Joanna Stern left the Wall Street Journal to build an independent media business — her book 'I Am Not a Robot' is the flywheel

Joanna Stern's post-WSJ bet: a media flywheel built around I Am Not a Robot

After 12 years as a personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern left to build an independent media company, The New Things, anchored by newsletters, video, and a book timed to launch the business. The book, I Am Not a Robot, is less a product than a distribution engine — the reason Stern is on a West Coast tour, the reason people who've never subscribed to her Substack are now encountering her name.

The structure is deliberate. Stern says she knew when leaving the Journal that she needed to get the business running before the book landed, so the flywheel had something to spin. Video feeds newsletter subscriptions, newsletter subscribers buy the book, and readers who discover the book through a review or a podcast clip become subscribers. The honest version, which she doesn't hide, is that the book is "a good marketing vehicle."

The book itself

The premise was to spend all of 2024 living with as much AI as possible — not as a booster or a skeptic, but as someone trying to answer a simpler question: what's actually real? The scope included health AI, self-driving cars, and humanoid robots, though she says it "really just turned into robots." The book is structured seasonally, with Stern living through each theme before writing it, and she found the pace of progress kept breaking her narrative: by the time she'd written a chapter, the landscape had shifted.

AI did not write the book, but it built the scaffolding. She used it to organize notes, manage timelines, and handle endnotes — she says the book would not have been finished without it.

She also ran experiments throughout: a season with an AI therapist called Ash (she still uses it occasionally), a summer AI boyfriend she has since ghosted, and a read-through of AI-generated fiction on Amazon. She found one AI-authored thriller, Variant, about rogue radiology AI, "not terrible" — though its author had to re-prompt the model every chapter because of the 3,000-word context limit.

“I thought, okay, I've got this book coming out, I've got to get out right away because I've got to start building this business so it's ready when the book is ready. I spent 2025 living my entire life with as much AI in my life as possible — generative AI, self-driving cars, medical AI, humanoid robots. And my headspace was just: what's real? I want to find out what's real here.”

On medicine

The radiology chapter is where the book pushes back hardest on the hype. Geoffrey Hinton has been predicting radiologist displacement by AI for years; Stern's assessment is that it hasn't happened and the framing is outdated. What has diffused is narrower and more useful: AI note-taking in clinical settings, where doctors now routinely ask patients if they can record the visit. She interviewed Bill Gates, who frames the opportunity on two tracks — an AI assistant for every doctor and patient, and AI doing drug discovery in the background. The more mundane version, AI-generated clinical summaries, is already showing up in mainstream culture: she points to the TV show The Pit as a marker of how normalized the use case has become.

The backend invisibility problem is real. AI catching a cancer in a mammogram gets no credit; an AI-generated slop image gets widespread contempt. That asymmetry shapes public perception in ways the technology's genuine benefits can't easily correct.

Companionship and guardrails

Stern's position on AI companions is clear: don't. Particularly for kids, where she argues a categorical ban on companion chatbots and AI toys is defensible and overdue. The analogy she reaches for is cigarettes — banned for minors, marketing restricted, and eventually the younger generation stopped picking them up. She sees YouTube's trajectory as a better template for the near term: the platform allowed serious harm for years, then built real guardrails, and while it's still imperfect, it's meaningfully better.

She's skeptical that governments will act, which puts the weight on companies to self-police. OpenAI's experience with teens using chatbots to discuss personal problems — "nothing but a problem for them" — is her clearest example of what happens when that doesn't happen.

The AI wearable bet

Asked about hardware, Stern says she's convinced a post-smartphone device is coming. The current wearable crop — she wore the Bee bracelet (acquired by Amazon in August 2025) and Limitless (acquired by Meta) alongside an Apple Watch for most of last year — doesn't get there individually, but it occasionally produces what she calls "holy crap moments." The Bee bracelet logging every time she mentioned calling a plumber, then surfacing it daily, is her clearest concrete example of the category's promise and its current ceiling. The agent can build the to-do list. It can't yet call the plumber.

The Humane Pin, she argues, failed on hardware, not concept. The concept — voice-driven, ambient, persistent — is the right direction. OpenAI's hardware project with Jony Ive is the one she flags as worth watching, specifically because Ive has been vocal about reducing phone dependency and she thinks that framing will shape the device's positioning.

The job market and young graduates

The commencement speech angle is where the segment gets most pointed. Stern gave an AI-themed address a year ago that went over well — in part because the audience was hungover, she admits. She wouldn't give the same speech today. The sentiment has hardened. Young people graduating now are talking to the cohort a year ahead of them and finding that the jobs they expected aren't there at the same clip. The post-GFC era of showing up at a campus recruiting fair and landing at Goldman or Google "if you were an A student at a serious school" looks more fragile than it did.

Her advice for applicants to The New Things: know the company, know the mission, and come in able to explain specifically which tools you'll use and what you'll hand off to them. The bar, she concedes, is not that high — but most people aren't clearing it.

The business

The New Things is at thenewthings.com. Revenue comes from newsletter subscriptions, book sales, and advertising. Stern frames human mentorship as something AI can't replicate and credits her years in institutional newsrooms — the Journal and others — as the foundation that makes the independent business possible now. Whether the flywheel spins fast enough to sustain it is the open question. The book tour, at minimum, is the test.