You mentioned that there is just less competition. There are quite a lot of people who are interested in local housing policy, but the number who go from simple interest or discussing it with the other parents at school to actually taking action on it is far lower. And so when you get to like hyperlocal politics, there might be 10 people that matter. And in any group of 10 people there are one or two good writers maximum, basically. And so you can be that person for basically the price of showing up.
I think I have a good buddy Alicia, who decided she wanted more courtyard housing to be built in Chicago and has been doing some combination of policy advocacy slash just creative use of LLMs to get herself into that. And she has gotten an op-ed in the Chicago Tribune and an op-ed in Crain’s Chicago Business, which is a locally influential publication.
This is the former comms professional in me sticking a hand up. Every producer of, for lack of a better word, content, needs to feed the monster every day.
[Patrick notes: I hate the word “content” because it autocommoditizes the value created by professionals, but nobody has yet come up with a way to say “writing” in a way that encompasses podcasts and video. Shakespeare and Taylor Swift aren’t remembered for their content and you won’t be, either.]
Given that there are relatively few people in the world that will crank out 800 word newspaper editorials and make them interesting on any given day, and every editor needs to find them for every day that ends in Y to do a daily news publication, just sticking your hand up and saying, “I can talk intelligently about a problem of relevance to your readers. And I can listen to editorial feedback and I’ll make this easy for you,” sifts you to the top of the pile.
And then after you’ve been cited by the Chicago Tribune as knowing what you’re talking about with regards to local housing politics, there is no one in the city of Chicago who will say that person actually doesn’t understand local housing.
Being able to communicate clearly really is a differentiator. And putting in the effort to put your communication in front of people has multiplicative effects.