The Writing Career Refocus I've Made - and You Should, Too - to Survive Our Industry's AI Apocalypse
Don't be afraid. The water's fine. It's just deeper out here.
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Last week was a transformative one for me professionally. Actually, it was a real rollercoaster, and its events convinced me to take a new turn in my writing plans for this year. And rather than simply explain why this decision is right for me, I'm going to take it a step further and also challenge you, the writer and creative, to do the same.
But first, let me back up a little bit.
Right now, so many writers are worried about having to compete with an AI. And the reality is that, yes: For many types of writing, there is reason to worry.
Yes, for the moment, I still maintain my view that AI writing is approximate to a bright undergraduate. It's gotten much smarter over the years, but it's still essentially at that level of often-effective, correct, and useful, but far from the level of an experienced professional. So it's not stealing book-length writing jobs yet: AI is good enough to act as an intern to help us write the book, but how many people are really going to want to read books written by interns?
However, AI certainly is good enough, at this point, to write great blog posts and pretty decent essays. It can do basic newspaper articles. Social media posts can be generated by the fistful. And forget about copywriter and marketing copy and all that - for the stuff that is supposed to be generic and bland, AI can do that in spades, of course - and in a fraction of the time it takes a human.
That adds up to something that will sound pretty radical. Writers: If an AI could replace you with the type of writing that you have previously made a living or a career doing, then you are not doing writing that is complex enough.
And you probably know it. You know you could be pushing yourself more to do better, deeper work.
And I know it, too. So this year, I've decided to make a professional shift in my writing: Instead of writing brief items of Jewish- and Israel-related news, I'm going to pivot to a focus on investigative journalism. And this is real journalism, in its traditional form, where you physically go somewhere and dig, where you seek out new facts, where you try to discover narratives unfound - where you pursue mysteries.
This is not "newspaper journalism," where you're just a stenographer at a city council meeting, or you take notes on press conferences, where politicians blather on about what they're supposedly going to do to make your life better.
This is something AI cannot do. An AI cannot go out into the real world, away from the computer and the internet, and find new facts that cannot yet be found through a google search. You go and talk to someone face to face, interview them, find their stories, and let them give you new information. You go digging for documents in archives, in obscure government tax filings, buried away in old reports. You develop subject matter expertise in not just one narrow area, but many overlapping, related areas. You research widely and deeply, digging into scholarly papers, lugging home stacks of old books from the library, calling up and talking to academics about the arcane subjects that they know more about than anyone else. There's hidden knowledge all around us that even the smartest AIs don't know - and can't know, at least not until we find it in the real world and tell them.
And it's writers like us who choose to do that, who choose not to fear the AIs, but to feed them, to ally with them, to use them as we pursue the truth deeper and deeper.
So it was with these thoughts in mind that last Tuesday showed me this difference in glaring relief. It was one hell of a day for me! In the morning, I woke up to see this 2200-word investigative essay I'd written published at RealClearInvestigations, the investigative journalism division of RealClearPolitics:
In the piece (which I'll republish here soon, and which anyone can republish with attribution to RealClear), I present the evidence for the dramatic increase in antisemitism over the last decade, and then offer analysis of some of the factors which have caused it - beyond the spike caused by the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas terror attacks on Southern Israel.
It's the best piece I've written in years. And now I'm going to begin a series of investigative articles on this trend of rising antisemitism for RealClear. We're also going to find other subjects for investigative journalism pieces I can tackle.
I'll note, too, that my journalistic output is also going to increase elsewhere. The Algemeiner has now upped me to three articles a week, so look for those on Mondays through Wednesdays: usually pieces on global antisemitism or the Middle East.
So by Tuesday evening, I was on a career high. I was still at my computer, beginning to map out plans for the next articles and considering the bigger-picture implications of working in long investigative pieces, for which I would have substantial time to do original research, interviews, and genuine investigations. The prospect was thrilling.
And then, as I was jotting down notes in my journal and looking to the future, a ghost from the past showed up at our desert door stop.
My phone chimed. I’d received a text from a wonderful writer I used to edit more than a decade ago when I was the managing editor of NewsReal Blog, a website dedicated to attacking leftists and liberals on the cable news shows. Back then it was my job to provoke attention online with angry blog posts that insulted people.
“Hey - I imagine you have some conflicting feelings. Thinking of you," she sent at 4:47 my time, which would've been 7:47 in DC political land.
At first, I thought she must have seen my RealClear article, but I didn't know what she could have meant by "conflicting feelings."
I replied, "Thanks. What do you mean?"
She responded, "David Horowitz passed away 😥”
Perhaps it's worth documenting for the historical record how I replied: “I hadn't heard. Thanks for letting me know.” I reflected for a moment, then added, “The main feeling I get now is relief,” and hit SEND.
This was a real blast from the past, and it came just as I was least expecting it. David Horowitz - the political activist and writer, not the consumer advocate who died in 2019 - was my friend and professional mentor from 2008-2011. He was responsible for persuading me to shift from being a liberal Democrat to a conservative Republican. He gave me my first full-time editing job and moved me and my then-wife to Los Angeles to work out of his namesake Freedom Center office, in spite of the fact that I was perfectly capable of doing the job from anywhere that had an internet connection and a nearby TV turned on to Fox News or MSNBC. Nevertheless, I was thrilled to get out of Indiana and come back to the state where I had grown up from 1987-1994, so we said yes.
After I left the Freedom Center for an editing position at Pajamas Media in 2011, David and I never spoke again. After about five years and now the West Coast Editor for Liberty Island Books, my position had softened, and I accepted an invitation to a Freedom Center event he was also supposed to attend. I was prepared to try and make some conciliatory statement. But he didn't show up, and in the nine years since then, I ultimately never called or emailed him again, and I kept him blocked on Twitter. I lacked the faith that such an effort would be worth it.
And I am at peace with that decision. In a sense, I’m at peace now as I have not been for a long time.
The details behind those years of Horowitz mentorship and my media-career trial by fire will wait for another day. The wounds of his passing are still too raw for those who loved and cared for him, so I will respect their feelings and their need to mourn in peace. They're all certainly more than aware that some hard facts about David are going to emerge now that he is gone. But those to come from me can wait.
For now, I'll simply say that, in 2025, at age 41, I am in a very different place, doing very different writing than I was in 2009, at 25. I could have simply spent the last 15 years writing those same angry blog posts blasting "the Left" and "the Islamo-fascists," sticking to what I knew how to do and what came easily, without having to learn any new tricks - although readers of this Substack will point out that I certainly haven't given up the habit of rage-blogging and dropping harsh insults.
And yes, that is part of Horowitz's legacy to me. I know how to write a blog post that can piss people off and draw attention and convince people to subscribe to an email list. I can identify a problem and describe it in a polemical, scary way, backing it up with just the right dose of facts and arguments, perfect for a blog post.
But the reality is that, nowadays, everybody can do that. In fact, it’s the everyday reality of the world on social media. What was once a niche, developing “new media” - blogging - became, during the Obama years, something done on the fly, several times a day, on a device the world now has in its pocket all the time. And one of the world's most evil men used it to become president twice, the latter time in spite of provoking an insurrection and becoming a convicted felon.
That's how persuasive the form can be. Skills I once had to develop and sharpen are now second nature to anyone with a Twitter account.
I learned this lesson early on in my writing career: Opinion is cheap. It's so cheap that most venues won't pay for it at all, whereas journalism and facts are valuable. That kind of writing pays handsomely. After all, anyone can sit at their computer and rant about how the Left is bringing the world to apocalypse, as I did working for Horowitz, but it takes real work and skill and effort to do something concrete to try and change the trajectory of that apocalypse.
So in rededicating my journalism career to an investigative focus, it seemed time to formally associate myself with one of the organizations most responsible for persuading me that investigative journalism matters. Last week, I also became a Senior Fellow at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, where I'll work with founder Steve Emerson to develop investigative articles and also a book project, exploring the history of Islamist groups in America and the efforts to counter them over the last 30 years.
I first worked with Steve in 2020 when we wrote two articles together about the anti-Israel history of then-senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock. Since then I've come to understand that his path of investigative journalism and original research is what really makes the difference: what really can change the world.
So that's the direction that I'm going to go in this year in my professional writing: researched-based journalism about antisemitism, Islamism, and other subjects.
And you'll see that reflected in my pieces here at Substack, too, as well as in the next fiction projects I'm developing, which will also be infused with original research.
In particular, what I can announce now, so that you can look forward to it, is the following: On our podcasts, we are going to begin presenting interviews with people around the world, starting with our team of authors and then branching out to others across subjects of interest.
Now here's the question for you - those of you who are writers - to consider: Why couldn't you do this, too? Put aside my preoccupations of terrorism, antisemitism, and radical ideologies. Why couldn't you go talk to people, visit places, dig up new facts? Yes, journalism and researching are certainly skills and they take time and effort to develop, just like any other skill, but that work is what you're selling. Journalism is more effort and work than opinion blogging, but you don't have to break your back to learn the fundamentals of doing it.
So you should.
Another of my blogging era mentors—who died on March 1, 2012, at the age of 43, two years older than I am now—was Andrew Breitbart. He wanted to spark a conservative activist revolution toward "citizen journalism:" the idea that anyone with a blog could go and do a better job reporting on something than a journalist at an established newspaper. It was a dream that sprang from “bloggers in their pajamas” debunking Dan Rather's 60 Minutes story, leading to his career downfall.
But Andrew didn't get to see it happen. He died and Breitbart was taken over by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump tweeted his way to the White House, and at some point along the line, conservatives grew uninterested in doing actual journalism: real investigation and research to find the truth, not the “alternative facts.”
Perhaps Breitbart's error, his naiveté and optimism, was in hoping that such a move could become a movement, that people would take up the drive, en masse, to pursue truth and uncover the reality behind the mystery or deception.
But there's nothing stopping you, the individual, from taking up this path. There's nothing preventing you from seeing what Andrew Breitbart saw, what Steve Emerson built his career on for decades, becoming his generation's most significant investigative journalist, what has now become plainly apparent to me, too, as the AI era transitions from dawn to the beginning of the morning - and what David Horowitz ultimately choose not to do.
It’s time to wake up. The damn fine coffee is brewing, and the path to a more effective, meaningful, profitable writing career awaits you.
Love reading how your journey continues. Keep it up!