Hey friend, how’s it going? 🌻
I come from a writing background, so naturally, I think about this a lot: what writing jobs will actually survive as AI gets better?
I obviously don’t know for sure. But based on the kind of work I’m seeing companies invest in, the conversations I’m having with people in my network, and where content distribution itself seems to be heading, there are three writing jobs I’d personally bet on for the near future.
Interestingly, all three of them are about knowing how to write somewhere, for someone, in a way that is difficult to manufacture at scale.
Let’s get into it 👇
📌 TL;DR
Reddit writing is becoming valuable because Reddit has enormous influence on AI search, while the platform itself is increasingly hostile to spam and inauthentic participation.
Newsletter writing is moving in the opposite direction of commodity content: people subscribe because they want a specific person’s thinking, experience, and point of view.
LinkedIn ghostwriting is becoming less about writing generic founder posts and more about capturing expertise that already exists inside a company and turning it into original, credible content.
The common thread across all three: the writing itself is only part of the job. Context, research, platform fluency, and the ability to extract original thinking matter more.
#1 Reddit writing
Reddit has become incredibly important for AI search visibility.
A Semrush study analyzed 248,000 Reddit posts cited across Google AI Mode, Perplexity, and ChatGPT Search. Reddit was among the top three cited domains across the platforms they studied, and more than half of the cited Reddit content came from Q&A threads.
Most of those cited posts had fewer than 20 upvotes and 20 comments. So you don’t necessarily need a viral Reddit thread to become part of the information AI surfaces. You need a useful one.
But there’s another side to this. Reddit is actively trying to protect the thing that makes it valuable in the first place: human conversation. Its spam policy explicitly prohibits repeated or unsolicited mass engagement and mentions generative AI tools when they’re used to facilitate spam. Reddit has also been investing heavily in detecting spam, fake engagement, and low-quality contributors. Individual subreddits have their own rules, moderators, and cultures in addition to the platform-wide rules.
That creates a pretty interesting content problem for companies. They want to participate on Reddit because the conversations there can influence search, AI visibility, and, ultimately, how people discover products.
But they can’t approach Reddit like another distribution channel where you take a blog post, shorten it, add a link and call it a day. And that’s where I think Reddit writers become a genuinely interesting specialization.
I’m already seeing roles looking specifically for people who can write helpful Reddit comments, understand moderator dynamics and subreddit cultures, identify relevant conversations early, and participate without resorting to spammy tactics.
That person isn’t really a traditional content writer. They need to understand how Reddit thinks.
Skills I think a really good Reddit writer will need
Subreddit fluency. The ability to enter a subreddit and understand fairly quickly what people talk about, what gets downvoted, what moderators remove, what kind of self-promotion is tolerated, and how people actually speak to each other.
Research before writing. You can’t manufacture a convincing first-hand answer from a three-line content brief. A good Reddit writer needs enough access to customers, product teams, or subject matter experts to understand what they’re talking about.
Thread spotting. Finding the right conversation is probably as important as writing the comment itself. Which questions signal genuine intent? Which discussions are worth contributing to? Which ones should a brand stay completely away from?
Writing without marketing language. Reddit has an unusually good radar for corporate language. The writing needs to be candid, useful, and specific, without desperately trying to sound “casual.”
Judgment. Probably the biggest one. Knowing when to mention your product genuinely helps the conversation, and when to say nothing about it is the better move.
I wouldn’t be surprised if “Reddit writer” or “Reddit content specialist” becomes a much more normal line on content teams and agency rosters over the next couple of years.
#2 Newsletter and Substack writing
If AI can produce a perfectly decent 1,000-word article in minutes, why would somebody pay another human to write a newsletter?
I think the answer is hidden inside the question.
I read newsletters because I want to know what someone noticed this week. What they’re changing their mind about. What happened when they tried something. What they’re hearing from customers that hasn’t made its way into a polished industry report yet.
That distinction becomes more valuable when the internet is overflowing with perfectly acceptable information.
And newsletters are particularly well suited to it because the relationship is direct. Someone chooses to let a specific person’s thinking land in their inbox every week.
We’re already seeing how seriously people are treating that relationship. The Substack resource I was reading while researching this piece talks about newsletter building almost like building a standalone media business: positioning, content pillars, voice, audience development, paid tiers, retention and monetization.
That is very different from “write four articles a month.” And I think there’s a B2B version of this opportunity too.
Founders, operators, and subject-matter experts within companies have years of knowledge. Product companies themselves have interesting things happening behind the scenes: experiments, customer conversations, product decisions, mistakes, market observations.
Most of those people don’t have the time, or sometimes the writing ability, to turn all of that into something people genuinely want to read every week.
That’s where the opportunity is. Not “newsletter writer who can produce 1,200 words.” Someone who can turn access into a publication people recognize.
Skills I think a great newsletter writer will need
Interviewing. If you’re writing for somebody else, your raw material shouldn’t primarily come from Google. It should come from the person whose name is on the newsletter.
Point-of-view extraction. A subject matter expert might give you 45 minutes of conversation. Your job is to notice the three sentences that contain something genuinely interesting.
Voice. Not “make it conversational.” Actually understanding how that person thinks, the words they naturally use, what they would never say, and how certain or uncertain they tend to sound.
Editorial judgment. Knowing what deserves an entire issue, what is merely a LinkedIn post, what has already been said before, and what could become a recurring theme.
Audience understanding. Good newsletter writing is partly knowing what your reader will forward to a colleague, reply to, save, or pay for.
Consistency without sameness. You need a recognizable publication without writing the same issue every Friday with a different headline.
Successful newsletters aren’t being treated as collections of posts anymore. They’re being built around positioning, recognizable content pillars, audience growth, and eventually products or paid offerings. That makes newsletter writing much closer to editorial strategy than freelance article writing.
#3 LinkedIn personal branding
Ghostwriting is obviously not new. But I think the job is becoming more interesting because LinkedIn itself is becoming more important outside LinkedIn.
One recent study analyzed 89,000 LinkedIn URLs cited by ChatGPT Search, Google AI Mode, and Perplexity. LinkedIn appeared in around 11% of the AI responses they analyzed, making it the second-most-cited domain in their dataset.
More importantly, original educational content was cited far more often than reshares. And individual creators mattered: ChatGPT Search and Google AI Mode cited individual creators more often than company pages in that study.
That changes the equation a little. Your founder’s LinkedIn isn’t necessarily just a social channel anymore.
The things your leadership team publishes can become part of the information layer through which people, and increasingly AI systems, understand your category, your expertise, and potentially your company.
Then there is employee advocacy.
Instead of one corporate account publishing everything, you can have a founder talking about where the market is going, a product leader explaining what they’re building, a sales leader talking about what they’re hearing from buyers, and employees sharing what they’re learning from actually doing the work.
Same company. Completely different perspectives.
But again, most of these people don’t have time to sit down three times a week and think, “What should I post on LinkedIn today?”
So I think there will continue to be an opportunity for writers who can do something much harder than produce LinkedIn posts: think and write convincingly as another human being.
Skills I think the best LinkedIn personal-brand writers will need
Voice capture. Your CEO, product leader, and salesperson should not mysteriously sound like the same content marketer.
Interviewing and listening. The best raw material is often buried in an offhand comment during a 30-minute conversation. You need to recognize it when you hear it.
Original-source research. Sales calls. Customer conversations. Internal Slack discussions. Product decisions. Experiments. Things the person actually experienced. That’s what makes the content difficult to replicate.
Editorial instincts. Not every interesting thought needs to become “5 lessons I learned about leadership.” Sometimes the unfinished observation is the better post.
Business context. You need to understand why this person is building an audience in the first place. Hiring? Category creation? Pipeline? Credibility? Partnerships? Their content should eventually compound toward something.
Writing restraint. Probably underrated. Good ghostwriting isn’t about making someone sound smarter. It’s knowing how much polishing you can do before they stop sounding like themselves.
Writing jobs aren’t disappearing. The definition is changing.
When I look at these three roles together, this is what I think:
Reddit writers need community intelligence.
Newsletter writers need access and editorial intelligence.
Personal-brand writers need human intelligence, the ability to extract somebody else’s thinking and preserve their voice.
AI can absolutely be part of all three workflows. Research, transcripts, idea organization, editing, repurposing- I would use it for all of that.
But the valuable part of these jobs is knowing which conversations matter, which ideas are actually worth saying, how a particular human would say them, and what shouldn’t be published at all.
Maybe that’s the shift writers should be preparing for. Becoming harder to replace before the writing even begins.
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Onwards and upwards,
Sreyashi
I read that Reddit's citation fell from 3.8% to 0.5%. I think reddit will still stay relevant but do you think you have anything to predict on this