This morning, I gave a Lunch & Learn to a group of goop interns. I was supposed to talk about editorial—what makes a good story, how we measure success, and how AI is changing the way we work. But driving home afterward, I found myself thinking less about the presentation than the conversations that followed. Their questions weren’t really about AI. They were about how to build a career in an industry that feels like it’s changing by the minute.
It occurred to me that the advice I gave them might be useful beyond that room. I’ve spent more than 30 years in media. In many ways, I’ve had several different careers without ever leaving the same profession.
When I started, magazines operated on a scale that’s almost unimaginable today. We marked up hard-copy proofs with red pens. There were copy editors, fact checkers, researchers, production editors, photo editors, art directors, and writers. On a title like InStyle, there might be five editors covering beauty alone. There was an entire department responsible for getting pages to the printer. I still remember Martha Nelson giving everyone VCRs for Christmas and flying the entire staff—yes, the entire staff—to St. John for a weeklong off-site.
Then came the internet. Then social media. Now AI. Each arrived with predictions that journalism was over, editors would become obsolete, or storytelling itself would somehow disappear. None of those predictions came true. The platforms changed. The business models changed. Reader habits changed. But people never stopped wanting stories. They still wanted to understand the world, learn something new, laugh, feel seen, or lose themselves in someone else’s experience for a little while. That hasn’t changed in thousands of years. What has changed is the toolkit.
Today I oversee an editorial team of four people, only three of whom touch copy. We produce newsletters, analyze performance in real time, think about commerce strategy, social media, search, video, and increasingly, how AI can help us work more intelligently. The economics have changed dramatically, the pace has accelerated, and all of us wear far more hats than we used to.
I use AI constantly, but probably not in the way people imagine. I don’t think of it as something that writes for me; I think of it as the most extraordinary research assistant I’ve ever had. It helps me transcribe long interviews, identify patterns in editorial analytics, quickly generate SEO-optimized metadata, pressure-test ideas, and answer the thousand small questions that inevitably arise throughout a day.
Many of those questions have nothing to do with work. Before I go to Trader Joe’s, I’ll take pictures of my fridge, freezer, and fruit bowl and have my AI grocery agent generate a shopping list, along with meal ideas and recipes for the week. When I was in Bali last summer, I recorded birdsong and was able to find out, almost instantly, which indigenous birds I was hearing. I’ll use it to help me analyze complicated medical studies about Alzheimer’s and translate them into a 10-point lifestyle manifesto. The point isn’t that AI replaces curiosity. In fact, it rewards it. Every time I ask a better question, I learn something I didn’t know five minutes earlier.
That’s what excites me most about this moment. At the same time, I worry a little about young people entering the workforce because I don’t want them to confuse using AI with learning how to think.
One of the interns asked me what qualities matter most if you want a long career in media. They probably expected me to talk about writing. Instead, I talked about judgment.
Judgment is one of those words that’s difficult to define until you’ve spent years watching it develop. It’s recognizing the difference between a trend and a genuine shift. It’s knowing when an expert has something original to say and when they’re simply repackaging conventional wisdom. It’s understanding that just because everyone is talking about something doesn’t necessarily make it interesting—and sometimes the story no one is paying attention to is the one that matters most.
People often call that “taste,” but I think it’s really the accumulation of curiosity. It comes from years of reading widely, reporting deeply, interviewing smart people, making mistakes, and slowly learning who and what to trust. It’s knowing which young plastic surgeon is doing the best work before everyone else catches on; understanding why one peptide protocol is being whispered about in group chats while another is turning people the color of Cheetos; knowing which pair of barrel jeans will make you look less like you’ve given up—not because a 22-year-old influencer on TikTok says so, but because you’ve spent years fitting, testing, and talking to women raised in the age of optional seatbelts. Those aren’t facts you can retrieve. They’re judgments you earn.
AI can help you gather information more quickly. It can help you see patterns, organize ideas, and get to a better question faster. But it can’t compress 20 years of experience into a prompt. That’s why I hope young people don’t use AI to skip the apprenticeship.
Read the book instead of the summary. Conduct the interview yourself. Wrestle with the story that’s refusing to come together. Learn why an argument works before asking a machine to critique it. Those moments aren’t obstacles to efficiency; they’re the process through which judgment is built.
The other thing I told them had nothing to do with AI. If you stay in any profession long enough, there will be setbacks. You’ll have difficult bosses. You’ll find yourself caught up in office politics. You’ll lose opportunities you thought you deserved. You may get laid off through no fault of your own. Sometimes you’ll feel like someone did you dirty. It’s frustrating. It isn’t always fair. But it also isn’t unusual.
Over the years, I’ve watched incredibly talented people leave this business because they interpreted one setback as a verdict on their future. I’ve watched others reinvent themselves over and over again as the industry evolved around them. They learned digital. Then social. Then newsletters. Then podcasts. Now AI. The common denominator wasn’t talent. It was resilience.
The people who build long careers aren’t the ones who never get knocked down. They’re the ones who keep getting back up. They stay curious enough to learn the next thing instead of mourning the last one. They evolve without losing the qualities that made them good in the first place.
There will be another technological shift. There always is. I don’t know exactly what comes after AI, but I’m certain something will.
What I do know is that there will always be an appetite for great storytelling. The way we tell stories will continue to evolve, just as it always has. Writers and editors have always adapted—that’s part of the job. We follow readers where they are. We learn new tools. We experiment. Sometimes we fail. Then we try again.
The skills that endure are the human ones: curiosity, critical thinking, empathy, judgment, resilience, and a genuine desire to understand the world a little better today than you did yesterday. Those have survived every technological revolution I’ve seen. I don’t expect this one to be any different.
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