Many people I talk to in this space perceive creators as these caricatures with selfie sticks, valuable mainly for entertainment.

And that’s the blind spot: they’ve absorbed this belief, consciously or not, that they’re competing with creators on entertainment value.

Entertainment value has a unique quality: it is self-evident.
It can make you laugh or cry without requiring context.
You don’t need to know who made it or why.
And you don’t need to trust the creator to feel something.

Sharing knowledge is very different:
With entertainment you ask, “Did I enjoy this?”
With information you ask, “Do I believe this?”
And that belief requires trust.

That’s the foundation of an epistemological contract: the unspoken agreement that what’s being shared is credible, trustworthy, and in good faith.

In media, I see trust mature along this ladder:

1. Consistency – You show up

2. Clarity – I get what you're about

3. Competence – You know your stuff

4. Intimacy – I feel like I know you

5. Integrity – I believe you care about me

Legacy media is built to do 1–3 at scale.
But creators win at levels 4 and 5.

This gap highlights an uncomfortable truth: the foundation that once secured institutional trust is no longer enough on its own.

In sensing the shift but misreading the cause, many media companies will be pulled into two flawed plays.

Some media companies will mimic creators or invite them in without clear guardrails, diluting the very institutional standards that originally built their audience’s trust.

This is how the “platisher” problem creeps in. When a publisher tries to act like a platform and publisher, chasing engagement like a creator at the expense of editorial integrity.

Others will double down on traditional editorial voice but lose relevance, unable to foster the kind of parasocial connection creators build through intimacy and integrity.

Even when the industry begins to fully understand the layers of trust creators cultivate, they will still struggle to replicate it.

They will conflate intimacy with oversharing or mistake vulnerability for performative emotion. Not out of cynicism, but because they’re working within a system built to optimize content, not connection.

The hard truth is the upper rungs of the trust ladder can’t be engineered.
Intimacy and integrity require something only humans can give: presence.

And presence isn’t a tactic.
It’s an art.

That’s why real knowledge sharing feels so human when it lands.
Even when it’s dry. Even when it’s subtle.

That human signal is what separates creators from everything else.
And instinctively, every Substacker knows it.

We are artists of insight, connection, and signal.

Legacy media will attempt to optimize for this through polish, scale, and AI.

But the gap will grow.
Because presence can’t be outsourced to “influencers”, and it doesn’t live in a business model.

And deep down, I think we all feel it,
legacy media is beginning to feel hollow.

Meanwhile the connection, the emotion, the intimacy of a creator engages us on a level that’s part spiritual, part epistemological.

That’s why media is changing.

Because creators aren’t just performing.

They’re participating in something deeply human.