Being the Why
AI-proofing your relationship with viewers
In 2024, Donald Trump’s margin of victory in Kentucky was historic: 64.4%. The largest in that state since 1868. If there is any place in America you’d think would be Republican-only, it’s Kentucky. And yet, since 1931, only four Republicans have been elected governor there, and none of them have ever been re-elected.
Something other than blind party loyalty is at work here. In a recent episode of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart asked the state’s current governor, Democrat Andy Beshear, what he thought it might be. Specifically, he wondered how it was the Democrats could win anything in the state when the odds seemed so clearly stacked against them.
The governor’s answer was as good an explanation of the challenge facing news talent as it was of the challenge facing politicians.
Beshear was talking about earning votes, of course, but he could just as well have been talking about what it takes to earn viewers. As an industry, we’re collectively obsessed with figuring out the what. What can you do to deliver the news in a way that will appeal to more than the Baby Boomer viewer? (No offense meant to Baby Boomers. I’m one of them!) Dress and talk more casually and colloquially? Stand instead of sit? Shoot and edit more quickly and cleverly? Learn to frame your work in vertical instead of horizontal?
Industry media regularly features advice about the need for more of these and other “doings.” They are all necessary and I coach all of them, but there is something more fundamental at work here. And if that’s all there is to it, it’s also stuff we can easily train the AI-generated version of you to do.
Stewart puts his finger on it when he talks about connection — the idea that something deeper than a change in technique is going on. Simply focusing on technique — just changing the way you talk, for instance — oversimplifies the challenge and risks missing the point. Is it possible that in our relationship with viewers we’ve become like the unsuspecting spouse in a comfortably routine marriage? We’ve been cohabiting, but somewhere along the way we stopped really connecting with them — at least not in a way that they valued enough to keep us in their lives when someone and something better came along. If it were otherwise, they’d find a way to watch us. They’d find a way to keep us in their lives.
It’s not because they don’t trust us. It’s because the routine of living with us has lost it’s sense of value and purpose for them.
Or, with younger viewers, do we risk being more like the friend of their parents who thinks he can somehow befriend them, too — by dressing and talking more like they do? Typing this, I’m flashing back to a conversation I had with my oldest daughter after driving carpool one day. I had worked hard — and I thought, well — at being conversational and relatable with a carful of her friends. “Dad,” my daughter said, “My friends and I just need you to drive and not talk. They don’t want to be your friend.”
Beshear’s point is that no matter how well you do the whats, none of it will matter if you can’t be a why—a reason someone would take the time to seek out your work in the first place. It’s not that the evolution and modernization of presentation is unnecessary. It very, very much is. But it is not the ballgame. Simply adjusting a technique is empty and ultimately futile unless it is embodied with real purpose and meaning.
And that’s not as easy or straightforward as it sounds.
Being the Why
Simon Sinek has built a multi-million dollar business based on helping people and businesses find and live into the whys. The challenge, he says, is understanding how you add value to the stories friends and customers tell themselves about their own lives. He describes the process in the clip below.
So try this exercise. Instead of wondering what you can do to keep viewers coming back for more, ask yourself why viewers would be motivated to keep coming back for more from you.
A couple of things will be immediately obvious.
One, the answer won’t be because you can provide any kind of service better and faster than they can get it anywhere else — at least on a day-in, day-out basis. Weather, traffic and headlines are all literally at their fingertips at a speed and level of detail you will never be able to beat. AI will only increasingly provide those things faster and better. The ability to provide them exclusively is a competitive advantage you’ve lost and lost forever.
Two, the answer will point you in the direction of things about you and your delivery that AI can’t replicate: Your capacity for caring and for being present in the moment in ways that can’t be pre-programmed.
When you can bring those things to the work — fearlessly and unapologetically — you lay the groundwork for performance that is both uniquely you and uniquely valuable.
And in the process, maybe you lay the foundation for a relationship viewers and future viewers will want to keep in their lives, whatever they have to do to find it.