Megan Osborne.
Megan Osborne, Editor of Better Homes and Gardens, argues that in a sea of AI, losing sight of community is the real risk for publishers and brands.
There is something AI will never be able to do. It can’t laugh, cry or reminisce over stories, long-lost recipes, or the smell of your grandmother’s garden. It can generate content at scale, but it cannot create connections.
And in a world of artificial everything, that gap is where the real opportunity lies. That gap is community.
Community is not a nice to have. It is a commercial strategy, and increasingly the thing that separates brands that endure from those that fade. The real issue facing publishing isn’t AI, it’s losing sight of the audience.
There’s a prevailing narrative that publishing is under threat, that generative AI signals decline. But that misses something fundamental. The brands that are struggling aren’t being outpaced by technology, they’ve drifted from what made them valuable in the first place. They’re talking at their audiences, not with them.
When I joined Better Homes and Gardens, one thing became clear quickly. We had scale, but we weren’t truly engaging with it. Messages from readers were sporadic, often transactional, and sometimes negative. Content was being pushed out, but we weren’t asking a simple question: does this actually matter to the people we serve?
So we changed the approach. We stopped optimising purely for traffic and started building for connection. That meant moving from one-way communication to genuine conversation, asking better questions, inviting participation, and actually listening.
The results were significant. Engagement increased by 157%, inbound messages grew tenfold, and sentiment shifted overwhelmingly positive. More tellingly, even as we moved away from a traffic-first mindset, referral traffic increased.
But the most important shift wasn’t in the numbers. It was in what that connection unlocked. A stronger, owned relationship with our audience. One less exposed to algorithms, and more valuable across personalisation, advertising and new revenue streams. Because when you truly understand your audience, performance follows.
This challenges a long-held belief that you have to choose between awareness, engagement or conversion. In practice, when you put your audience first, those outcomes start working together. Community is not a soft metric. It is a growth driver.
AI will continue to play a role. It is efficient, scalable and powerful. But it is built on existing information, and increasingly, a lot of noise. It can inform, but it cannot relate in a meaningful way.
It cannot build trust. That is earned through consistency, context and understanding over time. That is where brands have the advantage.
The opportunity is not to compete with AI on volume, but to double down on what it cannot replicate. Human connection, lived experience, editorial judgment, and a clear understanding of what your audience cares about and why.
Because the role of a brand is not to fill channels. It is to earn a place in people’s lives. Every piece of content should do something. Solve a problem, spark an idea, offer inspiration, or create a sense of belonging. If it doesn’t, it’s just adding to the noise.
We’ve seen this play out through initiatives like the Better Homes and Gardens Creator Awards, designed to celebrate Australian creatives and innovators. The response last year was immediate, reaching more than 2.2 million people through community channels alone. Not because it was engineered for reach, but because it genuinely meant something to the audience. The program is set to eclipse that number exponentially this year.
For publishers and brands thinking about where to invest, the answer isn’t more content or more distribution. It’s deeper relationships.
Because the moment you lose sight of your community, you lose what made your brand valuable in the first place.
Community gives you more than performance. It gives you a source of truth.
And while we started this journey to grow our community, that isn’t even the best part. It sharpened our strategy. It challenged our assumptions. It made us feel more deeply about the work we do, and how it can genuinely impact people’s lives.
For me, that’s been the most meaningful shift.
My role as Editor is more than a title. It’s a responsibility. Not just to the business or the team, but to the millions of Australians who trust and engage with Better Homes and Gardens every day.
Because no matter how someone connects with the brand, it means something to them. And that matters. Without that community, there is no purpose. No reason to exist.
The future of publishing isn’t defined by AI or algorithms. It’s defined by how well you understand and serve the people behind the audience. Get that right, and your community won’t just keep you afloat. It will move you forward.
Megan Osborne, Editor - Better Homes and Gardens