Writing is Back from the Dead

Just in time for Halloween, writing is back from the dead.

This time last year, a lot of people would have written off “writing” as a profession, a category of profitable services, or something you would advise your kid to study. 

I was one of them.

Thanks to cheap AI writing, human writing looked about as profitable as buggy wax, monocle cleaner, or ActionScript coding.

Human writing in the age of AI

The first hint that writing was only mostly dead came about a year ago.

At our annual Curious Public retreat in November 2025, we were looking at the changing economics of the comms sector. The market for writing seemed to be shrinking. No big surprise there.

But there was an anomaly: public relations was growing as a share of business across the sector. That was counterintuitive. After all, the traditional media market has been shrinking for years. There are fewer journalists, fewer outlets and fewer opportunities to get coverage. Why would demand for PR be growing when the media ecosystem it depends on was contracting?

The two data points are connected. Yes, writing is shrinking and PR is growing. But it turns out AI isn’t killing the market for content. It’s killing the market for low-value content.

Consider how people find information in 2026.

Research published by Muck Rack in May of this year analyzed more than 25 million links cited by AI systems. It found that 84% of those citations came from earned media sources, including independent websites, blogs and journalism. Journalism alone accounted for 27%

Underneath the Scooby Doo-style mask is the usual suspect: AI. The media ecosystem may be shrinking, but its content is seen as valuable to the robots gatekeeping how people see the world because it has third-party validation. Editors have picked up on this — and Canadian media are beginning to insist that all content be human-created. 

That’s a pretty cool second act for public relations. It’s also why writing is making an encore performance.

At Curious Public, we’ve been studying what makes organizations visible and authoritative in this new information environment. Using a scoring system we have developed, we see that most communications firms, including ours, have barely scratched the surface of what’s possible.

Our data suggests that firms don’t need to produce more content. They need to produce original research. Proprietary data. Substantial reports. Expert analysis. Strong points of view. Case studies that demonstrate exactly how and what changed as a consequence of their work.

It’s what we called “Idea Telling” in a previous blog —but now that concept has way more evidentiary support. 

This goes deeper than AEO — it’s about original, owned and authoritative content. Forty AI-generated opinion-based blog posts don’t add any authority. So the forty-first won’t change that. But one substantial piece of research that establishes something new? That’s an asset. It can create media coverage, generate social conversation, establish expertise, influence AI-generated answers and create value long after publication.

This doesn’t mean AI is the enemy. It has uses. AI can be an extraordinary research assistant, editor and production tool.

But it can’t manufacture original, proprietary evidence out of thin air.

There’s a massive distinction between content that’s cheap to produce and content that’s valuable to own.

And for communications shops and organizations willing to invest in genuine expertise, research and storytelling, that distinction represents a huge opportunity.

So here’s the lesson, at least for this week: 

Content is back, baby. 

It just matters what kind of content.

 

If your organization is ready to invest in original, authoritative content that earns coverage and AI citations, send us a message. We’re here to help.