After nearly 35 years as a talk show host, I've had many young broadcasters ask me, "What's the secret?" My answer always surprises them because it's so short.

"Have something to say."

Most expect advice about voice, pacing, interview techniques, social media or how to handle callers. Those things matter. But they're secondary. If you don't have an interesting idea, no amount of polish will keep an audience listening. The audience may admire your delivery for a while, but eventually it wants substance. It wants a reason to come back tomorrow.

The same principle applies to writing. Someone once asked me, "What makes a good writer?" My answer was the same: "Having something to say." Good grammar helps. A large vocabulary helps. A clever turn of phrase helps. But readers don't return because of sentence structure. They return because the writer consistently offers an insight, an argument or an observation they had not considered before. The style attracts attention. The ideas keep it.

That's one reason the rise of artificial intelligence doesn't worry me nearly as much as it worries some people. AI can make a sentence cleaner. It can tighten a paragraph. It can........

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