BoSacks Speaks Out: Define Your Franchise or Be Defined by Irrelevance

The most important question in media today isn’t whether TikTok is imploding, cookies are disappearing, or if generative AI can ghostwrite a cover story without blinking. No, I think the existential question, the one that keeps smart people up at night, is this: Can you define your franchise?

And no, I don’t mean your brand’s color palette or some vague mission statement dreamed up during a corporate retreat. I mean your franchise, your professional identity boiled down to its essential, defensible value. The thing that makes you, whether you’re a writer, publisher, strategist, or art director, too unique to be ignored and too relevant to be replaced.

Because here’s the hard truth: if you can’t define your value, someone else will. And when they do, they’ll flatten it, commodify it, or worse, strip it for parts.

We’re all in the business of selling thought. Intellectual property is our currency. We trade in context, clarity, creativity, and credibility. So ask yourself: What are you really selling? Is it still worth buying? And, this one’s critical, does your audience know why it matters? If not, irrelevance isn’t a distant threat. It’s already moved into your guest room and is eyeing the master suite.

The media landscape today is a cross between a flea market and a tech demo, part nostalgia, part chaos, part AI-generated knockoff. Some publishers are still operating like it’s 2006, clutching legacy models like security blankets. Others are chasing shiny new toys with no coherent strategy, mistaking motion for progress. And many are simply burned out, caught in the doom loop of content velocity and audience fatigue.

Meanwhile, others have found clarity in the chaos. The New York Times transformed itself into a product company, not just a newspaper. Games, recipes, podcasts, and even Wordle are now part of its ecosystem. They’ve defined a franchise that extends far beyond the printed page. Contrast that with The Messenger, launched with a massive team and tens of millions in funding, only to implode in under a year. Why? No core identity. No reason to exist beyond scale for scale’s sake.

On the independent front, creators like Tucker Carlson have taken their audiences direct, leveraging controversy and clarity alike. You know what you’re getting. Whether you agree with it is another matter, but there’s no confusion about the product. Meanwhile, indie newsletters like The Ankler, Platformer, and Culture Study are thriving not because they try to be everything to everyone, but because they serve someone, exceptionally well.

If you define your work, you build equity. If you don’t, you become raw material, grist for someone else’s mill.

Which brings us to the real threat: the erosion of authorship. In a previous column, I called it digital occupation, not disruption. Generative AI didn’t conjure itself from ether, it gorged on the back catalogs of our industry. Decades of reporting, reviews, analysis, and design, all hoovered up without consent or compensation. And now it's being repackaged, white-labeled, and sold back to the very audiences we cultivated. Tim O’Reilly wasn’t exaggerating when he said, “AI has adopted colonialism as its business model: extract resources from others and use it to enrich yourself and your customers at the expense of those whose resources you have taken.” This is not innovation. This is extraction at industrial scale.

Take The Atlantic, which earns more today from digital subscriptions than print advertising. Its franchise is clear: deep reporting with cultural resonance, distributed across any platform the audience uses. Or consider Morning Brew, which began as a snarky newsletter for bored business students and evolved into a multi-brand media operation, no print necessary, just precision-timed, personality-driven content.

Then there’s Condé Nast, once seen as a dinosaur, now morphing into a content studio with global ambitions. WIRED, Vogue, The New Yorker, these aren’t just magazines anymore, they’re multimedia brands with OTT channels, social series, and e-commerce tie-ins. At the regional level, Texas Monthly doubled down on its sense of place, creating docuseries, events, and longform storytelling that reflect the state’s unique identity. New Hampshire Magazine does the same on a smaller scale, proving that niche, when well-defined, is more powerful than reach.

Here’s the thing: print isn’t dead. It’s selective. Digital isn’t exciting. It’s expected. AI isn’t a disruptor. It’s a re-distributor. The real question is no longer format, it’s function. What does your audience need, and how quickly can you deliver it in a format they trust?

We’ve seen job titles mutate across the board. Editors are now search specialists and social strategists. Writers ghostwrite LinkedIn posts and churn out Substack essays. Printers are fulfillment centers. Designers build multi-format assets for half a dozen platforms. We haven’t disappeared. We’ve adapted. But if we fail to define our roles, we risk becoming invisible labor, uncredited, unprotected, and eventually unnecessary.

This isn’t anti-tech Luddite noise. This is a call for ethical infrastructure. Because if a tech company can train a billion-dollar model on your work without even telling you, let alone paying you, then copyright isn’t just broken, it’s obsolete.

So where does that leave us?

As I said a few days ago, we need enforceable licensing for training data. We need transparency in labeling AI-generated content. And we need industry-wide coalitions to draw the line, not just for ourselves, but for the next generation of creators who will otherwise inherit a hollowed-out landscape. Because silence is complicity. And ambiguity is surrender.

So I’ll leave you with this challenge: Define your franchise. Define what you do. Define who you do it for. Define how you deliver it. Then defend it like your career depends on it. Because it does.

The next time someone asks what business you’re in, don’t mumble something about “media.” Say it loud, and say it with intent: “I’m in the business of relevance.” Or better yet: “I’m in the business of trusted, expert communication in an age of synthetic noise.”

Say it like the authorship of your industry depends on it, because it absolutely does.