The most-read long-form text today is an AI-generated answer.

The longest, most carefully read text most people encounter in a day isn’t a news article or a newsletter. It’s the response from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.

For the past year or two, I’ve been chasing one question: how do you build a structure where good writing can be produced sustainably? My working answer was always the subscription model. Expand the market by writing in English, cut costs with AI, and maybe something works. That’s how I ended up here, in San Francisco, covering the tech world as a Korean journalist trying to go global.

There was a time when subscriptions looked like a gamble. Now I think the media companies that never tried them are the ones in deeper trouble. What seemed like the risky bet turned out to be the lifeline.

But the ground is shifting again, faster than I expected. The distribution of writing that’s fact-checked (or at least tries to be), writing that carries an intent to serve the public good, that isn’t just my personal career problem. It’s closer to a public interest issue. And that weighs on me sometimes.

Some days I think we’ve entered an era where entirely new forms of content are possible. Then I feel a pang of loss, like I need to say goodbye to a certain meaning of “writing.” Then I start wondering what it even means to consume content in this age.

It’s an unsettled time.