots.
Evergreen Is No Longer A Strategy
This segues neatly into something bigger that I have been watching collapse in slow motion, which is the evergreen content strategy.
For 25 years, the model was simple. Find keywords with volume, publish content that answers them, and build the traffic. It worked well, and most publishing businesses were built on this foundation. And then along came AI Overview and decimated this strategy almost overnight.
As Duane Forrester said, “If your content can be fully replaced by a summary, it has no moat. The summary becomes the product, and your page becomes the raw material that someone else’s system processes and discards.”
The Reuters Institute’s Journalism, Media, and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026 report found publishers deprioritizing evergreen content by 32 percentage points in favor of original investigations.
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