If you noticed the inbox was quiet last week, you're not wrong. The July 9 edition never left the dock because I was deep in redesign land. Both the Project C website and this newsletter got a MAJOR glow up. I would love any feedback on either if you have thoughts. 📧 The upside: this one's a double issue ‼️ , with two weeks of links and community wins and some great news for the Project C Community.

As part of the redesign I’m playing with AI helping level up the art situation here. This week it’s fully AI-generated. Would love thoughts. Is it super-cheese?

Without the creator economy, the scores of journalists who are making the shift to independence would not be able to keep doing what they're doing. For many, especially newsletter writers, consumer revenue (aka subscriptions) has been the most reliable way to ensure a steady income. But that income can be limiting, and if your primary medium is video, subscriber revenue is way harder to operationalize.

Which means, for many, whether newsletter or video creator, it's time to think about sponsorships.

Journalists are trained to believe that selling is somebody else's job, which serves an important purpose in news organizations with separate editorial and business sides, but has also limited journalists’ understanding of the business of news – leaving us unequipped to survive in a world of disappearing newsroom jobs and an exploding creator economy.

What we discover when we go indie is that there was never a wall between journalism and business, but between business and the newsroom. Media companies have dealt with walking that line as long as newsrooms have sold ads. Going indie means we quickly need to metabolize the reality that instead of a sales team walking that line, it’s now up to us.

It’s a tough adjustment that goes through a few typical stages of integrating a new reality: denial (that it’s really on YOU to sell), annoyance (that it’s really on YOU to sell), and finally acceptance – which for journalists looks like learning as much as possible about how to do it right (aka reporting), then diving in full force.

On the “do it right” part, we’ve done a lot of work with partners like Trusting News to help journalism creators make the best decisions about posted ethics policies and transparency in funding, but what Project C hasn’t done yet is go hard at helping them actually land those sponsorship dollars.

That’s changing now.

Project C, in partnership with Emily Dresslar and April Brumley Hinkle – super-smart former colleagues from RevLab and The Texas Tribune (RevLab Director and Chief Revenue Officer, respectively) who are now independent advisors to news organizations everywhere – are setting out to teach indie journalists everything they need to know to understand how to position themselves for sales success.

Over three sessions in June and July, members of the Project C Community went through Step Forward on Sponsorships, a work session series built and taught by Emily and April. I sat in on all of it expecting tactics and a clear process. They delivered all of that, but something psychological happened, too: A Zoom call full of journalists learned how to sell their work ethically and confidently.

The reframes Emily and April taught deserve a wider audience, so here’s a taste:

• Never discount – if a sponsor pushes back on price, add value instead of subtracting dollars.

• Propose one comprehensive package, not a good-better-best menu that invites bargain hunting.

• If a sponsor hands you a budget range, price at the top of it. (They told you the number for a reason.)

• Editorial control stays with you. Full stop.

That last one isn't a negotiating posture. It's the product. Your independence and credibility is the thing the sponsor is buying adjacency to.

Does it work? Becky Bullard (Democrasexy), who recently started working with Emily and Apri, closed her first-ever sponsorship midway through the series – for a podcast that doesn't even launch until September. And just this week, Kaitlyn Arford reported sponsor calls stacking up because, in her words, she'd spent time "pitching my ass off to brands." 🔥 

Here's something else to think about: As I alluded to up top, the math says most of us can't live on subscriptions alone. Beehiiv's new paid-newsletter report puts the median free-to-paid conversion at 0.62 percent. Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged, on pace for $1.5 million in year one, makes five to six times more from advertising than from subscriptions, as reported by Creator Spotlight.

Which brings me to the news: April and Emily aren't done with us. They've signed on as Project C's sponsorship specialists-in-residence for the next three months, to help members turn new sponsorship skills into sponsorship revenue. That means 30- and 60-day check-ins with the work session group and a dedicated sponsorships channel in the Project C Slack where they’ll offer real-time advising, document review, and office hours. The community is already building its own scaffolding around this, too: a member-led accountability group called #accountabili-buddies held its first meeting this week. Which is exactly what I mean when I say this place runs on mutual aid. 💪 

Members: Replays of all three sessions (slides included) with all of Emily and April’s lessons are waiting for you in the new Replay Room, the members-only section of the website:

Want a very much human thought partner for the business side of your venture? 1-on-1 coaching with coach and Project C Community co-moderator Blair Hickman gets your skills — and your business — to the next level.

SEE HOW COACHING WORKS

Members get at least one live event a month, usually more. All times ET.

🎤 Wednesday, July 29 · 1:00 PM · Small Talk, Big Impact. First in a new storytelling series with the Obama Foundation's Megan Finnerty (members only). RSVP →

🎤 Wednesday, August 5 · 12:00 PM · Your Work Origin Story (members only). RSVP →

🎤 Wednesday, September 9 · 12:00 PM · Values That Speak (members only). RSVP →

🇺🇸 And mark your calendar: I'll be on a panel at ISOJ in Austin this September.

Ready to build alongside 200+ creator journalists? $39/month gets you the private Slack, members-only events (and every replay in the Replay Room), plus our growing resource library. JOIN NOW →

See you next week, back on regular schedule. And if a sponsor hands you a budget range in the meantime, you know what to do.

– Liz

The Independent Journalism Atlas maps who's building independent journalism, and where. Go poke around to discover this ever-expanding world.

EXPLORE THE ATLAS

Sending out this edition a day early since it's a holiday week here in the U.S. and many folks will be off Friday. Speaking of the 4th, the best content I’ve seen so far re: America’s 250th birthday comes from Not-Ship’s Amanda Shendruk, who used this milestone to assess the country’s three biggest key performance indicators: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. Enjoy!

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸 

So here’s a thing that happened this week in the Project C Community:

Becky Bullard, the creator behind Democrasexy, wanted to report on a recent Texas State Board of Education meeting. Specifically the part where a board member amended the curriculum to require students to learn about the the “negative impacts of the counterculture movement” including things like divorce. (Yes, really.) The whole 13 hour meeting was online but no transcript existed and none of the AI transcription tools Becky tried could choke down a file that size.

So she did the thing you're supposed to do in a community like Project C: she asked for help.

And people showed up: Rose Thomas Bannister walked through her podcast-transcription workflow. I suggested Becky ask Claude Cowork how it would solve for this. And there was an honest, genuinely useful side conversation about AI and its real costs (Becky's audience is largely skeptical of AI, in part because of what data centers are doing to the water supply in Texas, and nobody in that thread waved the concern away. (I live five miles from the largest concentration of data centers in the country, so I get it. 💧)

Then Matt Kiser, who many of you know as the OG newsletter writer behind What The Fuck Just Happened Today, entered the chat and simply said: "I'm pulling down the video files right now. Will try to transcribe it on my machine for you."

Boom.

Here’s what Matt did: He used Claude to write a set of scripts that pulled the 13-hour meeting off its stream, extracted the audio, chunked it into one-hour segments, and transcribed all of it locally on his own laptop with an open-source model, nothing uploaded to anyone. He dropped the whole thing into a shared folder for her. "Lovingly made," he wrote.

It did the trick. Becky found exactly what she was after. ("This discussion and the curriculum requirement that got passed is absolutely wild," she reported back.)

Then Matt did something that is just such a great example of the spirit of shared purpose and collaboration in the independent creator journalism world: he packaged it up as a free, open-source tool anyone (including you) can run on their own machine, and posted it to GitHub.

(By the way, Becky also pointed out that Texas has no requirement that government meeting recordings be accessible to people with hearing impairments. So a tool built to help one reporter could potentially help a lot of people get at civic information that technically exists but is functionally locked away.)

I asked Matt how he thinks about the AI piece, because I know so many of us wrestle with the ethics around using AI, for both ethical and environmental reasons. Here's what Matt said and I agree:

“If our time is the scarce resource here, then is it really practical and productive for a solo operator to spend two full days listening [to] and transcribing a 13-hour-long video?” he asked. “No, probably not. But we can use these tools selectively to create time.”

This gets back at a piece I wrote a few weeks back. It’s not as simple as a binary use or don’t use AI – it’s in how you use the tools.

As Matt said, his tool “enabled Becky to take civic information that existed but was functionally inaccessible, and turn it into original journalism. And isn't that kind of the point?”

Yup.

But the tool isn't even the part that got me all choked up. It's the spirit of mutual aid that many say indie journalists lack because they don’t work within a media organization. And it’s true, newsroom reporters are lucky to have IT departments and all kinds of help. But out here, we have each other and it’s pretty frigging great.

Happy holiday week. Go easy. And if you've got a spare hour, spend it helping someone out. It comes back around.

— Liz

🔥 the latest things

📌 Capital Weather drops the "Gang" and goes independent – After 18 years inside the Washington Post, Jason Samenow's weather operation is standalone again and plenty of readers say CWG was their reason for subscribing to the Post in the first place. 👉 Nieman Lab

📌 Versha Sharma lands on Substack – The former Teen Vogue editor-in-chief has set up her own shingle. Another marquee editor deciding the masthead was optional. 👉 versharma.substack.com

📌 Om Malik, blogging pioneer, dies at 59 — GigaOm's founder was arguably the original creator journalist: an independent voice who reshaped tech coverage decades before we had a phrase for it. 👉 The New York Times

📌 SaySo bets a smaller, vetted creator feed beats the firehose – As "misinformation and slop" become the top-cited problem in the space, SaySo is wagering that a curated, trust-first feed is what overwhelmed news consumers actually want. (PS. I’m still not sold on the idea that audiences will download and pay for a separate creator news app.) 👉 Nieman Lab

📌 Advice for the expert who wants to write – A sharp, practical piece for subject-matter experts (here, clinicians) thinking about going independent. It’s written by Project C member Keren Landman, who is exactly the kind of specialist-to-creator convert becoming trusted news sources for many. 👉 Landmansplained

📌 The Guardian adds 55 jobs as UK publishers chase "creator-style" journalism – Legacy money pouring into creator-style video at Reach, The Sun and the Mail, plus Press Gazette's ranking of the top 50 UK Substacks by paid subs. Proof the model is being copied upmarket. 👉 Press Gazette

📌 Alex Heath: what AI can't replace – The Verge's Alex Heath convenes beehiiv's CEO, After School's Casey Lewis and CatGPT's Cat Goetze on where human judgment still wins — a fitting companion to this week's essay. 👉 Sources

🤗 from the Project C community

🎙️ Cody Short launched her podcast, Beyond The Timeline – available anywhere you listen. Congrats, Cody!

🎧 Andy Dehnart (Reality Blurred) launched a dedicated home for his reality-TV podcast, part of his AIR AMPLIFY fellowship. 👏 👏 

📻 Julia Barton is featured in a lovely profile on the Phonograph podcast about the near-history of audio storytelling.

📺 Amber Ferguson (ex–Washington Post) is back on YouTube after eight years off, with a long-form video covering the Obama Presidential Center opening.

💪 Patrick deHahn got published in The Nation – indie-plus-legacy byline stacking, done right.

⚖️ Seamus Hughes (Court Watch) wrote a gloriously Kafkaesque lede about his fight with the DOJ and broke news about a would-be mass shooter in the same issue.

🏆 Amber Sherman, MLK50's creator-in-residence, was part of the outlet's national-award haul. Congrats, Amber! 👏 👏 

📣 opportunities & happenings

📌 Trusting News is paying creator journalists $4,000 to test transparency signals with their audiences – up to 10 short-form video creators. Worth a look if you want to get sharper about how people decide what to trust. 👉 Apply here

📌 Calan the Artist's Summer School of Entrepreneurship — Grand CLIO winner and 69&Sunny founder Calan Malyn is running a 6-week virtual program teaching creative professionals the business side of building a brand, product, or service. Geared toward Philly creatives but open to anyone. Starts July 23; registration closes July 17. 👉 Details & sign-up

What's coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, members-only live events. Here's what's coming up (all times ET):

💰 Wednesday, July 8 · 12:00 PM ET — Step Forward on Sponsorships, Session 3 of 3 (Members only, Zoom). The close: building the proposal, pricing your package, handling a "no," and negotiating in a way that protects your brand. RSVP →

🎤 New series — "The Stories You Lead With," with Megan Finnerty (senior director of editorial at the Obama Foundation):

• Wed, July 29 · 1:00 PM ET — Small Talk, Big Impact. RSVP →

• Wed, Aug 5 · 12:00 PM ET — Your Work Origin Story. RSVP →

• Wed, Sept 9 · 12:00 PM ET — Values That Speak. RSVP →

Join the Project C Community!

If you're ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

New to Project C: 1-on-1 Coaching

Feel overwhelmed running or launching your creator journalism venture? Wish someone senior level was around to help you solve problems? Or help you learn new business skills without having to sift through 30 internet guides? Not sure your AI agent is steering you in the right direction? The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone (or with a robot). 1-on-1 coaching from Project C with the very much human Blair Hickman will get your skills and your business to the next level in a supportive way.

Book your discovery call today!

Note: Last week, we announced the Journalism Creators Startup Lab launch with our first North American cohort. In August, we’ll follow up with a cohort of journalism creators from the Middle East, Europe and Africa. If that sounds like you, find out more and fill out the interest form here. - Liz

Yesterday, I sat on a panel in front of a room full of biotech communicators (definition: heads of comms departments, agency people, the folks whose entire job is getting the right story about biotech developments to the right journalist/messenger). I’m writing about it today because it was a small window into something I think is genuinely good news for everyone reading this newsletter.

These are smart, experienced people and they kept circling the same questions: how much of a thing is indie creator journalism, how much do I have to pay attention to them and how do I get THEIR attention? The call was organized because these comms teams are starting to realize that the journalists who cover their issues aren't just in the trad media list anymore. They’re starting to see the power in pitching Katelyn Jetelina and Tara Parker-Pope (who was also on the panel) vs. the Times or Prevention.

I shared with them what you already know: One in three journalists now publishes independently. Three thousand five hundred newspapers have closed since 2005. Audiences are increasingly turning to social platforms for news. Journalism creators are on Substack and YouTube and Bluesky building loyal, paying audiences around exactly the topics these brands care about, but to a comms team working off a 2015 contact list, creator journalists are effectively invisible.

What's interesting is that they’re curious. They know they need to be here. Boeing posted a job this month for a News Creator Engagement Lead. Muck Rack's latest numbers say 82% of creator journalists report that some stories start with a pitch, and roughly a third of you already count PR people as essential partners. The PR pitch process for the wider influencer ecosystem is already well established. Now those same comms pros are starting to understand that creator journalists are a different beast.

(Source: MuckRack)

Here’s what I spent some time explaining to the biotech comms folks: While an influencer's worth is reach and aesthetic, a creator journalist’s is credibility and trust. An influencer can pivot from skincare to home goods to whatever's converting this week; you can't – and that's not a limitation. It’s actually how you’ve built a solid, trusting relationship with your audience. The instant your readers or viewers suspect you've been bought, they leave, and their subscription dollars and potential as an advertiser-friendly audience goes with them. A bad brand deal costs an influencer one awkward post. It costs you everything. Which is exactly why your “yes” is worth more than any influencer's: the selectivity that can feel like a constraint is actually the product. The trust you've built is the asset. Not the follower count.

We’re starting to develop the language to explain that nuance:

(Source: The Independent Journalism Atlas)

For years the creator-economy conversation has been measured in reach: who's got the biggest audience, the best engagement rate, the most reposts and – having lived through it – chasing those numbers didn’t provide a ton of value for brands in trad media. That goes double for the creator journalism ecosystem. The valuable thing was never the size of the audience, but the quality of the relationship – and creator journalism businesses are built around trust and loyalty. It’s a special thing to see. Just this week, WTFJHT’s Matt Kiser published his Summer 2026 reader update where he details all of the tweaks he’s made over the last quarter in response to audience feedback.

The risk is that the PR world flattens all of this back into “influencer with a press pass” – that the rush to work with you erodes the exact thing that made you worth working with. That's the line we all have to hold. It's why disclosure matters (I wrote a whole thing about that last month). It's why “creator journalists are not influencers” deserves to be a sentence in every media kit and why I added that distinction to Project C’s official definition of a creator journalist.

And full transparency: explaining this distinction to brands and comms teams is now part of what I do – it's work The Independent Journalism Atlas takes on, and if you're curious how we're describing you to the people on the other side of the table, that page is public.

So if you take one thing from me this week: the outside world is finally coming around to what you already knew. Your credibility a massive asset to you, and brands. Guard it like the treasure it is – because everyone else is starting to realize your superpower.

---

🔥 the latest things

📌 Kevin Roose and Casey Newton sign with UTA — The follow to last week's announcement that Roose is leaving the NYT> Hard Fork wraps in August, the two are building their own shingle, and now they've got agency muscle behind it. Again, publishers/editors need to rethink how they incentivize top talent to stick around. 👉 Variety

📌 Reuters Institute: how news creators went mainstream — The deeper chapter from this year's Digital News Report in a piece from Nic Newman, on the global rise of news creators. The stat that should reframe every “creators vs. journalists” argument: people who use creators trust them more than they trust journalists. 👉 Reuters Institute

📌 beehiiv opens the books on paid newsletters — The numbers our community will actually use: paid revenue on the platform hit ~$19M (up 138%), $10/month is still the default price regardless of size, and annual plans are the single biggest churn-killer there is. The gap between the top 10% and everyone else is execution, not luck. 👉 The State of Paid Newsletters 2026

📌 Evan Armstrong on building a premium one-person newsletter — A great profile of The Leverage: $15/month (steeper than NYT or WSJ, on purpose), three revenue legs, and a quality obsession that includes grading his own past predictions with AI and vowing to shut down if his accuracy drops below 85%. His mantra (“the number one thing you can do to increase your income is increase your prices”) is worth taping to your monitor. 👉 Creator Spotlight

📌 Cloudflare and beehiiv give independent publishers AI crawl controls — You can now decide whether the AI bots get to scrape your newsletter for free. A small piece of leverage handed back to the little guy. 👉 BusinessWire

📌 What 667 news creators say is actually hard — News Creator Corps mined 600+ fellowship applications and found the biggest challenge isn't visibility or monetization — it's misinformation and eroding trust (57% named it), with AI concern up more than 7x in under a year and burnout hitting full-timers and part-timers at nearly identical rates. 👉 News Creator Corps

📌 Forbes launches a Creator Network — Another legacy brand deciding to build with creators instead of competing against them. File it next to CNN hiring Kyla Scanlon as the “the institutions are assimilating, not fighting” beat. 👉 Forbes

📌 “Huge if true”: an indie outfit hiring a full-time production manager — Cleo Abram’s wildly successful Huge If True YouTube channel is hiring with a starting package of $120k-145k based on experience, plus bonuses. 👉 Google Forms

📌 6AM City runs 400 newsletters with no editorial staff — Abandon hope, all ye who enter here: A provocative (and ominous) counterpoint to everything I just wrote above about the value of a human, trusted voice. Read it and tell me where you land. 👉 A Media Operator

🤗 from the Project C community

🏆 Nicole Jeanine Johnson (Nicole the News Lady) won two Peter Lisagor Awards for her investigative reporting. Investigative accountability work, done independently, recognized by the field. We're so proud of you!

🐺 Soleil Ho and the Coyote Media Collective landed a terrific CJR feature on their Bay Area political-independent-media project. Go read it.

📰 Monique O. Madan (Two Can Be True) published her second partnership with a local newsroom as an independent — proof that the indie-plus-newsroom collaboration model keeps getting more real.

🎬 James Bareham (MBH4H) shipped his first editorial package: dueling essays on whether AI is good or bad, argued through Arrival and Elysium. A genuinely fun format experiment.

📣 And a huge thanks to Jennifer Chowdhury, who plugged Project C from the stage at an IRE panel! Love to see this community evangelizing in the wild.

📹️ Absolutely loving this Instagram vid from Journalism Creators Startup Lab member Arianny Valles!

Instagram post

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

💰 Wednesday, July 1, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 2 of 3 (Members only, Zoom). The prospecting session: how to find mission-aligned partners and reach the right people without feeling like a salesperson. RSVP →

💰 Wednesday, July 8, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 3 of 3 (Members only, Zoom). The close: building the proposal, pricing your package, handling a “no,” and negotiating in a way that protects your brand. RSVP →

(Missed Session 1 last week? The recording and deck are already up in the community's Event Replays tab.)

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

New to Project C: 1-on-1 Coaching

Feel overwhelmed running or launching your creator journalism venture? Wish someone senior level was around to help you solve problems? Or help you learn new business skills without having to sift through 30 internet guides? Not sure your AI agent is steering you in the right direction? The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone (or with a robot). 1-on-1 coaching from Project C with the very much human Blair Hickman will get your skills and your business to the next level in a supportive way.

Book your discovery call today!

I've spent the last couple of years talking to and working with journalists who are about to go independent or just did, and they pretty much all hit the same snags. There’s no issue creating the content. That is the work we were born to do.

There is a freedom and swagger that comes from stepping away from a news organization and launching your own newsletter or YouTube channel and being the decider of what gets created, when and why. That swagger is necessary and can carry you a long way. But not all of the way.

It’s all the other (sometimes deeply un-fun) stuff that goes into being an entrepreneur that means you’ll have staying power.

It’s usually a few weeks in when it hits: You can’t just create content anymore. You're also responsible for audience growth. Oh, and billing and legal. You’re figuring out if you can afford health insurancd. You're squinting at your newsletter platform trying to work out whether it's quietly skimming 10% off the top – or wrestling with other platforms to understand template design and segmentation. You’re the one freaking out when you realize you need to pay quarterly estimated taxes. And if you’re going to get a sponsor, you are the one who has to go out and land the deal. 

This is the exact moment when most independent news businesses either figure it out or run out of steam. It’s why I built Project C and why, along with some amazing collaborators, we’ve been teaching Going Solo for the past couple of years – to make it easier to figure out. We've been lucky enough to work with hundreds of journalists and seen some real success stories.

Today, though, thanks to the Google News Initiative, Project C is able to help even more early stage journalism creators get to sustainability. 

Say hello to the Journalism Creators Startup Lab

I am so dang happy to announce the Journalism Creators Startup Lab, a free program for early-stage independent news creators. We're running it with support from the Google News Initiative and a partnership with the Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Arizona State University, where I’m honored to serve as a fellow at the Knight Center for the Future of News.

We kick off next week with a cohort of 20 creators serving primarily North American audiences and we’ll follow up in August with our first global cohort. 

The program is built for that early hard phase where a journalist either figures it out or gives in and starts looking at comms jobs. Think first year or two of going independent: fewer than 100,000 followers, dead serious about the work but not yet making a full-time living from it. 

Over the first eight weeks we’ll dig into the basics: getting editorial strategy super sharp, actually understanding who's in your audience and how to find more of them, building revenue that doesn't all hang on one platform's mood that week, and – thanks to our ongoing partnership with Trusting News – figuring out the trust signals that we believe are important to carry into the distributed journalism ecosystem.

It's a mix of weekly live labs, self-paced coursework and one-on-one coaching, and it doesn't just evaporate when the first eight weeks of classes end. Every creator in the cohort gets three more months of 1:1 coaching afterward, plus a year-long membership in the Project C Community where 200-plus independent journalists are already comparing notes and helping each other every day. The coursework runs on CronkitePro (that's ASU's Cronkite School learning platform), and people who finish get a Cronkite certificate to point to, which matters more than you'd think when you're out here vouching for your own legitimacy every single day.

Meet the inaugural cohort

I've been a little obsessed with this list since it came together. It's such a good snapshot of what independent journalism actually looks like right now: food writers, city-hall explainers, data-viz nerds, YouTubers – spread across more than a dozen cities (plus one delightful outlier in Edinburgh), all covering the stuff the big outlets keep deciding they can't afford to:

• Christian Bryant (Washington, DC) covers American life, culture and conflict across his Substack and his video work, hopping between formats the way the rest of us hop between browser tabs.

• Becky Bullard (Austin) runs Democrasexy, and she's figured out how to make civic engagement feel genuinely good for women and queer people in Texas. The name tells you everything. She knows "eat your vegetables" was never going to work as a content strategy.

• Ben Camacho (Los Angeles) publishes Inadvertent, muckraking accountability journalism on local government, police and corporations across Southern California. The kind of work that gets you stonewalled on FOIA and occasionally sued, done independently, on purpose.

• Serena Maria Daniels (Detroit) writes Midwest Mexican, covering Midwest food and culture through a Chicana journalist's lens. It's the kind of beat a legacy newsroom would file under "vertical." She treats it like a whole world, because it is one.

• Rivan Dwiastono (Arlington, VA) runs @rivanupdates, explaining international affairs and U.S. politics to Indonesians at home and abroad. His whole promise is "news you can easily understand," which is so much harder to actually pull off than it sounds, and it's the entire reason people stick around.

• Amber Ferguson (Washington, DC) makes Girl with Drive, social-first journalism that lives right where culture, Black politics and internet trends collide. That's where a ton of the actual conversation is happening while the rest of the press is still writing trend pieces about it.

• Joseph Ferguson (Washington, DC) makes news explainer videos on YouTube for people who aren't usually into news or civics. Which is to say, the exact audience everyone swears they want and almost nobody actually builds for.

• Aidan Hall (Los Angeles) covers American politics on YouTube for Gen Z viewers who want the real version, not the 15-second hot take. Turns out that audience exists, and it's hungry.

• Brittany Harlow (Broken Arrow, OK) co-founded Crosswinds News, a Native-owned newsroom and cultural hub on the Muscogee Reservation, serving communities across northeastern Oklahoma. This is the first kind of coverage to vanish when local news shrinks, and exactly the kind somebody has to go build back.

• Nicole Jeanine Johnson (Chicago) is Nicole the News Lady, reporting at the overlap of education, politics and Black life in America. It's a beat that needs somebody living it, not parachuting in.

• Keren Landman (Atlanta) writes Landmansplained, covering public health, and I'm just going to quote her directly because I can't beat it: "for normal people who care about public health, whether they know what it is or not." If we had a Project C office, that'd be on the wall.

• Monique O. Madan (Miami) writes Two Can Be True, where investigative reporting, narrative writing and her own lived experience all pull up a chair at the same table. That's a tricky thing to balance. She makes it look easy.

• Ximena Natera (Oakland) is a visual journalist focused on community-centered storytelling. She's the person who gets that how a community is photographed is itself an editorial call.

• Heidi Przybyla (Alexandria, VA) runs Get Real News, reaching Pennsylvania audiences through short-form video. A good reminder that "local" and "video-first" were never opposites, no matter what anybody told you in 2016.

• Nicholas Renteria (West Hollywood) is LocalGovGuy, and he breaks down LA city, county and state government so a normal person can actually engage with it instead of bouncing off the jargon and giving up.

• Julie Rose (Provo, UT) writes Julie's Provo Notes, making city council and planning commission meetings make sense for the people who actually live in Provo. If you've ever tried to sit through a planning commission meeting, you know this is a public service that borders on heroism.

• Ashok Selvam (Chicago) is a founder of Ravenous, a worker-owned food and culture site staffed by some of the best food journalists in the country. Worker-owned. Read that again, because it's quietly an argument about how this whole industry could work.

• Amanda Shendruk (Edinburgh, Scotland) is the aforementioned outlier, and she's worth it. Her newsletter Not-Ship is data-driven and visually gorgeous, and she's always finding a way into today's issues that you didn't see coming.

• Frank Shyong (Los Angeles) writes Lunch Box, digging into the immigrant foodways and histories and policies that quietly decide what ends up on our plates. Food writing that's secretly policy writing is my favorite kind of trick, and he's great at it.

• Arianny Valles (Phoenix) leads Pendiente mi Gente, Spanish-language civic journalism for Phoenix's Latino community that lives on radio, podcast and digital all at once. She goes where her audience already is instead of waiting for them to come to her.

Stay tuned

I'll have a lot more to share as the cohort gets rolling, including their capstone projects at the end. For now I just wanted you to meet them.

If you’re considering a shift to the indie side or already there and craving connection, you are exactly who Project C, and this program, is for. For more information, check out the Startup Lab – and sign up to be notified about upcoming cohorts. 

🔥 the latest things

📌 Distributed platforms dominate news consumption – The audience data tells the story in the just-dropped Reuters Digital News Report. For the first time, “social media and video networks are, on average across the markets covered, more popular than both TV and owned news websites and apps as sources of news.” 👉️ Reuters Institute

📌 The future is independent – ICYMI, I was a guest on NPR’s 1A this week – along with Taylor Lorenz, Dave Jorgenson and Jerusalem Demsas – talking about independent journalism in the age of the algorithm. 🎧️ 👉️ Listen here

📌 Kevin Roose leaves the NYT – In a move that will have editors and publishers quaking in their boots about talent retention, tech columnist/podcaster Kevin Roose announced he’s leaving the Times to follow Hard Fork co-host Casey Newton into the independent ecosystem. The two will launch a new indie show this fall. 👉️ Substack

📌 CNN taps Kyla Scanlon as a financial analyst and contributor – the economics creator with a 150K+ Substack following joins CNN Business, the latest legacy newsroom to hire a creator instead of competing with one. 👉 Variety 

📌 iShowSpeed and the World Cup – Wired's big interview with the streamer whose World Cup coverage is reaching audiences no broadcaster can touch; a useful reminder of what "journalism" looks like to a Gen Z audience. 👉 Wired 

📌 Why the political creator scandals will only get worse – WaPo Creator's Dylan Wells on the disclosure gap: the FTC has no authority over political content, the FEC isn't built for influencers, and Rep. Mark Takano's new PAID Act would try to close it. A sharper, reported follow to our own May 29 disclosure essay. 👉 WaPo Creator

📌 CAA and Integrated Media launch a $250M creator-economy holding company – the infrastructure-layer land grab continues; the talent agencies want to own the rollups. 👉 The Hollywood Reporter

📹️ Learn social video from the pros – ONA has pulled together an all-star teaching staff – including LNI co-founders Micah Gelman and Lauren Saks and Bottum Up Media’s Rahim Jessani – for its upcoming Social Video for Journalists online course. 👉️ ONA

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

💰 Wednesday, June 24, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 1 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The foundation: how sponsorships fit your revenue strategy, what sponsors are actually looking for, and whether you even need a media kit. RSVP → lu.ma/9o8hfugs

💰 Wednesday, July 1, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 2 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The prospecting: how to identify mission-aligned partners and reach the right contacts — without feeling like a salesperson. RSVP → lu.ma/tgfjmhdy

💰 Wednesday, July 8, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 3 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The close: crafting the proposal, pricing your package, handling a "no," and negotiating in a way that protects your brand. RSVP → lu.ma/qhcgrm7wJoin the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

This morning, I’m welcoming two guest authors – Emily Wright and Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein from the Center for News Technology and Innovation (CNTI). Project C partnered with CNTI on a study that was released earlier this year about creator journalists working in the U.S. After we finished our work, they continued – partnering with Code for Africa to run the same study in South Africa. Today, Emily and Jay write about both of the studies - what they saw that was similar, and wildly different, in each country. Enjoy - and read on after the essay for this week’s news from around the creator journalism ecosystem. - Liz

Constraints, creativity & collaboration: Creator-journalism in South Africa isn’t as different as you might think

(CNTI)

Do you…

1. …provide people with verified factual information?

2. …have a personality- or voice-led brand?

3. …use “the creator economy” to distribute it?

If you answered “yes” to all three questions (and if you’re reading this newsletter, you probably did), the Center for News, Technology & Innovation would call you an “indie info provider.” Don’t worry, you can be both a creator-journalist and an indie info provider. We use this term to account for people who might not consider themselves journalists but are still doing “acts of journalism” (as our friends at News Creator Corps like to put it).

To understand how indie info providers navigate today’s media landscape, the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) – in partnership with Project C and Code for Africa – recently released two reports examining indie info providers in the United States and South Africa. As a global research center dedicated to supporting independent media, an open internet and informed policy conversations, CNTI investigated these indie info providers’ approach to credibility, revenue strategies and evolving roles within the broader information landscape. 

In the reports, we looked at each country on its own terms. By analyzing them together, we can see some common threads — and some big contrasts. Below, we discuss some key similarities and differences.

Similar media industry contexts…

The journalism industries in South Africa and the U.S. face similar struggles. In South Africa, recent media crises have forced media outlets to rely heavily on freelancers and short-term contracts. In the US, local journalism has contracted significantly in the last 20 years, and massive layoffs are happening even at legacy newsrooms like The Washington Post. 

In both countries, indie info providers have become important info sources for the public. A 2024 CNTI study highlights this shift, showing that about one in four people in South Africa and one in five in the U.S. get their news from individuals rather than organizations. Recognizing this trend, legacy newsrooms in the U.S. are actively partnering with these creators. 

…although on a slightly different timeline.

Of the 26 U.S. creators interviewed, drawn from Project C’s network, 23 launched their projects after 2020; in contrast, 12 of the 18 South African interviewees established their indie brands before 2020. The South Africans generally needed to dedicate fewer hours per week to them than their American counterparts, likely because they had passed the start-up phase. 

Still, both cohorts included many career journalists who took this path in response to job loss or broader industry instability. 

(CNTI)

Diversified income contributes to financial success

It became clear in talking with creators that it is real work to make money in the creator space. In fact, many creators interviewed in both countries struggled to articulate a clear business strategy. What is consistent is that having diversified revenue sources, instead of solely relying on reader revenue or ads, tends to provide more financial stability. In the U.S., although it is difficult to find a “third pillar” of funding outside of advertising and reader revenue, a few have cracked the code. Some interviewees capitalize on their expertise through consulting, speaking fees and events. Others are subsidizing their journalism indirectly: one interviewee sells related software and interactive content, while another connects their audience to paid opportunities for a fee. 

South African indie info providers don’t see relying on reader revenue as a sustainable model. Instead, events help drive revenue and audience growth. Some interviewees monetize their content by staging live theater versions of their online reporting, hosting exclusive industry awards or running interactive webinars. This model has been especially successful for B2B providers and satirists, who have been able to turn in-person engagement into financial stability. Others are turning to sponsors for funding. One interviewee relies on three different forms of sponsorship (direct, an advertorial platform that subsidizes the editorial platform and premium corporate subscriptions). Many South African interviewees are acting as their own sponsors and fund their indie brand indirectly through independent businesses or other day jobs. 

Relationships with legacy newsrooms: collaboration or competition? 

One of the most striking differences between U.S. and South African indie info providers is in their relationships with legacy newsrooms and freelance work. In South Africa, many creators actively partner with larger newsrooms to co-host events, syndicate content and appear on broadcasts. These creators also see their freelance work as intertwined with or an extension of their indie brands: their work is their work, no matter what publication it appears in. 

In contrast, U.S. indie info providers struggle to build these relationships with larger newsrooms. They say legacy newsrooms tend to view indie info providers as direct competitors, creating a culture of distrust. Indie info providers worry about having their ideas stolen during pitches, losing creative control or being exploited for “exposure” rather than receiving fair compensation. The U.S.-based creators who submit freelance work to larger newsrooms see this work separate from their indie brand, potentially due to concerns over losing editorial freedom. While South African creators see their relationship with larger newsrooms as a collaboration, U.S. creators see it as a transactional relationship or nonexistent. 

CNTI

Generative AI as a friend and a foe

The two cohorts had very different approaches to using AI, especially LLMs. South African interviewees are pragmatic, even when they are somewhat skeptical. As one person put it, “Listen, I want to complain with everybody about AI and how awful it is, but I work alone. I am a one-man team, and it has been an invaluable resource for me.” 

In some cases, LLMs seemed to act almost as a coworker. Interviewees described using these tools for a wide range of strategic and editorial tasks, including developing story angles, drafting emails, and cleaning up scripts. At the same time, several interviewees discussed pragmatic and functional challenges, especially cultural biases, linguistic gaps and unreliable rural internet infrastructure. 

For the most part, U.S. interviewees had a different and more restricted attitude towards using LLMs.  For many, AI tools are part of their process at some stage, but almost none of them use them to produce content directly. Many use specialized AI tools rather than general-purpose tools like LLMs, such as task and project management software, transcription tools or visual content editing. At least eight interviewees actively opposed the use of LLMs for content creation and some avoid using LLMs entirely. As one interviewee said, “I think that people should use their big brains.”

Both require a multi-platform strategy, but prioritize different platforms

Indie info providers in both countries find a multi-platform strategy essential. Eighteen of the 26 U.S. creators are active on at least three platforms, while roughly half of the South African cohort use six or more. 

Local media environments shaped which platforms they prioritized. In South Africa’s heavily mobile-first market, where 67% of surveyed English-speaking news consumers access news via smartphones and 98.2% of surveyed internet users are active on social media, indie info providers prioritize mobile-friendly platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Facebook, and newsletter platforms are much less popular. Only 3 total interviewees mentioned using Substack or Beehiiv, and no one mentioned Ghost.

In contrast, newsletters are an important platform for U.S. indie info providers, with 22 of the 26 interviewees using one of these three platforms. For many, newsletters are more straightforward to monetize than platforms that exercise more control over information about the audience. However, U.S. interviewees do still use Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

What’s next

This kind of deep-dive small-scale research is absolutely critical in capturing nuance and depth. It can’t capture the whole field, but it can help us figure out what questions to ask. Amidst global shifts in the journalism industry , indie info providers are here to stay. These two reports help address this knowledge gap, but there are larger-scale questions we still need answers to. Sign up here for more information about our plans — and how you can participate. 

Emily Wright is the Research Assistant at the Center for News, Technology & Innovation. Jay Barchas-Lichtenstein is the Senior Research Manager at the Center for News, Technology & Innovation.

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🔥 the latest things

📌 Mehdi Hasan's Zeteo is expanding to the U.K. – and it's doing it from a position of strength, with Semafor reporting the move and Press Gazette putting numbers on the paid subscriber base. 👉 Semafor and Press Gazette

📌 Can Verbatim Media be the left's Red Seat Ventures? — Puck looks at whether the business machinery that scaled Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly post-cable can be replicated for progressive independent media. The infrastructure layer of creator journalism is becoming its own competitive market. 👉 Puck

📌 They spent years covering the creator economy – now they're in it Kaya Yurieff and Jasmine Enberg left FT gigs to launch Scalable not only track the creator economy, but are building tools to make market economy data easy to find and use. 👉 Talking Points by JSA

📌 The Gourmet lawsuit — the former owner of Gourmet magazine is suing the new Gourmet newsletter. A preview of the brand-name fights coming as legacy mastheads get resurrected as indie products. 👉 Semafor

📌 Tyler Denk's beehiiv hit $30M ARR — and he shared 10 lessons from the climb. The victory lap came with a reality check: when he took questions in a Reddit AMA, his own customers pushed back, with one suggesting he put some of that revenue toward "a platform that actually works consistently." 👉 Big Desk Energy and Reddit 

📌 The Rundown AI takes its first strategic investment — Rowan Cheung's AI newsletter, one of the biggest solo-built media products of the past few years, is taking outside money. 👉 Rowan Cheung on X

📌 "I have 1 million subscribers and been doing this for a decade" — Kendall Baker, watching GQ lavish a glossy feature on the Substack House crowd, asked the obvious question: why do year-old newsletters with 50K subscribers get mythologized while people who've been quietly building for a decade don't? 👉 Kendall Baker on X and GQ

📌 How AstroKobi built 8.5M followers on accuracy — a profile of Kobi Brown, the space creator who refused to milk the "interstellar comet might be aliens" frenzy and walked away from millions of easy views. His verification network of working scientists is a model any creator journalist could borrow. 👉 Creator Spotlight

 🫂 from the Project C Community

🎉 Huge congratulations to Ghazala Irshad, who relaunched The Brown Line after nine months away, poured everything into a Global South-focused guide to the World Cup in Chicago!

⚖️ Seamus Hughes of Court Watch talked to a retired man in Oregon who filed his own lawsuit to stop the minting of a 24-karat gold Trump coin – and largely won – before any other outlet noticed.

💛 For two years, Yulia Denisyuk has asked every guest on her Going Places podcast the same question: what brings you hope? Her season finale, "Crowdsourcing Hope," compiles answers from 18 of them. If your week needs a lift, start here. 👏 

📚 Amanda Shendruk went down a summer-reading rabbit hole and came back with data: she analyzed more than 1,000 book recommendations to find the most-recommended titles, then turned it all into a searchable tool you can browse by genre. Data journalism in service of your beach bag. 🏖️ 

🧴 Zineb Haddaji spent months reporting on skin-bleaching creams sold openly on TikTok and WhatsApp in Djibouti – banned since 2015, still destroying women's health while the government looks away – and turned the investigation into a short video so the story travels.

😎 On my radio

📻 Tuesday, June 16, 11 AM ET | — I'll be in-studio on NPR's 1A talking about independent journalism and new media: who's actually making the leap from legacy newsrooms, how creator journalists build sustainable businesses, and why audiences (especially younger ones) are following individual journalists instead of institutions. Tune in live or catch the episode after.

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

💰 Wednesday, June 24, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 1 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The foundation: how sponsorships fit your revenue strategy, what sponsors are actually looking for, and whether you even need a media kit. RSVP → lu.ma/9o8hfugs

💰 Wednesday, July 1, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 2 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The prospecting: how to identify mission-aligned partners and reach the right contacts — without feeling like a salesperson. RSVP → lu.ma/tgfjmhdy

💰 Wednesday, July 8, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 3 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The close: crafting the proposal, pricing your package, handling a "no," and negotiating in a way that protects your brand. RSVP → lu.ma/qhcgrm7w

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

New to Project C: 1-on-1 Coaching

Feel overwhelmed running or launching your creator journalism venture? Wish someone senior level was around to help you solve problems? Or help you learn new business skills without having to sift through 30 internet guides? Not sure your AI agent is steering you in the right direction? The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone (or with a robot). 1-on-1 coaching from Project C with the very much human Blair Hickman will get your skills and your business to the next level in a supportive way.

Book your discovery call today!

Last year, I was invited to a very cool convening. Tracy Baim, who runs Press Forward Chicago, brought together a group of creators working in the Chicago area, along with a handful of publishers and funders. The idea was to hear more from creators about their work, the realities of how they are sustaining their businesses, and what they need.

What we heard that day was that the content creation for these folks is the easy part. They know what they're doing, they know how to reach their audience, and they are, in most cases, really killing it in that regard. It's the business side – the contracts, the rates, the grant applications, the liability questions, the "should I take this partnership or does it compromise me?" conversations – where people get stuck.

All of this tracks with what we’ve learned from the 200+ member-strong Project C Community and surveys like these from CNTI and Video Consortium.

So I'm really proud to share something today that is an attempt to help solve for the business side of creator journalism.

This Monday, June 8, Independent Journalism Atlas co-founder Ryan Kellett will be in Chicago at Navy Pier's Chicago Shakespeare Theater for a summit hosted by Press Forward Chicago and The Onion. At noon, alongside new data from a landscape analysis of Chicago's creator journalism ecosystem, they'll be releasing a new comprehensive guide we produced for Chicago area creators: the Chicago Creator Journalism Toolkit. We'll also be releasing a new, updated Chicago ecosystem scan from the Independent Journalism Atlas hand-crafted by our very own Justin Bank.

The toolkit is a practical guide for independent creators producing journalism, civic information, and accountability. Honestly, most of what's in it applies whether you're in Chicago or not. This is our attempt to write a business manual for creator journalists and we hope you find it useful. Its yours, free, thanks to support from Press Forward Chicago.

Here's what's inside:

• Sample contracts tailored to Illinois – including what you need to know about the Illinois Freelance Worker Protection Act (it's actually really useful, go look it up). These contracts will also serve as a good guide even if you aren’t based in Illinois.

• Rate card guidance – benchmarks across work types plus data from a survey of Chicago-area creators on what they actually charge (Spoiler: only 11% have an established rate sheet, which is a problem we can fix!)

• Revenue model breakdowns for all seven major streams: subscriptions, sponsorships, grants, freelance, events, licensing, and platform monetization – with an honest look at the pros and cons of each

• Grant funding resources – where to find journalism grants, how to write a proposal that actually gets read, and what to expect after you win

• Liability insurance guidance – what media E&O insurance is, what it covers, and whether you actually need it (the answer is probably yes)

• Partnership frameworks for working with traditional newsrooms – three models, what to negotiate before you sign, and red flags to walk away from

• Creator boundary checklists for evaluating new projects, managing scope creep, and protecting your intellectual property

• Credibility and ethics resources – built on the three-pillar framework developed with Trusting News.

The toolkit is live now. You can read it and share it here: Chicago Creator Journalism Toolkit →

If you're in Chicago: The release event is Monday, June 8, noon–2 PM at Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier. It's free, and in addition to the toolkit release and a panel of local creators and media, Press Forward Chicago will share details on an upcoming open call for collaboration grants between traditional newsrooms and independent creators. (WBEZ tours after.) The event is hosted by Press Forward Chicago, Project C, and The Onion, and moderated by Chicago Public Media’s Kimbriell Kelly. RSVP here to reserve your spot!

---

🔥 the latest things

📌 Ameer Al-Khatahtbeh runs @Muslim (12 million followers across platforms, 6.7 million on Instagram alone) basically by himself. The 27-year-old Palestinian journalist started the account in 2019 at Rutgers because he couldn't find the right outlet to warn fellow Muslim students about Trump's travel ban. It exploded during COVID Ramadan (250K followers by graduation), then more than doubled again after October 7. His formula: digestible enough for a fifth grader, shareable by a boomer, written for three distinct audience segments: traditional Muslims, cultural Muslims, and non-Muslim followers who trust @Muslim to cover stories mainstream media ignore. The whole operation is him and one other person. The WIRED Middle East profile is worth your time – especially the part where Meta banned @Muslim in India under a secret government order, locking out 330 million potential followers with no appeal process. The platform gave him a legal citation and nothing else. 👉 WIRED Middle East

📌 The way the wind is blowing – The Washington Post’s super-popular weather section, The Capital Weather Gang, has gone indie after nearly 20 years – breaking away from The Post and rebranding as Capital Weather.

📌 Flipboard's Surf platform launched "social websites" – Surf, built by the Flipboard team, is letting publishers and creators build their own curated social destinations pulling from Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, YouTube, RSS, and podcasts. Early adopters include 404 Media, The Verge, WIRED, and Project C member Andy Dehnart. 👉 TechCrunch wrote about it back in April.

📌 Substack is building tools for bigger publishers – Hamish McKenzie confirmed to Business Insider that Substack is working on enterprise tools for multi-person newsrooms: multiple editors and writers, video and community features. The question for us: Does Substack serving bigger publishers help or hurt the independents who rely on network effects there? 👉 Business Insider

📌 beehiiv meanwhile, would like your attention – beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk announced this week another upcoming feature release event, scheduled for July 16th. The last event, held last fall, saw beehiiv’s introduction of an updated website builder and enhanced analytics. 👉️ RSVP here

📌 Boeing is hiring a News Creator Engagement Lead – The company wants someone in Seattle to identify independent news creators, cultivate relationships with them, and, "collaborate with news creators to provide information and brand messaging so they may create content that resonates with target audiences." Take note: We have arrived at a moment where a Fortune 50 aerospace company has a dedicated headcount for managing creator journalists. 👉 Boeing job listing

📌 The duPont-Columbia Awards - Columbia University's audio and video counterpart to its Pulitzer Prizes - honor original reporting in the public interest with a compelling narrative. Platforms include online, documentary, podcasting, and broadcast - both national and local. They are looking to expand their reach to this kind of journalism in the creator journalism space. Work that appeared for the first time to a U.S. audience between July 1 and Jun 30 is eligible. 👉️ duPont.org for more information and a link to enter. Deadline July 1.

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

• 📹 Wednesday, June 10, 12 PM ET | DEMO: Editory video creation (Members only, Zoom) Editory founder David Rodin demos the tool that turns written pieces into social-first video. Attendees get 2 months free + 20% off after. RSVP → lu.ma/yivkru1p

• 💰 Wednesday, June 24, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 1 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The foundation: how sponsorships fit your revenue strategy, what sponsors are actually looking for, and whether you even need a media kit. RSVP → lu.ma/9o8hfugs

• 💰 Wednesday, July 1, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 2 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The prospecting: how to identify mission-aligned partners and reach the right contacts — without feeling like a salesperson. RSVP → lu.ma/tgfjmhdy

• 💰 Wednesday, July 8, 12 PM ET | Step Forward on Sponsorships — Session 3 of 3 (Members only, Zoom) The close: crafting the proposal, pricing your package, handling a "no," and negotiating in a way that protects your brand. RSVP → lu.ma/qhcgrm7w

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

New to Project C: 1-on-1 Coaching

Feel overwhelmed running or launching your creator journalism venture? Wish someone senior level was around to help you solve problems? Or help you learn new business skills without having to sift through 30 internet guides? Not sure your AI agent is steering you in the right direction? The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone (or with a robot). 1-on-1 coaching from Project C with the very much human Blair Hickman will get your skills and your business to the next level in a supportive way.

Book your discovery call today!

A quick note before we dive into today’s newsletter: One thing we’ve learned over the past two years of supporting creator journalists: At some point, what you actually need is someone who can help you think through how to level up your specific business. That’s why Project C now offers 1-on-1 coaching led by the amazing Blair Hickman. I’m excited about this because not only has Blair – who was one of my favorite colleagues at Vox and is one of my go-to collaborators now – worked as an operator, manager and leader across all parts of a media business, from editorial to audience to business, but she’s an incredible coach (I know this because she’s been coaching me off and on for years!). She’s opened a handful of spots this summer for creator journalists who want a senior-level thought partner. It works for people at all phases of the business, whether you’re just starting or have hired a few folks.

If you're not sure whether it's the right fit, a discovery call will tell you. (It's a conversation, not a sales pitch. Promise. That’s Blair in the pic below. She’s as approachable and warm as she looks. Promise.)

→ Learn more and book a call

Dark money is finding its way to creator journalists

Last year, Project C started work with a journalist who was leaving a traditional news organization to launch an independent project focused on the next presidential election. It was really fun. We were taking all of the theory from Project C’s research and our Going Solo workshops and applying it directly with one creator –  an incredible opportunity to actually test our process.

Project C had been hired by a management company with funding from a philanthropist who believed in this project and its ability to help shine a light on an undercovered part of the 2028 race. We did, too. As the project got underway, Project C underlined the importance of transparency around funding and we were told that we would figure it out down the line. As we got closer and closer to launch, it became clear that the underlying funder was not open to disclosing their support of this project. 

Whether the funder’s reasons were benign or malignant was of no consequence to me, as I believe in practicing what I preach: full transparency around funding for any creator journalism project.

In the end, we had to walk away. Project C took a real financial hit, and leaving the journalist to get to launch without us felt genuinely awful. The project debuted on schedule – without disclosing where its funding came from. We wish the journalist and the project well, but this is exactly the kind of thing that erodes and abuses audience trust.

This is a story we are seeing over and over and over.

From paragon to paradox

Last week, Carlos Eduardo Espina did something that most paid political influencers don't do. The Texas-based creator with 14 million TikTok followers who The New York Times once touted as a one-man TikTok Telemundo, confirmed publicly that he had been paid by Tom Steyer's California governor campaign to the tune of $400,000, according to financial disclosures. In a more recent New York Times article, Espina told the Times he didn't think he needed to disclose anything, because the postings signaling support for Steyer were being done on his own, not as part of any payment. The payments, said Espina, were for unspecified consulting work for the campaign. Hmm.

Now, California's Fair Political Practices Commission is investigating whether this violated state transparency rules. The Steyer campaign, for its part, says they told all the influencers they worked with to include disclosures in their posts – and that the obligation to disclose was on the creators. 

And while Espina's admission makes him more transparent than most of the people doing what he did, that still doesn't make what he did right. 

This is just the latest example of a problem that the creator journalism world needs to continue reckoning with directly and urgently: ethics and credibility – and how independent journalistic creators signal both of those to their audiences.

Last August, Taylor Lorenz published a piece in Wired revealing that Chorus – an arm of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, a progressive dark money network that distributes more than $100 million a year – had quietly been recruiting and paying liberal political influencers since spring 2025. Monthly stipends ranged from $250 to $8,000. Per Lorenz’ reporting, the contracts were explicit: don't tell anyone. Participants were required to give Chorus advance notice before interviewing prominent sources, and were prohibited from disclosing their relationship with the organization.

California passed a disclosure law in 2023 specifically to address this. But Senator Tom Umberg, who authored California's 2023 disclosure law, told CalMatters that paid influencers in politics are more prevalent than three years ago. “Transparency is like whack-a-mole,” he said. “Every year there's a new modality, and so there's a new way to get around stuff.”

In December 2024, Julia Angwin published a paper out of Harvard's Shorenstein Center called "The Future of Trustworthy Information: Learning from Online Content Creators." (Angwin now directs the Shorenstein Center's Independent Media + Audience Project, which is actively working on what standards and practices should look like for independent media.) The paper lays out a framework for trust built on three elements: ability, benevolence, and integrity. What Angwin found is that creators have become really good at building external-facing trust. They narrate their expertise, respond to audience questions, show their work, engage with critics. They operate in a low-default-trust environment and have had to earn every bit of credibility they have.

Angwin notes that several of the creators she spoke with – including TikTok doctor Mohammad Siyab Panhwar – have made a deliberate choice not to take brand deals at all, because audiences are skeptical of them. "It's more credible if I don't monetize my content," Panhwar told her. When YouTuber Tim Pool was revealed to have secretly taken payments from Russian operatives, his own comment section turned on him.

The creator economy's accountability mechanism is the audience. And the audience is watching.

The problem, though, is that political payments are harder to see, harder to regulate, and as the Espina situation shows, harder to even define. Was the $400,000 for "strategic advice and campaign surrogacy," as Espina said? Or was it for posting favorable content? How can he even make that distinction? The line between a creator sharing a genuine political opinion and a creator being paid to share a political opinion is invisible to audiences if no disclosure is made.

Project C and many other entities and individuals are asking consumers to bet on the future of news as independent and produced by personalities. If we're going to do this credibly and responsibly, getting this right matters a lot.

—--

Good eggs

I’m not here to proscribe rules for influencers. But creator journalists have built their credibility on a different architecture – based on audience trust rather than institutional authority. Their credibility is entirely personal. When it's compromised, it's gone.

I've talked with several journalists working in the creator ecosystem who are telling me they're getting more and more of these offers for paid deals. Not a surprise that journlalists working in the creator ecosystem would be treated similarly to run-of-the-mill influencers whose standards are just different. In every case, I advise them to steer clear. These arrangements are becoming normalized. And many of the creators entering into them are struggling to make ends meet with reader revenue, sponsorships, and philanthropic support still developing. And because journalists have traditionally been so segregated from the business side of journalism, they’re entering into these deals without fully understanding what they're risking.

Some people are modeling what good looks like: Chicago-based content creator Rachel Cohen breaks down various funding mechanisms (and which ones she uses) in this Instagram story:

Instagram post

LNI Media, the independent journalism outfit founded by Dave Jorgenson and fellow Washington Post veterans Micah Gelman and Lauren Saks, has a public ethics and transparency pledge that explicitly covers funders and editorial independence. Isaac Saul’s Tangle, which prides itself on its lack of bias, states clearly in its advertising policies that Tangle does not accept political ads.

Local News International’s crystal clear policies.

What I don't have is a good example of a creator journalist who has explicitly disclosed political payment in a model way – because, honestly, I'm not sure that model exists. The best practice right now is mostly: just don't take the money. Which is a fine principle, but not a very practical one when a well-funded campaign is offering a creator with a few hundred thousand followers $25,000 to mention them in a post.

This is the right conversation to be having now, before these arrangements become so normalized that disclosure feels quaint – especially as we careen toward the 2028 presidential election, when many first-time voters are getting their political information primarily from the creator ecosystem.

It's why Trusting News and Project C developed this toolkit for Lenfest to help funders navigate finding credible, trustworthy creators. It's why one of the six courses we teach as part of our Going Solo Creator Journalism Workshop is devoted entirely to ethics and credibility and trust, taught by Lynn Walsh from Trusting News. It’s why the Project C community talks about editorial independence and best practices constantly. It’s why I continue to work with the Trusting News team on studying and understanding how trust is built in the creator ecosystem. And it's why I continue to support the work that Julia Angwin is doing out of the Shorenstein Center.

Espina's transparency about taking the money is actually useful, even if the situation itself is a cautionary tale. It gives us something to point to and say: this is the line, and here is what it looks like to cross it. 

I’d love to hear your thoughts on All of the above and how we should move forward with continuing to develop ethics and credibility standards for creator journalism. Either add a comment or reply to this email.

🔥 the latest things

📌 Joanna Stern left 12 years at the WSJ to build something from scratch — a beehiiv newsletter, a YouTube channel, subscriptions, sponsorships, and an NBC deal that lets the network use and customize her content. This new Nieman Lab profile is the fullest account yet of how she's thinking about the business. 👉 Nieman Lab (ICYMI, also catch Joanna on these podcasts: 🎧️ Hard Fork, On with Kara Swisher, Decoder)

📌 Joe Posner is calling YouTube the new public television — The Vox Video co-founder launched Dream On, a monthly documentary series about communities fighting poverty, incubated at Harvard and funded by foundations. He's building what he thinks public media should be on the platform where the audience actually lives. Episode one is up. 👈 Harvard Gazette

📌 Jim Waterson (former Guardian media editor, now running London Centric) posted on LinkedIn asking the question everyone thinks about and almost nobody answers: "How much do you actually make from doing independent journalism?" The thread is the story. 👉 LinkedIn

📌 Google I/O dropped a pile of AI creator tools: Canva-competitive design, Workspace AI integration, a mobile AI Studio app. Will they be useful? You tell me. If you’re an independent creator actively using AI in your work, like Alex Heath, I’d love to hear from you. Just hit reply to this email. 👉 Google I/O 2026

📌 Congrats to Johnny and Iz Harris and the NewPress team on their News & Documentary Emmy win! 👉️ LinkedIn

📌 Geoff Fowler is leaving the Washington Post to launch his own Substack covering AI and its effects on kids and families. 👉 Substack

📌 Substack wants you to trust their app more than your email list — Substack's Head of Design publicly argued creators should rely on the Substack app over email for audience ownership. Tyler Denk at beehiiv wrote a detailed rebuttal: algorithmic feeds, 10% take-rates, platform lock-in, no data portability. Yes, he runs a competitor. The argument is still worth your time. 👈 Big Desk Energy

📌 NPR lost 28 more – The 2026 journalism layoff wave is already worse than 2025. Don Gonyea, Vickie Walton-James, Joe Shapiro, and Nell Greenfieldboyce are among the names walking out the door this week, as NPR tries to fill an $8M hole left by the elimination of federal public media subsidies. 👈 NPR

📌 YouTube pulled $60B in 2025 (more than Netflix!) – Brand relationships there last 13.5 months on average, vs. 7.7 on Instagram and 4.9 on TikTok. For video-forward creator journalists, YouTube is far and away the most durable business platform in the space. 👈 Creator Spotlight

New to Project C: 1-on-1 Coaching

Feel overwhelmed running or launching your creator journalism venture? Wish someone senior level was around to help you solve problems? Or help you learn new business skills without having to sift through 30 internet guides? Not sure your AI agent is steering you in the right direction? The good news is you don’t have to figure it out alone (or with a robot). 1-on-1 coaching from Project C with the very much human Blair Hickman will get your skills and your business to the next level in a supportive way.

Book your discovery call today!

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As audiences increasingly get their news from independent sources, it’s crucial for readers and funders to understand who to trust and why. So, I spoke to a groups of indie creator journalists who cite their sources, hire fact-checkers, and are producing trustworthy, fact-checked content.

Seamus Hughes of Court Watch, who recently won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for a project done in tandem with the New York Times, recently shared an anecdote with me that has become his lodestone for journalistic integrity. He started his career in the Senate Homeland Security Committee about 20 years ago, working on an investigation that had the potential to turn into a big story. His boss at the time, congressional investigator and Pulitzer Prize winner Jim McGee cautioned Hughes about the importance of getting things right: “This is a one day story for you, but it’s the rest of their life for the person you’re writing about.” This kind of compassion is crucial for high quality journalism.

Trustworthy news from creator journalists is important, because one in five adults regularly got news from influencers in 2025, according to the Pew Research Center. So do independent creator journalists do the work rigorously and model bst practices for their audience?

Independent journalists like Hughes and me can get lumped in with disreputable creators who share misinformation or fake AI slop. But just like we see a distinction between The Associated Press and The Daily Mail (the latter has been banned as a source on Wikipedia due to its high percentage of fake news), we should evaluate creator journalists based on their own content, not some average of the industry. 

The Project C Community regularly shares and talks through fact checking best practices. This March, Rose Thomas Bannister of Modo di Bere and Anna Pujol-Mazzini of good story (a trained fact checker) hosted a session for the community on fact-checking when you’re working solo. Pujol-Mazzini emphasized the importance of having a second person check your work if at all possible. In her six years of fact-checking brilliant reporters, she says, never once reviewed a piece that had zero errors.

Slides from a recent Project C session led by Rose Thomas Bannister and Anna Pujol-Mazzini.

“If you’ve done the reporting, you’re too close,” she said in the live session.

Bannister shared that independent creators have a tendency to respond to mistakes defensively or casually. She recommends a simple, professional response like you would give in a newsroom, “Thank you, corrected.”

Newsroom expertise and collaborations

Many creator journalists have worked for newsrooms and are familiar with how to create content with high standards of accuracy. A 2025 study of journalists by Muck Rack reports “creator journalists are more likely to have a longer tenure in the industry with around 60% having more than 10 years of experience.”

Hughes, for example, also writes for The New York Times and other publications, pointing out the biggest contrast is that “a major newsroom has major resources.” In a newsroom, it’s not uncommon for multiple writers, editors, and the research desk to review a story. Hughes estimates that 25 people could touch a newsroom story before publication, “which means they may catch something that I don’t catch.”

Independently verifying facts can be more difficult as a solo journalist. Hughes says that sources are less likely to respond to a request for comment or to share extra information when he presents himself as a Court Watch reporter vs. from The New York Times.

Still, the amount of verification the independent journalists I spoke with are able to accomplish is especially impressive considering more limited resources. For example, for a Court Watch story on the Special Investigator General for Pandemic Recovery involving funding fraud, Hughes interviewed more than a dozen people and had a lawyer review the piece before publication.

Hughes calls or emails people named in stories to request comments. If an assertion in a court document seems off or cannot be verified, the Court Watch team will be transparent about being unable to verify independently, or specify that the lawsuit “alleges” the assertion. Papers from both the right and left of the political spectrum regularly pick up facts that Court Watch originally reports. (Hughes says being cited and linked to from a major newspaper generally doesn’t drive traffic or subscribers, unfortunately.)

Julie Holstein of Ward 6 Brooklyn, who formerly worked as a producer at 60 Minutes, feels the difference between working independently versus in a newsroom. “[I’m a] journo who spent her entire career verifying on top of verifying,” Holstein says. “Nothing of mine was published unless it was triple-sourced. It’s now a work in progress.” She is transparent with her readers about which facts she’s able to independently verify in her solo work.

Hanna Raskin of The Food Section requires all contributors to submit sources’ contact information, links to any documents they consulted, and interview transcripts on request. Raskin explains, “fact checking still falls to me, unless I’m the one writing the story,” in which case she hires a contractor.

Quinn Emmett of Important, Not Important says that fact-checking is “table stakes,” but that it’s challenging to hire an affordable contractor with a fast turnaround time. 

Corrections with integrity

A creator journalist myself, I write and publish a newsletter, Amplify Respect, to help readers find less anxiety and more hope about being transgender. I’ve had to grapple with how to ensure my work is accurate and reliable.

A screengrab from Amplify Respect.

Creating a publication on a tight budget, I cannot afford to hire editors, fact-checkers, or research assistants. Instead, my partner edits my posts, carefully reading drafts and calling out typos and content errors. I cite sources and link to primary research when relevant.

Because one of the pillars of my content is using respectful language, I felt especially embarrassed when a long-time reader commented on my inadvertent use of a slur for people with a mental illness (“wacko”) as part of an anecdote. The commenter referred me to a list of ableist words and terms to avoid curated by Ly Xīnzhèn M. Zhǎngsūn Brown. 

A fantastic resource for reporting on trans people with respect is the Trans Journalists Association’s Stylebook and Coverage Guide, answering questions such as, should you use a person’s old name when talking about their past (generally, no), and covering editorial best practices.

In the case of this correction, I replied to the comment to thank the reader for educating me, and edited the post to remove the word in question, with a note documenting that I had made the edit.

I rely on my audience to trust me enough to let me know when I’ve messed up. Any single editor may or may not have caught this mistake before publication. But my work sometimes feels like a collaboration with hundreds of engaged community members who form a powerful fact-checking team. 

Shaping community standards

Creator journalists don’t have to work independently from newsrooms. Amber Sherman, Creator in Residence with MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, profiled by Project C, created a partnership in which her work as a creator is held to the same standards of journalistic integrity as the rest of the newsroom.

Dave Jorgenson, co-founder of LNI Media and former “Washington Post Tiktok Guy,” left the newsroom with two other co-founders to create their own content. The LNI team had the freedom to develop their own Ethics and Transparency pledge, including publicly sharing sources, funders, and corrections. With three co-founders previously from The Washington Post, the team brings the skills and experience of newsroom fact-checking to independent journalism. 

LNI is partnering with Poynter’s media literacy program to teach teen creators media literacy, ethics, and responsible AI use, helping to inform the next generation about best practices. 

Objective journalism about our own experiences

It can be difficult to fact-check one’s own experiences. I wrote about being harassed in a public bathroom as a gender non-conforming person for HuffPost. I was very aware that I had no proof that this situation had happened. Although I had journaled about the experience immediately afterwards, I had no photos or video, nor did I try to interview the man who was interrogating me about my gender - wouldn’t that be awkward!

What I did have was assurances from many other gender non-conforming people in my community that this kind of harassment happens to them often in bathrooms.

I can’t easily cite this word-of-mouth common knowledge, but I know more about certain realities of daily life within the trans community than someone who is relying on studies and interviews to find an angle to report.

So can independent publishers do better than major newsrooms when reporting on marginalized communities?

Newsrooms have a history of preventing marginalized staff from covering issues that may affect them personally, in the name of “objectivity.” This can include reporting on workers, Black people, Indigenous people, immigrants, and LGBTQ+ people.

As journalists, it can be disappointing and isolating to not be allowed to report on issues that we have become experts in through lived experience. Bridget Thoreson, founder of MyCareerRiver.com and an executive at a social impact firm, worked as a reporter and editor at a daily community newspaper from 2008 to 2015. Before the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges US Supreme Court decision guaranteeing the right to marry for same-sex couples, Thoreson had traveled to another state to obtain a marriage license for her and her wife. The newsroom leadership banned Thoreson from working on any coverage of gay marriage, although other journalists were putting out content on this timely topic. 

Sitting in the newsroom, Thoreson watched the Obergefell coverage on the TV as her coworkers came by to congratulate her. She reflects, “as a journalist, I was just so deeply disappointed that I could not use my perspective to inform our coverage.”

Thoreson says, “I could not be trusted as a professional not to bring my personal lens to the story without bias … it really made me consider my career more broadly, and where I could go where my unique value would be appreciated.”

Assigning a story to someone who is outside the relevant community does not inherently make it more accurate. Lewis Raven Wallace, author of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity, writes, “I can’t be neutral or centrist in a debate over my own humanity. The idea that I don’t have a right to exist [as a transgender person] is not an opinion, it is a falsehood.”

Independent creators are able to share stories that matter from their own experience, within the standards of good journalism. Reporting from within their community, journalists can educate from a real life perspective and suggest actions for readers to take. Sources are more likely to trust and share their stories with a member of their own community. 

Starr Dunigan is a journalist who has spent nine years chronicling Black joy, currently at Black Joy Behind the Scenes. She recalls a Black woman questioning her as a reporter, “Why do you only come when we are dead?” Reporting from within the community is important because journalists will likely have more awareness of the variety of stories affecting folks.

A 2025 study by Muck Rack concluded “autonomy is a primary driver for creator journalists with 57% saying their primary motivation is creative or editorial freedom.” 

A toolkit for creator journalism trust and credibility

Looking for specific best practices and credibility markers? Project C, Trusting News, and the Lenfest Institute for Journalism developed The Creator Journalism Trust & Credibility Toolkit. This toolkit helps “local news ecosystem funders assess whether a creator’s work is trustworthy, high-quality and worthy of investment.”

For funders or newsroom leaders, evaluating which creator journalists are worthy of investment helps support high-quality independent journalism. For creator-model journalists, the toolkit serves as a guide for best practices.

Here are some tips pulled from the The Creator Journalism Trust Framework, part of the Toolkit, to help evaluate creator journalism:

For readers, check if creators:

• Distinguish between facts and opinions

• Disclose sources of funding

• Present diverse perspectives in sourcing and content

For creator journalists, show your readers you are trustworthy by:

• Publishing an ethics policy

• Providing original sources, links and citations

• Maintaining editorial independence by not allowing funders to influence content decisions

Check out the The Creator Journalism Trust Framework for more guidance.

What do you think about trust and accuracy in creator journalism? Please let us know in the comments.

Rey Katz writes and publishes Amplify Respect, a newsletter to inspire less anxiety and more hope about being trans. Their essays are published in HuffPost and other publications.

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Imagine a procedural crime drama where the star detective walks into a room that's already been processed. Evidence has been bagged, witnesses interviewed, the smoking gun found. She announces she's cracked it. The other detectives exchange an eye-roll.

That's roughly how it felt to watch the journalism world react this week to a speech by Deborah Turness, the former CEO of BBC News (who resigned last year following questions about the BBC's editing of a Donald Trump interview), in which she declared that the rise of creator journalism is "the most disruptive shift the news industry has seen." The Guardian and Nieman Lab both covered it. LinkedIn did its thing. And people in my world, who have been living inside this shift for years, shared it with something between validation and exhaustion.

To be fair to Turness: she's not wrong about any of this, and she says she made these observations out of genuine love for the BBC and belief in its future, which I'll take at face value. But there's a difference between being right and being timely, and the speech she gave this week describes a disruption that has already happened as though it's a threat on the horizon. It also gets the "what to do now" part wrong.

Gallup's yearly tracking of media trust shows it degrading steadily, with a particularly sharp drop starting in 2020. That's when Americans stopped waiting for traditional news organizations to make sense of the world for them and started finding individual voices they trusted – voices not tied to brands. (That "not tied to brands" part matters for what follows.) Years of "fake news" narratives had already sowed seeds of doubt. Covid, and the simultaneous gutting of local news across the country, finished the job. Audiences were actively looking for somewhere else to put their trust, somewhere that felt separate from institutions. They found it, and they stayed.

That is still happening, but really it’s past tense. It happened.

It shows up in declining subscription numbers, in tanking advertising revenue, in paltry Nielsen ratings that are now too drastic to ignore or explain away as a temporary dip – and in the comment sections of Substacks written by people who used to work at the places now desperately trying to understand where their audience went. It shows up in the vast numbers of people following independent creators on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok and in newsletters. Each of those platforms makes (a lot of) money because they understood what was happening five or six years ago and built the infrastructure while legacy news organizations were still attributing the shift to “news avoidance” and convening task forces about that. 

(Dear reader, it wasn’t news avoidance – it was audience migration.)

And it isn't just the audience that lost trust in legacy news brands. When I did my Sulzberger fellowship in 2024, prior to launching Project C, I talked to dozens of journalists who were thinking about going independent. Yes, they cited job security concerns. But they also talked about losing faith in the people in the corner offices. I talked to videographers being told to produce content that aligned more with advertiser needs than editorial mission, or writers being told to stop doing mission-driven work because it wasn't sellable. In the weeks after 300 journalists were laid off from The Washington Post, a significant number of them launched newsletters. That's not a trend. That's people and audiences moving in the same direction at the same time.

The Project C Community of journalists who left or got pushed out of traditional newsrooms and built independent practices now has 220 members (and grows every month) while The Independent Journalism Atlas now tracks 1,453 independent news creators (and growing, too). Not because we’re just so dang fun (though we are), but because the alternative stopped working for them and they needed to find a new way to keep doing the work they love.

Which brings me to who Turness says she spent "the last several months" talking to in order to reach her conclusions. Platform executives. Talent agents. High-profile broadcast journalists who made the leap to independence with existing audiences and name recognition already intact. That's a perfectly reasonable group if your question is "where did the money go?" It's a much less useful group if your question is "why did audiences stop trusting us, and what would bring them back?" Those are different questions, and the source list reveals which one is actually being asked.

Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is among the people she cites. He could have told her this in 2022. (He probably did tell anyone who asked.) He has a financial stake in creator journalism succeeding – which doesn't make him wrong, but it does mean his perspective on whether legacy news organizations should "liberate their talent and let journalists act more like creators" is not exactly disinterested.

That is exactly what many newsrooms are actively trying. But it misreads what creator journalism actually is. The audience didn't leave The Washington Post or CNN because the journalists weren't relatable enough. They left because they distrusted the institutions, and they were actively looking for somewhere else to put that trust – somewhere that felt separate from the brands. The trust they found was built through a direct relationship over time, through consistency, and the sense that the person on the other end of the newsletter or podcast actually gave a damn about the specific thing they were covering. Audiences are no longer looking for a one-size-fits-all news source or a brand’s stamp of approval. They want someone covering a very specific niche topic deeply and authentically. You can't replicate that by changing the packaging. The trust has moved. The format is downstream of that.

And for news executives worried about training up in-house talent and then watching them walk out the door and take that audience with them: yeah, that's probably going to happen. Joanna Stern left the Wall Street Journal earlier this year after 12 years to launch her own consumer tech media company. NBC News subsequently signed her as a contributor. Notice the direction of that transaction. She didn't go looking for an institution to validate her. The institution came to her, because she'd built something worth paying for. The journalists who are best at building direct audience relationships are going to figure out that the optimal place to do that is independently – not inside a brand the audience has already decided it doesn't trust. The smarter move for news executives is to figure out what a relationship with an independent journalist is actually worth, and build a model around that.

The real case for big newsrooms (it exists)

Here's where traditional news organizations can actually win: doing the things that genuinely require scale:

• Enterprise investigative work that takes a team of 30 and 18 months to publish.

• Simultaneous FOIA requests across 50 states. 

• The legal infrastructure to sit on a story while lawyers review it, to defend a reporter in court, to publish something that will survive a defamation lawsuit. 

• Sending a correspondent into a war zone with security support and an actual evacuation plan. 

• The coordinated document analysis that required 80 newsrooms across 40 countries to crack the Panama Papers.

That is the value proposition. Not "our journalists can now post on TikTok."

The things that require capital and sustained coordinated effort – that's what large newsrooms can do that a creator with a great Substack will struggle to do effectively. And crucially, that's where trust gets rebuilt, slowly, through the work itself.

Over the past several years, media organizations have scaled back their newsrooms, and in some cases gone out of business entirely. That scaling back almost always starts with newsroom jobs. The industry has already shed thousands of positions: more than 3,400 in 2025 alone, with 2026 on pace to be worse. I thought cutting the newsroom was the wrong move a decade ago watching it happen at Gannett, and I still think so. We were cutting the very thing that was actually valuable to the end user. The journalists who lost those jobs didn't disappear. A lot of them figured out that they could build something on their own, and they were doing it at exactly the right moment: the audience had already migrated and the platforms were already waiting for them. The shift had already happened by the time anyone in a corner office started calling it one.

News execs, here’s a freebie: think hard about what your organization can do that independent creators cannot. Concentrate your resources there. That's the path back.

What's frustrating about the Turness framing isn't that she got there eventually. It's that even her methodology for getting there reproduces the exact problem she's trying to solve. She went to the top of the food chain to understand why audiences stopped trusting the top of the food chain. The actual story – the one being written right now, by journalists who built something real from scratch without a platform exec's blessing or a talent agent's phone call – didn't make her source list. Which is kind of the whole point.

🔥 the latest things

📌 Your Friendly Neighborhood Newsletter — Kyle Chayka zooms in on the rise of neighborhood-level newsletters and how these labors of love, often with small audiences, are building a strong sense of commuity. 👉️ The New Yorker

📌 Democrats try a new creator playbook in California — Tom Steyer’s California gubernatorial campaign has hired news influencer Carlos Eduardo Espina to advise on creator strategy. 👉️ WP Creator

📌 Don Lemon's Lemon Media Network crosses 10 million followers — The expansion announcement this week included a new operations director, a new DC correspondent, and the launch of a daily newsletter (Lucky Lemon 7) on Substack. That's a 50% audience increase in a year. 👉️ The Wrap

📌 PBS and ITVS launch the Independent Lens Creator Lab — The inaugural six-month cohort includes five creators who will produce up to 12 vertical videos for Independent Lens and PBS social platforms, with up to $36,000 in production funding plus mentorship. The cohort includes Fernando Hurtado of In The Hyphen. 👉️ Variety

📌 Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax — Substack's 10% revenue cut is pushing high-profile publishers (The Ankler among them) to Ghost and beehiiv. For a newsletter earning $10K/month, switching to Ghost saves $9,600 a year. 👉️ The Verge

📌 Mega creators are finding their personalities don't scale — This piece on the growing pains of the biggest creators trying to build standalone businesses is fascinating. There's something here for creator journalists, too: the audience relationship is an asset, but it can also be a limit. 👉️ Digiday

📽️ Big fan of this vertical video training promo from Poynter:

Instagram post

📌 Congrats to Seamus Hughes for his Pulitzer win for a project in collaboration with the New York Times! :

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

A few weeks ago, I sat around a table in Perugia, Italy, with some very smart people – many of them creator journalists trying to feed their content machines and make a living every single day. The topic on deck that evening was AI: how to use it in our work, and whether we should use it at all. It won't surprise you to hear that, with a table of about 16 journalists, the thinking was all over the map.

At one end of the table (the theoretical end, not the actual one) were the purists who swore AI would never have anything to do with their work – not even as an aggregator or to handle the background, repetitive tasks that would make their jobs easier. They saw it as a slippery slope, one that could easily introduce error or misinformation into their product. Fair enough.

At the other end sat the fully AI-pilled contingent who see artificial intelligence's rapidly growing ability to do nuanced, rigorous work as a key tenet of how they'll build their product from now on. They see AI as yet another tool in a journalist's arsenal – one that can help us do better work as long as it is in the right hands, with the right parameters guiding its use.

And in the middle (where I was more comfortable), were the people who see the promise of it – who are genuinely curious and intrigued – but who also have enough doubts and questions that they're not ready to dive in. We want to dip our toes in thoughtfully, because we don't yet fully understand what all this really is yet.

Platformer's Casey Newton was not at that table, but I wish he had been. He's probably spent more time thinking through this than almost anyone. Not only is he one of the tech industry's leading analysts and commentators, he's also been an early adopter of using AI in his work and has been very publicly on the record about it. Which made it all the more striking when he announced last week that he was actually scaling back what he delivers to his audience, in order to concentrate on things that only he, as a human, is capable of doing.

He rightly notes that link roundups are easily doable – and in many cases more effectively built these days by AI than by humans. They are commoditized work, and will become even more so as AI adoption grows. Casey actually showed us a version of this himself: earlier this year, he wrote about using Claude to generate a personalized briefing, which was producing stronger link aggregation for the newsletter than he was building manually. His prediction now is that soon everyone will be doing something like that for themselves – each of us with our own customized feeds, pulled together by AI, whenever we want it. Because the tool – AI – is available to all of us, you see.

So rather than continue delivering that kind of aggregation as part of what subscribers are paying for, Casey is doubling down on what he says AI can't replicate: analysis, original scoops, exclusives, the stuff that only comes from real shoe-leather reporting and years of cultivated sources. This does map directly onto what Project C has been arguing for years: that the creator journalists who will survive are the ones who've built genuine relationships with their audiences through very specific niche expertise and irreplaceable points of view.

I admire the bet. Casey is uniquely positioned to make it. He has the brand, the sources, the track record, and the financial runway that most independent journalists can only dream about. If anyone can make "only original reporting" work as a subscription product with a quality-not-quantity frame, it's him.

But I don't agree with him entirely. Or maybe I do but in a different way?

I can say this: I don't agree that there's only one way to approach our AI-infused future.

This may be the right thing for Platformer to do because this is Casey’s product and it needs to feel right and good for him and that's one of the beautiful things about this creator journalism gig. We are our own bosses and can make these decisions unilaterally.

But as a reader, I'm bummed.

I rely on Platformer's link roundup to stay oriented in the tech space without having to build and maintain my own feed. Even knowing that a roundup is primarily AI-generated, what I'm really paying for is Casey's brand of journalism – his and his co-editor Lindsey Choo’s editorial judgment and their implicit stamp of approval that what landed in my inbox is worth my time. The human layer is the product, even when AI is doing the heavy lifting underneath it.

That, I think, is the lesson creator journalists should actually take from all of this: ⭐️ "make sure your human layer is irreplaceable." ⭐️ Casey's move makes sense for Casey. It doesn't necessarily follow that the rest of us should stop curating.

I've been running a kind of hybrid model here at Project C for a few months now. As I’ve shared before, every Thursday a scheduled process runs in Claude that scours multiple spaces for the best and most relevant information for anyone interested in creator model journalism. The AI does the sweep, then I do the edit. I pull lame links, add ones it missed, and then write around what's left.

What makes that difficult to replicate isn't just the editing; it's also what the AI is sweeping in the first place. It has access to publicly available sources, yes, but also to spaces I've curated myself: notes I keep in a running weekly document, context about the overarching themes that weave through Project C, guidance about what I'm looking for and how those priorities shift over time. So here’s my take: The AI's output is only as good as what you put into it. Two journalists using the exact same tool can produce something entirely different, depending on the depth and specificity of what they bring to it.

This is what is perhaps getting lost in the debate around AI and journalism: A camera is a camera. A trained journalist’s brain or eye is something more. We have always wielded common tools in uncommon ways – the pencil, the printing press, the typewriter, the tape recorder, the computer, the spreadsheet, social media – and the tool was never the key part of the equation that equaled journalism. The brain and training behind it was. Is. It’s what the journalist chose to point it at, and why, and what they made of what came back that mattered. Matters.

AI is no different. It's a powerful tool, and in the hands of someone with real expertise, a cultivated source base, and years of editorial judgment informing its inputs, it produces something that nobody else can quite replicate.

Could you still go build your own customized feeds about creator journalism or tech or public policy or Widow’s Bay (my fave new show)? Absolutely. But the bet I'm making – which is, btw, the same one Casey is making, just in a different direction – is that knowing there's a human being on the other end making judgment calls is still worth something to readers.

The links are below. ⬇️

🔥 the latest things

📌 Anthony Mason negotiated his own YouTube show while staying at CBS – The longtime CBS music correspondent launched "Alchemy," a YouTube interview series about artists and the creative process in a deal that gives him ownership of the show. The LA Times piece calls it "the first of its kind." For anyone thinking about how to create outside your day jobs while protecting what you build, this is worth a close read. 👉 LA Times

📌 After a WaPo layoff, Geoffrey Fowler went indie, but also… – Fowler was the Post's tech columnist for eight years before the 300+ person layoff wave. He's now on Substack with 17K+ subscribers. He’s launching the newsletter as he also steps into a role with the new Youth AI Safety Institute. It’s an interesting hybrid and one that I’d term an edge case helping to re-interrogate the boundaries between journalism and advocacy. 👉 Geoffrey Fowler's Substack

📌 Vine is back (as Divine) and its whole pitch is no AI - The Jack Dorsey-backed relaunch of the original short-form video platform launched publicly this week with a hard rule: every clip must be made by a human. They've imported 500,000 original Vine videos into the archive on a bet that nostalgia plus authenticity can beat algorithm-driven slop. 👉 The Guardian | TechCrunch

📌 Vice News is back, too – and pivoting to creator - Shane Smith is resuscitating the brand he founded as a "social-platform-first outlet" built around his own podcast and video series. Hmm. 👉 Hollywood Reporter

📌 TikTok's algorithm reportedly favored Republican content in 2024. A new Guardian/academic analysis found evidence that TikTok's recommendation system pushed pro-Republican content during the 2024 election cycle. This is a timely cautionary tale: what you're actually signing up for when you try to build an audience on someone else's algorithm? 👉 The Guardian

📌 Substack launches new creator interview series - Each episode will feature co-founder Hamish McKenzie or Head of New Media Hanne Winarsky sitting down with an independent media founder at their favorite neighborhood bar or restaurant. 👉 On Substack

📌 The Ankler is leaving Substack for Passport. We can assume Janice Min won’t be Hamish’s first interview guest. Status reports that other high profile Substackers – The Bulwark, Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo, and Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me – are also considering an exit from the platform. 👉 Status News

📌 🐝 beehiiv's MCP is now free for everyone – Previously in paid-plan-only beta, beehiiv's AI integration layer (which lets Claude and other AI tools connect directly to your newsletter data) is now open to all users. 👉 beehiiv

📌 Progressive megadonors are betting big on content creators. Per Semafor, a cohort of progressive funders are moving significant money into creator-led media as a political strategy. 👉 Semafor

📌 Syracuse University launches a creator economy minor - the new program will teach monetization, entprepreneurship and have to navigate the ever-shifting opportunities of distributed platforms. 👉️ NetInfuencer

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

Discover 1,400+ independent creator journalists by platform, topic and location.

This spring, we spent time with two independent journalists breaking the kind of accountability stories that used to be the exclusive province of big newsrooms, and watched them fight on two fronts to keep their names attached to their own work. One front is legacy journalism, where outlets can treat solo reporters as sources rather than peers, scooping stories the creators originated. The other is an aggregation and AI-summary layer that strips reporter bylines in favor of whichever institutional brand republished the piece last. For journalists whose livelihoods run through a direct subscriber relationship, credit is how the next story gets paid for.

Marisa Kabas

Right around rush hour on the afternoon of March 6, Marisa Kabas – who writes the indie newsletter The Handbasket – published a bombshell: never-before-seen body camera footage from the DOGE-led raid on the U.S. Institute of Peace the year before.

The story existed because she had spent a year in federal court to get it – filing a FOIA lawsuit in June 2025 with free legal support from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP).  Kabas and the RCFP fought through months of government delays and exemption claims, finally winning the battle before a D.C. Superior Court judge in February. 

The footage ran to nearly six hours. No other journalist had pursued it through litigation. 

Like many independent journalists building followings in the creator ecosystem, Kabas took her readers along on the journey to get the footage. She posted when she started pursuing the story. She updated when the FOIA request was made. And on Feb 18th, she triumphantly shared the news that she had won her lawsuit and the footage would be released within 14 days. 

“I will share clips and insights with you as soon as I can,” wrote Kabas at the end of that post.

Implied in that statement was the work now ahead of Kabas: hours spent poring over the footage, additional reporting and consultations with her partners at RCFP to ensure they were getting it right.

Kabas was not intending to publish on March 6th at 4:59 p.m., just ahead of NBC4 Washington’s evening news broadcast. The story of why she did is emblematic of the challenges independent journalists are facing when it comes to credit. 

A COURTESY CALL

On March 5, Marisa got an email from someone she didn’t know: Mark Segraves, a general assignment reporter with a local news broadcast station, NBC4 in Washington, DC. Segraves asked only for her phone number with no context for why. She sent it along, mildly curious.

The next day, Segraves called. He congratulated her on her work in winning the FOIA case, then revealed NBC4 had submitted its own FOIA request the week before and also had the footage and was planning to air the story, essentially breaking the news, that day on the channel’s 5 p.m. news broadcast. 

Kabas went into triage mode. She told Segraves about the months of work she’d put into the story, the long court battle – and asked Segraves for the professional courtesy to hold his story until Monday to give her time to finish hers and publish first. 

“Well, I'm not just a blogger,” Segraves said. “I can't just hold it. But I'll ask my editor.” 

The conversation turned contentious when she called Segraves out for knowing 24 hours earlier that they were planning to air the story on the 5th and not telling her (even though that would have given her at least those 24 hours to prep her story). Kabas said that Segraves made a point of saying he'd never heard of her before, which she found particularly galling given her very public reporting.

According to Kabas, Segraves soon called back to say they wouldn't hold the story, but offered to do a quick Zoom interview with her to to include in their package. She agreed, reluctantly, thinking she’d at least be on the record in this initial reporting, in some small way rather than erased entirely from a story she’d originated and fought almost a year to bring to light.

After that Zoom, Kabas had three hours to get her story out before the NBC4 evening broadcast. She did, publishing at 4:58 p.m.

At 5 p.m., NBC4 Washington aired a seven-minute package. The segment opened with the words "First on 4." Kabas was not mentioned for the first six minutes. When she appeared, they mispronounced her name. NBC4’s Instagram and TikTok cuts of the segment erased her entirely. When Kabas wrote to the station to point out all of this, the news director apologized only for the mispronunciation.

@nbcwashington

For the first time, we’re getting an inside look at what happened the day the Trump administration took over the U.S. Institute of Peace. ... See more

THE NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

While a narrative has arisen about news influencers and creator model journalists taking reporting from established news organizations and getting more views and engagement, there is a long, uncertain history of how credit and attribution is handled in journalism.

Most of us have lived through the ways this dynamic played out during the Aggregation Era of the 2010s. But it has roots back to the earliest days of newspapering when even Ernest Hemingway had to fight for his byline.

That dynamic has not translated well to the indie journalism space where layers of editing and legal departments often don’t exist. Rather, journalists like Kabas are working on their own and vulnerable to being scooped – often by reporters and institutions that have less fluency with the creator space and poly-platform realities.

It’s left to the creator herself to make the calls, send the emails and demand credit if they want to chase a larger publication for attribution. Kabas is not the only reporter whose work illustrates this pattern. She's just had the most complete experience of it across 15+ months of independent reporting.

REPORTING THROUGH THE GAPS IN FULL-TIME EMPLOYMENT

Monique O. Madan launched Two Can Be True on New Year's Eve 2025, nine months after being laid off from The Markup and CalMatters. She had spent 17 years in newsrooms: a decade at the Miami Herald, on the national team at USA Today, and in investigative roles at CalMatters and The Markup. Her Herald work freed a man from 11 years in ICE detention and solitary confinement.

She is not a newcomer to serious accountability journalism. She is, however, new to doing it without a salary, an expense account, a legal team, or an editor.

Madan works primarily from home, often with her two children. (Photo courtesy Monique O. Madan)

Eight weeks into her newsletter, a scoop landed. Guards at the remote Everglades immigration detention facility known as "Alligator Alcatraz" were circulating an unauthorized morale patch – a grim reaper with red eyes holding a hatchet, guard towers silhouetted behind him, the words "You Can't Hide."

A fired guard had handed the patch to an activist outside the facility. Madan tracked down a recently released detainee, asked him to describe the patch without being shown it, then confirmed it on FaceTime when his description matched exactly. Florida Highway Patrol, FDLE, and the Bexar County Sheriff's Office are now investigating. 

She reported this alone, on her living room floor, nine months postpartum. She tried to get a pre-publication legal review and was turned down by multiple organizations, who said they weren't set up to assist independent journalists.

"The reporting itself didn't change," she said. "The conditions did. Whether I was at USA Today or the Miami Herald or The Markup – records requests, pressure testing everything. Your instincts don't go away because you're independent. I found that to be really assuring. It was a beautiful moment for me."

"I did have less friction. But I also had less protection."

Madan’s experience with a mainstream local newsroom was different from Kabas’. 

The Miami Herald – her first employer, her alma mater and hometown paper – republished the investigation with full credit and a prominent link back to the original. She wrote a six-point essay explaining why the moment mattered. She knows what the norms should be, and she modeled them publicly because they aren't yet assumed.

The Herald did seemingly everything right to credit and attribute an independent reporter. And yet, still, in this evolving cross-platform world, there is more to the story…

Madan’s work as it originally appeared in her newsletter (left) and a few days later in The Miami Herald.

AGGREGATION ERASURE 

Once the Herald republished Madan's investigation, aggregators, news sites, and AI-summarization tools picked it up, but attributed it to the Miami Herald. The Herald's clear notation that the story originated in Madan's newsletter did not survive the relay chain. By the time the story had moved three steps from its source, she had disappeared from it.

"I spent days reaching out to editors, generic websites, LinkedIn messages… saying I need a correction. I was screaming: ‘Link to my story. This is my reporting.’ And I got some pushback. A lot of people were like, ‘Well, we think we didn't make a mistake, but we're gonna help you out as a professional courtesy.’"

Some outlets updated their attributions, but many didn't change a thing.  And the AI summaries, once generated, were essentially locked.

“The institutional bias built into the aggregators stands in direct contrast to what so many people are choosing to trust – the human who actually did the work, has the knowledge and is introducing the public to the story,” said Joy Mayer, executive director of Trusting News, a non-profit that advises newsrooms and creators on best practices for trust and credibility. “It's easy and efficient to see everything in one place. But for an individual news consumer to believe something is responsible and accurate, being several steps removed from the original source isn't helpful.”

The aggregation failure is structural and largely automated, built into the architecture of how news travels online. No single bad actor. No correction mechanism. A system that seemingly defaults to the largest institutional brand name at each relay point.

The research supports this at scale. A 2025 Tow Center study at Columbia tested eight AI search engines and found they provided incorrect or inaccurate attribution answers in more than 60 percent of queries, with a specific documented tendency to cite syndicated rather than original versions of articles. When a Herald story is picked up by Yahoo News or MSN, the aggregated version is what AI tools reach for. 

As John Shehata of Newzdash told us: "At NewzDash, we track AI Overviews across millions of news queries, and we already see a major attribution problem, even for large news brands. If AI platforms are not consistently getting attribution right for major publishers, the problem is likely even more severe for independent journalists. And when attribution does appear, it usually goes to the publisher brand, not the reporter who actually did the work."

For a journalist at the Herald, this is no doubt irritating. There is work to be done between the executive offices and legal departments of these publishers and platforms. For a newsletter two months old, built on a reporter's name and a direct subscriber relationship, this is existential AND material. It's an economic and reputational threat.

"As journalists, we're taught it's not about credit," Madan said. "It's about the public good, the impact we're making. And I 100% believe that. But we also have to think about the realities of credit and what that leads to. I need to make a living somehow."

‘BLOGGERS IN PAJAMAS’ 

Back to the NBC4 reporter Mark Segraves’ comment to Kabas. "Not just a blogger" does double work: it's a status claim about himself, and it reveals the definitional map that is wildly out of date: a journalist defined as working with institutional backing plus beat assignment plus editorial chain.

What's absent from that map is that the source chose Kabas, not NBC4 or The Washington Post. The records were released because of her work. The legal risk and work was hers (and RCHP’s). The story would not exist without her. Yet the institution seemingly encountered her work as a resource to access, not a peer with prior claim. Kabas told us that Segraves made sure to tell her he'd never heard of her before. We can imply an assumption that recognition flows only from institutional affiliation – not from a year of federal litigation, not from the federal employees who trusted you with classified memos, not from a subscriber base that grew because you were right.

But the sourcing reality is expanding in the opposite direction from that credentialing assumption.

Sources are increasingly choosing independent journalists. Federal employees leaked to Kabas because they trusted her. Madan got the Alligator Alcatraz tip because a decade of immigration reporting relationships traveled with her out of the newsroom. The institutional frame values credentials; what actually produces the work is trust and sustained attention.

LOOKING FOR GREEN SHOOTS

There are promising paths emerging. 

One clear example is when credit is designed into the process before a word is written. When Slate editor Patrick Reis approached Kabas in the summer of 2025, the resulting investigation into Jack Posobiec's voting records was announced as a joint production from the start: "combining Slate's decades of impactful journalism with The Handbasket's independent spirit." Both got attribution. Both got an audience. 

The credit-and-grow loop feels like the most immediate mechanism for the journalism industry to name and normalize. When independent journalists get proper attribution, audiences find them, subscribers follow, and that funds the next FOIA lawsuit, the next week of reporting on a living room floor with a nine-month-old, the next story that starts with a tip from a source who trusted one person in her apartment. 

Part of the fix isn't complicated. "Just heavily credit where you first saw the story," Kabas said. 

“I understand how the fast pace of daily news might leave precious little time for asking how information originally got uncovered and whether credit should be shared with an outside journalist,” said Trusting News’ Mayer. “But we simply must do better than doing a quick turn on something that's based on another journalist's labor. We simply must give respectful credit. Even better, we should be looking for ways to partner. In some sectors of the industry, collaboration has become a lot more common. That spirit needs to extend to independent journalists.”

Kabas described recently updating one of her own pieces to add a Times reporter's name after he jokingly pointed out she hadn't credited him. She did it immediately. "It's not that complicated," she said. The standard she's holding others to is the one she holds herself to.

But other solutions are less clear – specifically considerations like legal protection. 

In late April 2025, Adam Marshall from the Reporters Committee reached out to Kabas directly. He'd seen her name. He’d seen her reporting. He told her if she ever had anything, they were a resource. She mentioned the USIP footage, he took it to the RCFP team and they filed in June. A year later, she won.

"I could not have afforded lawyers for a year on my own,” she said. “There's no way."

So now, in some cases, the institutions built for journalism are reorienting toward the independent practitioner. But in others, the gap remains. Madan tried to get a pre-publication legal review and was turned down. Multiple organizations told her they weren't set up for independent journalists. And notably, no other organizations have reached out to Kabas since RCFP did.

As for the aggregator problem, that problem feels messier and primed to become more so. The Herald credited Madan by name, linked prominently, and seemingly did everything right with their alumna.

And yet the downstream ecosystem erased her anyway. The evolving system of aggregation, licensing and syndication has failed to identify and support the individual reporting.  

So what are reporters left to do, but keep reporting these scoops as we all work to position institutions to support that work. We know it starts by making it legible with case studies like this. We’re eager to continue the conversations with anyone who has ideas on how to support the humans doing this reporting.  

Note: We reached out to NBC4’s news director Anthony Mague and reporter Mark Segraves multiple times via email, phone and LinkedIn, giving them a week to respond. They did not.

Liz Kelly Nelson and Justin Bank co-reported this piece. Kelly Nelson is the founder of Project C. Bank is a principal at Better Media Studios and he blogs/substacks at BankonJustin. They are, with Ryan Kellett, co-founders of The Independent Journalism Atlas.

I'm writing this from Perugia, where the International Journalism Festival is in full swing and the Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) just dropped the most in-depth report we've seen on the U.S. independent creator journalism landscape. Amy Mitchell, CNTI's executive director, presented the findings here yesterday on a panel with me, Justin Bank, Justin Arenstein and Dave Jorgenson. (Full disclosure: Project C was a research partner on the study.)

I want to talk about what stood out to me from the study and why a few of you told me it bummed you out.

Who doesn’t love an action-packed panel shot? l-r: Code for Africa’s Justin Arenstein, CNTI’s Amy Mitchell, Justin Bank, woman with glasses on top of her head and an utterly gripped Dave Jorgenson. (Photo by Jay Baras-Lichtenstein)

Here's the setup: CNTI surveyed 43 independent information providers across the country, then went deeper with 26 of them in long-form interviews (literally long. Like 90-minutes each). They focused on earlier-stage creators on purpose, so keep in mind the results are NOT inclusive of runaway creator era stars like Joy Ann Reid, Don Lemon or Carlos Eduardo Espina. 

Out of the 26 interviewed, 19 had some journalism experience, and for 10 of them, reporting was the only career they'd ever had. Only three had launched before 2020. Job loss or industry uncertainty is what pushed most of them into this life.

One creator, a former journalist now running a consumer product-focused outlet, summed up the whole thing in one sentence:

"Unless I build the thing that I want to work for, it's not going to exist."

That line stuck with me and reminded me of what I heard when I did a similar survey back in 2024 when I was contemplating launching Project C. At the time, I talked to a handful of journalists who had left traditional news organizations to launch their own channels or newsletters. The way that they described it to me was that, in addition to feeling industry instability, they didn't feel that they could produce the kinds of content that they wanted within institutional corporate brands who were increasingly beholden to advertisers (and billionaire owners) anymore. 

It captures something essential about this moment. The people doing this work didn't set out to become entrepreneurs. They set out to keep doing journalism. The business part showed up whether they wanted it or not, because the work they wanted to do only existed if they built it themselves – which meant learning how to run a small business, build marketing strategies and figure out how to make money. 

THE PART THAT STINGS

Very few of the creators studied by CNTI reported earning a profit. (Again, remember that most of the people surveyed were members of Project C who are early in their building phase with their ventures.)

Just three out of 26 said they could fully fund their lifestyle with this work. Fewer than one in three had a fully developed business strategy. For former journalists especially, building a brand and figuring out how to monetize felt like what the report calls a "mindset shift," and a distraction from the work they actually want to do. As one of them put it, “I had no idea I was going to be running a business."

The learning curve is steep and mostly self-taught. Fewer than half (11 out of 26) had taken a structured business course of any kind or reached out to the Small Business Administration. The biggest teacher, as one creator with management experience put it, was "either personal experience or chatting with peers."

We knew this a couple of years ago, but it was interesting to see it confirmed at scale. This is the reason that the Going Solo curriculum concentrates on the business skills creators need to grow audience and revenue, not the journalism fundamentals they already have.

Then there's the loneliness. Going independent is fulfilling but exhausting, and the report found the physical and mental toll is unsustainable for many of these creators even as they deeply value their editorial freedom. One creator, who has since grown her operation to a team of five, told researchers, "I burned out like every other month being a one-woman show."

THE POLY-PLATFORM PATH, CONFIRMED

Meanwhile, 18 of the 26 are active on at least three platforms. Not because they want to be everywhere (nobody wants to be everywhere), but as a hedge against the next unpredictable algorithm change. They're stressed trying to balance formats, audiences and revenue options across a shifting landscape. Newsletters are common even among video producers. AI is showing up in internal processes but not yet in distribution.

HOW IT LANDED

After the report dropped, I heard from a few people in the Project C community who said it felt like a gut punch. One person called it depressing.

I get it. When you're in the trenches, juggling your editorial calendar and your ad outreach and your subscriber growth and your podcast editing and your taxes (BLERGING taxes!) and also somehow your actual reporting, the last thing you want to hear is that the data confirms how hard this is.

But we needed this snapshot of a moment in the evolution of this growing space.

Up until now, most of what we've known about independent creator journalism has been anecdotal or focused on audience habits. We've read about or heard success stories and cautionary tales. What we haven't had is rigorous research that tells us what the landscape actually looks like for the people doing this work every day. Now, with this CNTI survey and the Video Consortium research that dropped earlier this year, we do.

This knowledge changes what we can build. When we know that business skills are the gap, and that nobody is even taking a basic small business course, you can design programming to fill it. When you know creators are learning almost entirely through peer exchange, you invest in community. (That's exactly what we're doing at Project C.) When you know that only three out of 26 can fully sustain themselves on this work, you can stop pretending that "just start a newsletter" advice is enough, and start advocating for real infrastructure: bundled subscriptions, funder support, institutional partnerships that actually move the needle and real back-office shared service solutions.

Here's the part that gives me genuine optimism. This research isn't stopping. CNTI is set to release a parallel South Africa study with Code for Africa. They're planning to expand the interviews into more countries and we have ambitions to broaden these early findings into a much larger quantitative study.

If you're an independent creator and you haven't read the report yet, go read it here. Then tell me what resonated, what made you wince, and what you wish the next study would dig into.

No links today, but if I'm especially good on the plane home this weekend, I'll send an extra weekend edition chock full of the latest!

So the newsletter is a day late, but hopefully not a dollar short. I've been traveling a lot this month, so the weekly Friday for the next few weeks be more links, less essay. This week, I was visiting the new Knight Center for the Future of News at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communications. I had such an amazing time connecting with students and faculty, sharing a stage with the amazing Rashida Jones, and meeting two Project C members - Zineb Haddaji and Jazmin Goodwin – in person. 😍 - Liz

On the left with Knight Center director Andy Pergam ad Uncensored’s Rashida Jones. Clockwise from top left: Zineb Haddaji, ASU’s charter, me talking my talk and exquisite desert flora in downtown Phoenix.

🔥 the latest things

📌 Nieman Lab profiled Trustfnd's newsletter bundling model, featuring indie journalists who sold 500 bundle passes in week one – 77% to completely new subscribers. Michael Jarjour (ex-Twitter) built it to let independent pubs grow together.

📌 Kaitlyn Arford published "The Layoff Library" – a massive resource list for laid-off journalists looking for work, freelance opportunities, and community support. Timely as hell given the AP news.

📌 Nieman Lab profiled V Spehar – the full arc of UnderTheDeskNews from viral TikTok to sustainable indie news business. One of the most complete portraits yet of what it actually takes to build a creator-journalist career at scale.

📌 From A Media Operator, when going solo morphs into a SaaS – A cycling editor quit his job to launch an AI-powered newsroom, building a custom CMS that automates the operational grunt work of publishing. Now while actual cycling site is struggling, the tool itself is attracting licensing partners and may be the real business.

📌 Will audiences actually download a standalone news app? Last year’s big bet on a quality standalone news creator app was Noosphere, this year brings the debut of Newdle – $14.99/month bundled app for independent journalists.

📌 OpenAI bought TBPN – reportedly for "low hundreds of millions,” and is shuttering the show's $30M ad business. This is one of the cleanest signals yet that the big AI labs see creator-led shows as a strategic media play, not just a marketing path.

📌 Outdoor Retailer is hiring 150 creators – If the outdoors and travel/adventure is your beat, this may be for you.

📌 200+ organizations signed an open letter to YouTube asking the platform to crack down on AI-generated slop targeted at kids. A rare moment of real pressure on platform content standards.

📌 The Associated Press is offering buyouts to 120+ U.S. journalists as it pivots away from newspaper-era revenue toward video and AI licensing deals.

😎 from the project c community

📌 Rick Ellis wrote a provocation about the future of TV criticism – how independent journalists can make themselves most useful to the people and companies they cover.

📌 Vanessa Armstrong shared a Reddit discovery hack 👀 — use reddit.com/domain/yoursite.com to see everywhere your posts are being shared. Simple, useful, and it sparked a great conversation about Reddit distribution strategy in the community.

📌 Andy Dehnart was selected for the AIR New Voices cohort! Congrats, Andy — 14 tada reactions and counting. He also hosted a pitching workshop through the Flatiron Writers Room AND was one of the first to spin up a Trustfnd bundle with Vanessa Armstrong and Ani Bundel. Big week. 🎉

📌 Seamus Hughes had his best day at Court Watch News — 65% open rate, 13% CTR, 3K website hits, 40 new subs, and a NOTUS citation! All from a piece about a federal judge calling out the Bureau of Prisons. This is what accountability journalism looks like when you own the platform.

📌 Michelle Leder wrote a short item for the NYT DealBook that immediately drove a new paid subscriber, a group subscription inquiry, and a wave of free signups. Legacy exposure → indie conversion pipeline in action.

James Cave built an interactive antique map product for The Jiffy newsletter using Mapbox, Claude Code, and GitHub + Cloudflare. It’s super cool, so no wonder he’s also a finalist for the Next Challenge Pioneer Award. Congrats, James!

Matt Kiser dropped a quote in that should be on a wall somewhere:

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

The deals have been coming fast enough that it's easy to miss a pattern underneath them. Just to cherry-pick a few from the past few weeks/months:

• OpenAI acquired TBPN — a profitable daily tech talk show with eleven employees — for what was reported to be in the low hundreds of millions. Not for its ad revenue. For its voice. For its trust.

• The Washington Post launched a formal creator network built on an IP-sharing model that lets creators retain ownership of their content.

• Johnny and Iz Harris launched Newpress, a production company and community platform that is essentially creating a new spoke-and-wheel model to launch creator journalists within their Umbrella brand, and empowered with Johnny’s main YouTube channel with it’s 7.5 million followers.

• Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway reportedly turned down a $40 million guaranteed offer and re-signed with Vox — but on entirely new terms, a 70/30 revenue split, 70% to the talent. They believe their five-show portfolio could generate $100 million over four years.

• Lenny Rachitsky released his entire newsletter and podcast archive as AI-readable structured data, making his accumulated expertise directly accessible for builders, researchers, and anyone training on the work — a move that inverts the gated-content model entirely and bets that the corpus is more valuable open than locked.

These are all different announcements. But what they share is that they are all bridges being built in the same direction, by people who've concluded that the old fortifications aren't worth defending.

There's also a structural reason this is all happening now. The gated-content model that funded the subscription era is being hollowed out from two sides simultaneously: creators pulling audience trust away from mastheads, and AI eroding the discovery layers. Over the past two years, search engines referrals have declined by 60% for small publishers, 47% for medium-sized publishers and 22% for large publishers, according to Chartbeat data provided to Axios.

The moat is draining. The bridge-building is urgent.

TWO ROOMS, SAME URGENCY

I spent the last few weeks moving between two rooms where this was the underlying conversation, even when it wasn't explicitly stated as such.

The first was Vancouver, at ATmosphere Conference 2026 — a gathering of protocol builders, developers, and community organizers imagining what the internet could become. The second was Chicago, at the Online News Association Conference — journalism mid-transition, full of humility and resilience, still searching. Different rooms, different languages, same underlying urgency about where things are heading and what might hold.

Erin Kissane opened ATmosphere with a talk titled "Landslide / Hold Fast." She traced a line from the 1964 Alaska earthquake — where a saturated substrate turned to liquid under repeated shocks and an entire harbour slid into the sea — to our present information landscape. The analogous structural liquefaction was clearly resonant to those of us in the audience there as I imagine it is to all of you reading this now. Her prescription comes from kelp biology: holdfasts anchor entire communities into stability, create calmer zones in turbulent water, and make space for other organisms to shelter within them.

I had already been thinking about bridges when I heard that talk. Walking out, I realized she was describing the same thing from a different angle. A bridge and a holdfast serve opposite instincts — one is about moving, one is about staying — but in a moment of liquefaction, you probably need both. It being a scrappy, DIY’y gathering, I even dashed a photo of Erin giving her invocation into my presentation and adjusted a few slides.

Erin Kissane presenting at ATmosphere Conf

This was my first time at a developer conference and what stood out to me was how comfortable everyone in that room was with not knowing what comes next. The humility felt …. strategic?

Technical builders proposing and pitching ideas and destinations that were overlapping and competing with each other. The community building infrastructure designed to work regardless of which way things may go. The question that kept surfacing was sharp: is the holdfast in this ecosystem the AT Protocol itself? Bluesky the company? The independent developers building on top of it? The social bonds between the people in the room? These people and projects don't always pull in the same direction.

That tension was most tangible in the product conversations. Rudy Fraser laid out how Blacksky is building community-owned algorithms on the AT Protocol — giving communities control over their feeds, their moderation, and their own governance, so people can be their full, specific selves without ceding that infrastructure to any single company — Bluesky included, Graze — a feed-curation platform that lets curators build paid, subscriber-only feeds on ATProto, and was literally powering the conference's own feed — presented a year of lessons from funding and building in the atmosphere.

These conversations and others reflected the messy realities of building bridges in such shifting grounds: expertise plus community plus portable monetization, anchored in open standards rather than in any single platform's goodwill. And that messiness extended after the conference as community members questioned some of the product annoucnements from the BlueSky team and the newly appointed CEO reached out to talk to developers directly.

Blaine Cook, Twitter's original lead developer, explained what it takes for local communities to govern their own digital spaces in a beautiful talk that braided the concepts of pluralism and network architecture with … the funkiness of cheese.

In Chicago, the humility came from a different place — the accumulated weight of watching an industry hollow out faster than any of us had prepared for.

In Vancouver, I gave a talk about how the aggregation era burned down journalism institutions and how the federated era is emerging from the embers. And as one of the few journalists at the conference, I found myself continually conveying our industry’s shared trauma.

In Chicago, I found myself mostly in the back of rooms watching journalists helping and teaching other journalists. The embers igniting each other. My favorite moments were watching Dave Jorgenson and his Local News International colleagues run a masterclass on digital video production with scores of eager audience members getting into the weeds of camera settings and scripting questions.

Dave Jorgenson, Lauren Saks and Chris Vasquez demonstrating camera angles

According to our unofficial counting, ONA had more creator-focused programming than any previous conference — at least 14 dedicated sessions.

Ryan Kellett, Liz Kelly Nelson, Jeremy Gilbert, and Kate Skelly gave practical insights into how news creators and institutions can "find the we." Liz moderated a conversation with Sara Goo from the Washington Post, Devin Smith from the Wall Street Journal, and Adrienne Johnson Martin from MLK50 about how each of these different institutions are applying different approaches: the Post building an entirely new creator network, the Journal developing in-house talent to work more like creators, MLK50 partnering with a creator in residence. Three different bridges. Pontoon, suspension, drawbridges.

On the ONA panel I moderated — Chicago in Focus: Building Bridges with Independent Voices — Tracy Baim captured the whole thing in a sentence. Forty-one years in Chicago community journalism, co-founder of Windy City Times, now leading Press Forward Chicago. "The alternative," she said, "is becoming the mainstream."

It sounded like a benediction. When alternative media does its job — when it builds trust, covers what institutions won't, and shows up consistently for its community, it is no longer marginal. It becomes the essential resource of it’s community. And in an era where finding and serving niche communities becomes more feasible as the economics of 1,00 true fans becomes more and more universally feasible ….. and as the aggregation era gives way to a federated one, the next builds will resemble that path more.

WHAT THE PATTERN MEANS

The through-line across all of these announcements — Newpress, Pivot/Vox, the WaPo creator network, Lenny, Graze, ATmosphere, ONA — is that trust has migrated from mastheads to people, and the people who understand this are building structures around it. In December, I wrote that creator-journalists are decentralizing from institutions and platforms. What we’re watching now is the next phase: the bridging. Not a reversal of decentralization, but its maturation.

Three-quarters of news executives told the Reuters Institute they'd be getting journalists to behave more like creators in 2026 — but that framing still puts institutions at the center of the story when it’s the human layer that is clearly ascending.

Consider Trustfnd, founded by Michaël Jarjour — former Twitter partner manager who decided to build something that made journalism stronger against "even its worst enemies." Trustfnd lets independent journalists create newsletter bundles across platforms, sharing audience funnels without merging operations. Jarjour's framing: "a network effect as a service." It's a different kind of bridge. Independent entities that move like one when it's useful, and independently when it's not. They announced their first bundle just last week:

Today, we're launching Bundle Passes.   

It's a new way for journalists to team up and give new audiences 30, 60, or 90 days of access to their paywalled content in a bundle.

— Trustfnd (@trustfnd.com)
2:10 PM • Mar 26, 2026

What the Independent Journalism Atlas exists to build is the discovery and standards infrastructure that makes the ecosystem legible — to funders who can't find the creators they want to support, to institutions that want partnerships without exploitation, to audiences who want to follow journalists across platforms. The rise of creators is blurring the line between journalists, creators, and media companies, and the infrastructure that helps people navigate that terrain is exactly what's been missing.

Bridges need on-ramps.

THE HARD TRUTH

Practically: if you're working in journalism right now, the hollowing out of the industry means there are vacuums all around you.

Build bridges within it to cover more ground. Build bridges out of it to amplify your impact.

But bridge with intention toward ambition and values, not just toward survival. The creators who are succeeding are the ones who built something accumulative — a beat, a source network, a community, a corpus — and then made it portable. Lenny didn't just open his archive; he built something worth opening and has a clear articulated strategy of asking his product-minded fanbase to build with his work.

The moats of the last era were built around content — behind paywalls, inside algorithms, locked to platforms. The bridges of the next era are built around trust — portable, parasocial, accumulated over time.

Swisher and Galloway bet their relationship with an audience was worth more than a $40 million guarantee. Johnny Harris built a 7.5-million-subscriber channel after leaving Vox — and then built Newpress to build up other journalists following through his flywheel. The bridge is the same in each case: trust, accumulated over time, made portable.

Tracy Baim built Chicago community journalism through four decades of economic pressure, platform shifts, and cultural upheaval. The structure she built is still standing. That's what a holdfast does. You can't buy that.

But you can build from it.

////

Justin Bank is the co-founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, a principal at Better Media Studios and he blogs/substacks at BankonJustin.

Also this week: beehiiv launched native podcast hosting on every plan and took aim at Substack and Patreon in one move. The New Yorker profiles a Spanish-language news creator reaching millions of followers. An honest take on the ethics of paywalling your own work. And the Daily Mail hired 25 creators and is producing 20 videos a day. All that and more in the links below. ↓

But first…

In February, The Washington Post cut roughly a third of its staff. Around the same time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced 50 cuts, about 15% of the newsroom. Press Gazette is running a live tracker of 2026 journalism layoffs, and at the current pace, we'll blow past all of 2024's total well before summer.

These cuts are sending a ripple through the journalism world. Journalists who are still inside these newsrooms watching the cuts happen around them start comparison shopping newsletter platforms and they book coffee chats with friends who've already made the jump. They look at their own personal social followings (usually modest as they’ve been posting as part of a brand for years), their own savings accounts (also modest), and try to figure out if the math could even work.

Here's what I've noticed after three years of running Project C: the math almost never adds up the way people think it will. Not because going independent is a bad idea (I wouldn't be doing this if I believed that!) but because the math is more complicated than the stories we keep telling about it.

There are a few things going on here. 

1. The Don Lemon effect. People see the big names who left legacy media and launched Substacks and YouTube channels and made a ton of money doing it – your Kara Swishers, your Joy Reids, your Bari Weisses, your Casey Newtons (don’t @ me!) – and they assume that's the model. Those are real success stories, but they are the exception, not the norm. The people I work with in the Project C community are part of what I'd call the massive middle class of the journalism world. These are people who can likely hope to replicate a salary they might have been making as a beat reporter or a video producer working in a newsroom, and that's a real achievement, but in most cases they're not going to break through to the "I'm making millions of dollars a year doing this" level. That's okay. That was never realistic for most people inside newsrooms either.

2. The economics of creator journalism are genuinely different from the economics of the broader creator economy, and people keep conflating the two. The salary data and revenue benchmarks that float around online mostly come from entertainment and lifestyle creators, not journalists. The money moves differently when your audience is news consumers. Audiences in those other verticals are accustomed to paying for things. They buy merch, they accept sponsorships as part of the deal, and the parasocial contract includes commerce. Journalism audiences, especially those trained by decades of free news online, are completely different. They're more likely to believe information should be free. They're more skeptical of brand deals. And they hold journalists to higher standards around disclosure, independence, and accuracy, which are standards that are right and good but that add friction to nearly every revenue stream available to creator journalists. (Case in point: Kevin Ortega-Rojas, a political news creator with 500K Instagram followers, took a $10K deal with prediction market platform Kalshi and his audience revolted. He gave the money back, even though it would have covered two months of rent.)

3. The timeline. People assume they're going to launch a newsletter, turn on the subscription payment button, and money will start flowing in. That's not how this works. The ramp-up to sustainability will take at least a year (possibly years), not months, and if you don't plan for that from the start, you're going to be in trouble before you ever get the chance to find out whether your thing could have worked.

Now, I also want to push back on the flip side of this, because there's a counterargument floating around that I hear more and more from folks committed to trad media: that it's basically impossible to make this solo thing work. That there's a top 1% of creators who are going to get rich launching Substacks and everyone else is just out of luck. That is just not true. It is entirely possible to build a sustainable career doing independent journalism. I work with people in Project C every single day who are doing exactly that. But "possible" and "easy" are very different words, and the gap between them is where most of the hard conversations need to happen.

I had a conversation at ONA (the Online News Association annual conference that this year had a ROBUST creator track) this week with someone who's been in the journalism world a long time and is genuinely supportive of this movement in the creator space, but is skeptical about the monetization possibilities. His question was basically: "Isn't it going to continue to be a challenge to find people who want to advertise next to news content?" Basically: If we can't get advertisers to buy ads against news content in newspapers and at digital news sites, how are we going to do that for individual creators? He's not wrong. That's a big question hanging over all of this.

Because while it's not that difficult for someone who is producing journalism content more closely related to cultural criticism or covering restaurants to find ads, it will probably never be the case that somebody wants to advertise next to Monique O. Madan's investigative work on immigration enforcement. That means trying the other usual sources of income, philanthropic and reader revenue, but also, in many cases, it means getting super creative. We'll come back to that.

The creator economy is not the creator journalism economy

The Publish Press ran the results of their annual creator salary survey this week, and it's a useful data point, but you have to read it with the right lens. This is a survey across ALL kinds of creators, not just journalists: lifestyle, entertainment, sports, beauty, the whole spectrum. The spread runs from a first-year video essayist making $7,000 to an "edutainment" team pulling in $7.5 million, and still 53% of those surveyed made less than $100,000 last year. Those numbers are the ones that tend to circulate in the "can you make a living as a creator?" conversation, but they're describing a fundamentally different economy than the one journalism creators are operating in.

When we published our study with the Video Consortium and Fordham University in January, specifically on the economics of creator journalism, the numbers were harder.

Fifty-six percent of the creators we surveyed said they aren't earning enough to support themselves. Only 28% fully fund their livelihoods through their independent work. Forty percent say a job outside of their independent practice is still their most consistent income source, and 52% are using personal savings to fund their work, not as a bridge to something more stable, but as an ongoing subsidy.

One creator put it to us plainly: "I work contract jobs to pay the bills. It doesn't feel like three jobs, it is three jobs. My independent stuff is rewarding, but I'm skating by."

Only 23% reported steady, predictable income. Everyone else surveyed is managing month-to-month uncertainty, income swings, or no sustainable income from their independent work at all. The study's own framing, which I keep returning to: audience appetite for creator-model journalism has not translated into financial sustainability for most creators.

I can tell you that we heard this echoed loudly at ONA this week. In session after session, I heard directly from creator-model journalists and aspiring creator-model journalists about not just how hard it is to make money, but how hard it is to figure out how to make money. These are journalists. They were trained to report, to write, to produce. Nobody taught them the business side. And that gap, between the journalism skills they have and the business skills they need, is a huge part of what's making this transition so difficult for so many people.

So how ARE people making it work?

What was really interesting at ONA was hearing how different the answers are depending on who you ask.

Amber Sherman, the creator-in-residence at MLK50, led a packed room through her approach. Amber's income is a mix: her partnership with MLK50 around news content, brand deals for more lifestyle-inflected content, plus speaking engagements and appearances that are all starting to contribute to her bottom line. It's a portfolio model, and she's making it work, but it took real intention to build. Crucially, though, Amber also shared that she still has a full-time day job she loves as a policy organizer, so she's not looking to her news content to pay her bills or provide her with health insurance.

At ONA26, Amber Sherman speaks to how she makes money creating content about her hometown, Memphis.

In another session, Matt Brown from Extra Points and Matt Kiser from What the Fuck Just Happened Today walked through how their business models work. Both are more than sustainable at this point. And the most interesting thing about that conversation was how completely different their approaches are, which really speaks to the fact that there is not, at this point, a one-size-fits-all solution. In many ways that's a good thing because you can figure out a model that suits your personality or your skill set or the kind of time you have. But it's also still limited by the available options and the infrastructure (or lack of it) that exists to support these businesses.

Remember earlier when I said journalism creators need to get super creative? Matt Brown is a great example. Beyond his newsletter subscriptions, he's built a premium database product and games that his audience pays for, revenue streams that have nothing to do with traditional advertising and everything to do with understanding what his specific readers will find valuable enough to buy. Justin Bank wrote last fall about Matt and some other journalists who have built some pretty novel revenue streams, too. 

But getting creative has limits, and those limits are different for journalists than for other creators. Remember Kevin Ortega-Rojas, from the CJR piece? Kevin’s creativity led to him taking a paid partnership with Kalshi that would have been less remarkable for a lifestyle influencer. His audience held him to a different standard. He pulled the post within an hour and gave the money back. "In my mind, I'm talking to Black and brown people, and trans and immigrant populations," he told CJR. "People who already have a lot to deal with in this world. I don't feel right about making the news accessible to them and then turning around and asking them to support me financially." That's the tension at the heart of all of this. As Kevin put it: "At the end of the day, the only thing I really have is the audience's trust. If that's gone, none of this works."

Giving it time

Marissa Lovell's story is a good example of what the timeline actually looks like. Creator Spotlight talked to Marissa about From Boise, a twice-weekly local newsletter launched in March 2021. She hit 10,000 subscribers in her first year, which sounds great until you know that she was also juggling contract PR work and freelance clients the entire time to pay the bills. By mid-2025, she hadn't paid herself in months and was seriously considering going back to full-time employment. Then she made a critical hire, someone who could actually sell sponsorships, and revenue tripled in a single quarter. By the end of 2025, From Boise crossed $100,000 in revenue, nearly five years after she launched it.

That's a success story. And it took five years, a baby, a cashflow crisis, and the willingness to keep freelancing on the side the whole way through. Marissa is exactly the kind of creator journalist I'm talking about when I say the massive middle class: she built something real, she's earning a living from it, and she did it without an existing platform or a tech salary cushion. But nobody would call that timeline fast.

The people I've watched make this work almost always have some version of Marissa's story. They built before they leaped, or they had a runway (severance, a partner's income, savings) that gave them 12 to 18 months before the numbers needed to pencil out, or they kept a foot in freelance or consulting while the subscription side grew. The transition was a process, not an event.

The people I've watched struggle are the ones who, whether by choice or by layoff, found themselves doing the math at the moment of crisis and decided six months of savings was enough time to figure it out. Sometimes that's all the runway they had. And in my experience, it almost never is enough.

It's not just on the journalists to figure this out

Here's what I want to push back on a little, even in my own framing: the onus shouldn't be entirely on the individual journalist to learn business skills, build a revenue strategy, and figure out the monetization puzzle solo with what is available now, today, in April 2026. We can do better. We can build a support system for creator journalists that helps them succeed. The wider business community and the journalism industrial complex need to build the infrastructure, tools, and business models to make this easier.

Some of that is starting to happen. At ONA, Nick Swyter from the New York Times led a session on how creator journalists can go after grant money, which is an increasingly interesting avenue for independent creators. But the philanthropic world is still playing catch-up in figuring out how to support and give money to creators who are mostly for-profit entities. The grant infrastructure was built for nonprofits, and a lot of creator journalists just don't fit neatly into those boxes. That's why I'm heartened to see the work that Lenfest is doing to bridge the gap between creators and newsrooms.

There are also people trying to solve the bundling problem. Michael Jarjour's Trustfnd model is an attempt to help creator journalists make money by bundling together and selling subscriptions, with the idea that there's strength in numbers. Think of it like if you took the Substack model of recommendations, but instead of recommending a gajillion other newsletters, you're saying, "Here are two or three that I think are really top quality. If you pay for all three of us together, you'll be supporting the kind of work you actually want to see in the world." It's early, but it's the kind of creative infrastructure-building that this space needs more of.

What we're doing about it

I'm not writing this to talk anyone out of making the leap. I run a community for people doing exactly that, and I believe in what we're building and that independent creator journalists are a growing part of the future of news and information. That’s why I partnered with Justin and Ryan Kellett to build The Independent Journalism Atlas, which is growing by leaps and bounds every day.

But I spend a lot of time in conversations with journalists who are weighing the jump, especially in weeks like this one when the layoff tracker keeps refreshing, and what I notice is that the conversations they most need to have almost never happen. The conversations about timeline, about which revenue streams take how long to build, about what the first 18 months actually look like financially and emotionally and logistically.

The creator journalism success stories are real. The ownership, the autonomy, the feeling of building something that's actually yours: I experience that every week and it's worth a lot. But the math is slower than the stories make it look, and the journalists most vulnerable to making the leap without adequate runway (the ones at the outlets that just announced cuts, the ones with the least savings, the least access to a financial cushion) are often the ones who need the honest version of this conversation the most.

In the Project C community, this is what we work on every day. We're continuing to do monthly training and programming, and for the rest of this year, we're going to hone in even more on the business side specifically. That includes sessions with coaches to help creators set up business plans and figure out how to get started with a real revenue strategy and with the builders who are trying to pioneer new paths to monetization for creator journos. We're also exploring partnerships with groups like Lion Publishers to bring to bear what they've learned working with independent news businesses, along with what organizations like the Independent Journalism Atlas and News Creator Corps are building. The roads are being paved. We just need to pave them faster.

If you're weighing the jump, or if you know someone who is, come be part of that work. Join the Project C community →

🔥 the latest things

📌 Beehiiv just launched native podcasting — The short version: you can now host, distribute, and monetize your podcast on beehiiv. Auto-distribution to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Castro and more. (Also takes from: Semafor, TechCrunch)

📌 The Rise of a Spanish-Language News Influencer — The New Yorker profiles Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has built a massive following delivering news to Spanish-speaking audiences on TikTok.

📌 I Thought Paywalls Were Unethical. This Is Why I Started Paywalling. — In Lex Roman’s Revenue Rulebreaker, Project C member Kaitlyn Arford writes a piece that’s for you if you've ever felt like charging for your work makes you a bad person. Kaitlyn spent a year convinced that "good people make their content free" – and it nearly killed her newsletter. After a year of paywalling, she tripled monthly paid reader revenue.

📌 Inside the Daily Mail's Creator-Led Content Playbook — DMG Media hired 25+ creators and now produces 10–20 original videos a day across its social channels. Videos are averaging 250K–300K views and outperforming their traditional content.

📌 ChatGPT is the worst AI at crediting news outlets (per new study) — Nieman Lab covers a new study showing that all major AI models fail to properly attribute journalism, but ChatGPT is the most egregious. Relevant for creator journalists thinking about AI traffic and attribution — your work is feeding these systems either way.

📌 The Guardian is experimenting with republishing its food newsletter on Substack — Legacy outlets are finally starting to figure out that their own platforms aren't where their audiences are. Worth watching whether this becomes a broader pattern.

📌 Your open rate is a lie — Newsletter writers take note: Adam Ryan at A Media Operator on how email open rates are increasingly unreliable. If you're making decisions based on open rate data, this is worth reading.

📌 Shape the future of the journalism creator movement – Syracuse University is now accepting applications for an executive director for their new Center for the Creator Economy, a joint initiative of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

📌 Have you tried Surf yet? – If so, hit me back with your thoughts about this new platform that promises to build a one-stop-shopping social web experience for you and your followers. I’m going to goof around with it this weekend.

🤗 From the Project C community

🎉 Bryan M. Vance was accepted for the National Press Foundation's Local Business Journalism Fellowship. Nine 🔥 emojis from the community. Congrats, Bryan!!

💸 Julia Barton (Continuous Wave) sent a fundraising ask to her readers this week — and nobody unsubscribed. "I asked for money and no one unsubscribed??! (yet) 😱" — Eight 💪 emojis from the community. A reminder that asking works.

🎙️ Ani Bundel hit 30 days since relaunching Telly Visions — and reports 71 paid subscribers and 3,902 free subscribers. That's a start-from-scratch comeback worth celebrating.

🏛️ Jayne Lytel was invited to serve as an advisory member of the National Press Club Journalism Institute's press freedom initiative. She called it "the best wins are unexpected." Congrats, Jayne!

🎤 Andy Dehnart (Reality Blurred) was selected for the AIR New Voices cohort — a podcast support and development program. Congrats, Andy!

📹 Vanessa Armstrong (TubeTalk) cold-emailed publicists she knew from her freelancing days – and landed an interview with the directors of the new Ken Burns-produced Thoreau documentary. "They said yes!" Five 🎉 emojis. This is how it works.

👕 Monique O. Madan (Two Can Be True) launched merch to fund her independent journalism — T-shirts, sweatshirts, and totes, launched at ONA26. She's also offering founding subscribers a sweatshirt if they sign up in person. Direct, scrappy, entrepreneurial. Go support her.

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

📅 Thursday, April 9 — Building with beehiiv: Website Builder Hosted by Liz Kelly Nelson & Ryan Gilbert | 1:00–2:00 PM ET | Zoom | Members only The third in the beehiiv series — this one focused on the website builder tool.

📅 Tuesday, April 21 — Social Club (Unofficial) Tuesday Meetups Resume Rose Thomas Bannister's weekly social video workshop returns after her Italy hiatus. Join #social-video to stay in the loop until then.

Project C is the community for independent creator-model journalists – the people building what journalism looks like next. Join us for $39/month: access to our Slack community, live workshops, event replays, and a room full of people who get it. JOIN NOW!

Andrew Freer couldn’t sleep.

The day before, his neighbor had been arrested a block from their kids' school in Oak Park, just outside Chicago. The neighbor had been doing what a lot of Chicagoans were doing in September and October of 2025: following an ICE vehicle, honking his horn and blowing a whistle to alert the neighborhood. Four agents got out of the car and drew their guns, right in front of the school, which promptly went into lockdown.

Freer, a commercial filmmaker with 20 years in the industry, stayed up thinking it through. By the next morning, he had a media plan, a mission, and a new organization: Go Fourth Media.

"I just thought, what can I do?" he told me.

What he could do, it turned out, was get out on the streets with a camera and document Operation Midway Blitz in a way that made people actually feel what was happening.

The Gap He Saw

Operation Midway Blitz, for those who somehow missed it (and Freer would argue many people did), was the federal government's massive immigration enforcement surge in Chicago, launched in September 2025. At its peak, some 250 immigration agents descended on the city, making over 1,000 arrests. Border Patrol agents used tear gas and pepper balls against protesters, U.S. citizens were detained, and agents set up checkpoints at O'Hare where they stopped Uber and Lyft drivers to demand identification papers. One agent interrupted a Somali man's prayers, laughed at him, and told him he "wasn't special" while running his face through facial recognition software.

Mainstream media were covering this story, too, but Freer and his small, scrappy team did something different. They learned to track the convoys, figured out how to get ahead of the agents, and kept their cameras small and their setups nimble (he keeps making them smaller, he told me, because if you want to follow ICE agents, a big camera rig isn't going to cut it). And he developed what he calls his own form of "gonzo journalism," providing voiceover context so viewers could understand what they were seeing on screen. He didn't want to make it about himself, but the urgency demanded it.

The result is some of the most visceral footage of the immigration crackdown that exists anywhere on the internet, and I'm not being hyperbolic. Go watch the Chicago checkpoint video – that includes details you won’t hear anywhere else, like the fact that ICE had their “own media” in tow to document their work.

Instagram post

‘If You Want to Know How It Felt, Ask a Filmmaker’

Freer's background is worth understanding, because it speaks to something we talk about a lot in this newsletter: the people doing some of the most important journalism right now aren't necessarily the people the journalism industry would credential as journalists.

(Courtesy Andrew Freer)

He grew up in a pastor's family that moved from Ohio to Indonesia when he was nine. He lived there until he was 18 before returning to Chicago for college. That experience, he says, shaped how he thinks about immigration and democracy. After school, he spent two decades in commercial video production, working on corporate documentaries, editing for the Obama campaign, and making his own independent docs (including one following an LGBTQ church in Oak Park that he shot by checking out cameras from his old school's film department because he still knew people who would lend them to him. Andrew is a man who scraps.)

He paraphrased a quote to me that I think perfectly captures his philosophy: "If you want to know what happened, ask a politician. If you want to know how it felt, ask a filmmaker."

That ethos is all over Go Fourth's work. Their interview pieces, like Eva's story and Scott's story, aren't trying to just prove something is right or wrong. Rather, they're trying to put you inside someone else's headspace. What does it feel like to be detained? What does it feel like to be shot by ICE and then have them lie about it? What is the generational trauma that follows a family after these encounters?

Minneapolis and the Knife's Edge

When ICE turned its attention to Minneapolis in January, Freer went too. What he found there, he says, was a city on the verge of something terrifying.

"I think we were less than a week away from full civil unrest in Minneapolis," he told me.

Citizens were out in their neighborhoods with weapons, people called "commuters" were on every block with whistles tracking ICE vehicles, and residents were putting up blockades in the middle of streets. Meanwhile, ICE agents were breaking down doors, going into the homes of citizens, and using tear gas liberally (Freer was gassed multiple times, which is how he learned that the half-face gas masks he'd bought weren't going to cut it and he needed full-face ones).

And then it de-escalated, which was a relief, but also, Freer says, became its own problem.

The Funding Cliff

Here's where this story intersects with something the funding and philanthropic community reading this newsletter really needs to hear:

Go Fourth Media is approaching 1.5 million views across social media – all organic, from just 10 videos. Their comment sections include people saying things like "this should win the Pulitzer Prize" and "I'm sobbing watching this." Multiple viewers have told Freer that watching his work changed how their families understood what was happening.

A sampling of comments from GoFourth’s Instagram account.

Despite doing crucial work to document these potential goverment over-reaches, Go Fourth Media has raised just $16,000 through an online donation platform called Give Butter, to cover six months of frontline documentary journalism in two American cities under crisis. The money just isn’t there to support Freer and his team doing this work in a sustainable way.

"At this point, I've had pretty much my entire post-production team say that they aren't able to donate any more time to this, understandably so,” said Freer. “So I've been filling in the gaps with post-production and some things like animation and music composition and other things we aren't able to do moving forward without any funding support."

Freer has talked to the usual journalism philanthropy suspects and been told, "this isn't specifically something we fund.” He had promising conversations with multi-millionaire donors who were very interested during the Minneapolis surge and then ghosted him when things de-escalated. A high-profile cable news team was in talks about producing content together, but interest faded when the news cycle moved on.

The recurring problem? He keeps falling through institutional cracks.

"I tell people we're both journalism and documentary and then people hear, oh, you're neither," he said. Documentary funders say he's a journalist. Journalism funders say he's a documentarian. Immigration-focused organizations say media isn't their priority. Grant cycles move too slowly for urgent on-the-ground work. And the application processes themselves are a time sink that a one-person operation documenting active ICE operations simply cannot absorb.

Meanwhile, the personal cost is staggering. Freer estimates he's putting in 40 hours a week on Go Fourth work, at an opportunity cost of tens of thousands of dollars monthly to his commercial business. He's bought gas masks, ear protection, cold weather gear for Minneapolis, and about $5,000 in specialized camera equipment. And, he is, increasingly, doing this work by himself.

"I just need, I need to be able to hire somebody at some point,” Freer told me. “Like, I can't do this all by myself. I need another full-time person – an executive director, senior producer, journalist type that can really help me move this forward."

It's Not Over

When I talked to Freer on March 25th, he had just come from O'Hare, where he counted 30 ICE agents who had been deployed there to do the work of the unpaid TSA agents who either weren’t showing for work or were overwhelmed. He was heading back after our call to interview a community member at the airport. He's currently working on a piece about Marimar Martinez, who was shot by ICE in October, and interviewing a Venezuelan family.

"It's not over," he told me. "They're changing their tactics. They're moving up asylum cases. They're still leasing offices and building warehouses to detain people. Believe what I do, not what I say."

The name Go Fourth Media started as a reference to Fourth Amendment rights being violated on the streets of Chicago. But Freer sees a bigger future for it, if he can get the support: a fourth estate organization focused on holding the government accountable through the kind of visceral, human-centered video journalism that he says legacy outlets either can't or won't do.

"The three branches of government were all pushing this forward," he said. "It's only journalism and the fourth estate and First Amendment rights that can push back against this."

He's right. And the question for funders, for the journalism industry, for anyone who believes that what happened in Chicago and Minneapolis matters and needs to be documented, is a simple one: Are you going to wait until the next crisis to care or to fund Andrew’s work?

Go Fourth's next video, about ICE agents at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, drops on Tuesday. You can donate to support Go Fourth and Andrew's work at Give Butter.

Project C is in Chicago this week for ONA26. If you’re at the annual conference, join me, the 2026 Creator Cohort and many more people you read about here for a robust slate of creator-focused programming. Look for panels and sessions from me, Ryan Kellett, Justin Bank, Amber Sherman, Adriana Lacy, LNI Media, Rahim Jessani and so many more!

Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk announces the MCP - and Claude makes the connection.

This week, beehiiv launched something that sounds deeply nerdy but is actually a pretty big deal for anyone who publishes a newsletter: an MCP.

If you've been avoiding AI in your day-to-day work, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, and if you haven't encountered the term yet, you will. It's an open standard that lets AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini connect directly to the apps you already use. So you can essentially let your AI buddy of choice see your email, your project management tool, your Slack, your newsletter platform, your diary, etc. Instead of copying data into a chat window and asking an AI to analyze it, the AI just talks to the tool. Presto. That means Claude or ChatGPT can synthesize data and narratives across all of the places where you show up, but also - increasingly - it's leading to one's AI buddy becoming the homepage of your internet, your productivity, your life, your grip on reality. (Or maybe that's just me.)

Anyway, back to beehiiv. If you're a paid beehiiv newsletter writer (I am and, full disclosure, I serve on an advisory board for the beehiiv Media Collective), you can opt in to a pilot program, link up to Claude and start asking questions like: Who are my most engaged free subscribers who haven't converted to paid, and what do they have in common? And it will actually look at your subscriber data and tell you. Not only do you not have to export Excel spreadsheets or CSVs, you also don't really need to have a deep understanding of data, analytics, or audience strategy.

The MCP is only as good as the prompts you feed it. I sat in on an eye-opening session with beehiiv's Ryan Gilbert earlier this week. Ryan was querying his own newsletter data at a very high level. He got a ton of useful insights and action steps out of it that are beyond my level of understanding. But that's okay, because for me, it's more useful to type in simpler queries like: What are the red flags that you see in my audience data?, or, Based on looking at all of the audience data available, what are five things that I can do right now to increase my engagement and retention? The MCP and the advice that Claude gives me will meet me on my level and even allow me to level up a bit.

Tyler Denk, beehiiv's CEO, wrote in his newsletter that he expects most beehiiv creators will eventually manage their newsletters through AI rather than the app itself. What a wild thing for a tech company CEO to say: you won't use our interface.

The beehiiv MCP is a signal. Things are changing significantly and quickly. And it arrives in a week where the conversation about journalists and AI got a lot more interesting…

On Wednesday, Wired's Maxwell Zeff published a piece profiling tech reporters who are using AI throughout their work. Alex Heath, who left The Verge last year to go independent on Substack, now speaks his scoops into a microphone using a voice-to-text tool, feeds them to Claude, and lets it write his first draft. He's built a custom set of instructions – his "10 commandments" of writing like Alex Heath – so the AI matches his voice. He still revises everything. But he says this workflow saves him 30 to 40 percent of his writing time, and it frees him up to do more of the thing that actually makes his newsletter valuable: reporting.

Casey Newton, who writes Platformer, said there's a difference between newsletters where the value is in the information and newsletters where the value is in the voice. If it's information, he thinks readers won't care much that AI helped write it. If it's voice and opinion and analysis, using AI to generate the whole thing feels cheap. Newton isn't using AI to write Platformer (yet), but he's experimenting with a Claude-based editor modeled on his own past work, and says the feedback rivals what he's gotten from human editors.

Taylor Lorenz, meanwhile, uses AI to run the business side of User Mag (SEO descriptions, data analysis, YouTube optimization) but won't let it anywhere near her actual writing. She doesn't trust it with sensitive reporting materials, and she loves the craft too much to hand it over.

What I find useful about the Wired piece is that it models something we all need to start doing: talking openly about how we use these tools. Because a lot of people are using them and not saying so. 👀 

The state of play

The same day the Wired piece dropped, The Atlantic published Vauhini Vara's investigation into undisclosed AI use at major newspapers. The piece centers on a New York Times "Modern Love" column that an AI researcher flagged as likely more than 60 percent AI-generated. The author told The Atlantic she'd used AI for "inspiration and guidance and correction" but hadn't copied and pasted from a model.

Vara cites a research team that ran thousands of articles from the Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post through AI detection tools and found that opinion pieces were six times more likely to contain AI-generated content than newsroom articles. That's a pattern, so we need to start talking about it.

Here's where I think this lands for us over here in creator journalism land: there are two ways to handle AI, and we're watching both play out in real time. One is to use it quietly, hope nobody notices, and risk getting caught in exactly the kind of credibility crisis that's now engulfing legacy media. The other is to be upfront about it and to tell your readers what you use AI for, what you don't, and where the human judgment lives.

I'm going with option two. So here's my disclosure:

I use Claude EXTENSIVELY in my workflow. Every Thursday morning, it assembles the research brief I use to build this Friday post. It sweeps my Gmail, my Slack channels, my meeting notes, and a handful of industry sources, then organizes everything into essay pitches, links, community spotlights, and programming notes. I still write every word you read. I still make every editorial call. Wht I don’t do is spend half my Thursdays on a scavenger hunt – scrolling through Slack, skimming email newsletters, running Google Alerts, looking for the links and stories worth sharing. Now Claude does that searching and puts it all in one place. And it did take me a while to train Claude to do the search correctly. But taking the time to train Claude means I actually have the time to read and digest articles, watch the videos, think about what matters and why. The searching was never the valuable part of the work. The reading and thinking was. I just couldn't get to enough of it before and stressed. A lot.

I also use AI to help me think through drafts of essays and longer reported pieces. It doesn’t write them, but my new AI editor does push back on my arguments, suggest cuts, and flag when I'm being unclear. It's not a replacement for a human editor (I wish I could afford one). But for a one-person operation, it's the difference between publishing something I've pressure-tested and publishing something I just hope holds up. (If anyone's interested, reach out to me and I'll share the prompt with you that I use to design my AI editor.)

For independent creator journalists, this is the moment when you really need to be thinking about how to integrate AI into your workflows, because despite all of the inherent risks that come with ceding some control to robots, the gains for the kind of one-person and small-team operations that make up most of the creator journalism world are considerable. Not only are we doing the content creation - the part we want and need to preserve as human-generated – but we're also managing budgets, social media accounts, marketing plans, subscriber drives, ad sales, and on and on and on. Much of that work can be done by the robots now, and it's a fair trade to reclaim some of that time for the work that actually matters: the journalism.

The beehiiv MCP isn't going to fix everything overnight and Claude doesn’t suddenly mean we don’t need editors or fact checkers or peers to review our work. But between beehiiv connecting your newsletter to AI, Wired profiling the reporters who are already doing this openly, and The Atlantic documenting what happens when people do it secretly – the message of this week is pretty clear: AI is already in the workflow. The only question is whether you're going to be transparent about it or not.

I know which side I'm on.

(Ryan Gilbert, who leads beehiiv's creator partnerships and has been running our Building with beehiiv series, led a session specifically on MCP integration this week for the Project C Community. If you're a member, look for the replay in the Slack replay folder.)

 

🔥 the latest things

📌 YouTube revamps its Creator Partnerships portal at NewFronts. The old BrandConnect was a "ghost town." The new version uses Gemini to match creators with campaigns — and unlike Agentio (which takes 20%), YouTube isn't charging a platform fee.

📌 The Creators Guild of America launches Mosaic. Every campaign and collaboration gets verified, documented, and owned by you. Covered in The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, and Forbes this week.

📌 The 2026 journalism layoff wave is already worse than last year (and it's only March). CBS News Radio shut down after nearly a century. The Washington Post, Politico, Vox Media, CNBC, and the Wall Street Journal have all cut staff. CBS alone laid off 6% of its newsforce.

📌 Rick Ellis's Too Much TV newsletter sparked a Verge investigation into whether Kalshi and Polymarket's journalism partnerships raise ethical red flags. The piece centers the Project C member’s argument that prediction market partnerships undermine journalist credibility – and ends by noting people subscribe because they trust him.

📌 A new nonprofit called "Deinfluence" is going after undisclosed influencer campaigns with litigation. Founded by a lawyer who pursued fraud in the travel influencer space. The timing is right as Republicans in Congress are now investigating whether a left-leaning digital group violated campaign finance disclosure rules through influencers.

🫂 From the Project C Community

🎉 Seamus Hughes (Court Watch News) is officially a Goldsmith Prize finalist for investigative reporting — one of the most prestigious awards in the field. Congratulations, Seamus!

🎉 Jillian Melero published the March issue of Connect Puerto Rico, pulling together reporting from Canary Media, IEEFA, 9 Millones, and TIME on the archipelago's energy crisis — plus a new recurring section, Energy Workforce Watch.

🎉 Jason Mundok's local lifestyle podcast So Good Lancaster hit 3,500 downloads across 21 episodes. Steady, consistent growth!

🎉 Zineb Haddaji published her first AND second TikTok videos — and the community has been cheering her on with feedback and encouragement.

@haddabtin28

À #Djibouti, un plan pour protéger le pouvoir d’achat… dans un contexte de tensions régionales et d’échéances politiques. Prévention écono... See more

🎉 Alicia Hastey, a former CBS News producer, joined the community this week with her project thefourthestate.co — aiming to bring together creators in a single space and help them grow audiences as watchdog journalists. Welcome, Alicia!

🎉 Huma Razvi joined the community and is building a newsletter called The Fifth — recently moved from Ghost to Substack after a year of "crickets." Welcome, Huma!

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

🚀 Thursday, March 26 — Building with beehiiv: Analytics & Audience Retention with Liz Kelly Nelson & Ryan Gilbert, 1:00 PM ET (Zoom, members only)

🚀 Monday, March 30 — Social Club (Unofficial) with Rose Thomas Bannister, 3:00 PM ET (Zoom) — weekly vertical video strategy hangout

🚀 Tuesday, March 31 — Your Next Milestone: Spring Drive Edition with Blair Hickman, 2:00 PM ET (Zoom, members only)

🚀 Wednesday, April 9 — Building with beehiiv: Website Builder with Liz Kelly Nelson & Ryan Gilbert, 1:00 PM ET (Zoom, members only)

ONA26! Chicago, Week of March 30

Project C is at ONA26! Next week, join me, the 2026 Creator Cohort and many more people you read about here in Chicago! There’s a robust slate of creator-focused programming, so look for panels and sessions from me, Ryan Kellett, Justin Bank, Amber Sherman, Adriana Lacy, LNI Media, Rahim Jessani and so many more!

🚨 Not yet part of the Project C community? Join 200+ independent creator journalists in our Slack, get access to events, workshops, and a crew that gets it. Membership is $39/month. Join here →

Programming note: We have a new website! projectc.biz got a ground-up rebuild this month and it's a HUGE upgrade. Take a peek for links to Independent Journalism Atlas, the Top 50 list, our research, community info and the brand new Lizbot 🤖 , who will answer any and all of your questions about creator-model journalism. Go poke around and let us know what you think.

The Joanna Stern model

Something interesting happened this week.

Joanna Stern — who spent 12 years as the WSJ's tech columnist — left the Journal to launch her own creator brand, New Things, on beehiiv. Newsletters, video, live events. It’s the whole poly-platform playbook. But here's the part that caught my attention: she simultaneously signed on as NBC News' chief technology analyst, where she'll bring some of her exclusive reporting and analysis to their platforms — while keeping full ownership of her own brand.

This is not the model we've been watching play out for the last two years.

The model we've been tracking — and the one I wrote about last November — has largely been one-directional. Legacy media tries to absorb creator energy: hire a TikTok person, launch a Gen Z newsletter, bolt a "creator strategy" onto existing operations. Creators, for their part, leave institutions to go fully independent. Two lanes, moving apart.

What Stern is doing is a third thing (a “new thing,” lolz). She's not being absorbed by NBC. She's not rejecting legacy infrastructure. Like Amber Sherman at MLK50, she's building something that lets her own her IP, her audience, and her brand while also tapping into the reach and resources of a major news network — on her terms.

That distinction matters.

And here’s something else to ruminate on:

Earlier this month, Johnny and Iz Harris launched Newpress — a production company and incubator for creator-journalists. Harris built a 7.5 million subscriber YouTube channel after leaving Vox, and now he's using what he learned to help other journalist-creators launch their own shows. Newpress handles the business and production side — editors, sponsorship deals, infrastructure — while the journalists focus on making the work. Their collective already has more than 10 million combined subscribers.

These two announcements, arriving in the same month, tell a bigger story.

A year ago, we were still explaining what creator journalism is to a lot of the industry. Last summer, when we released the Top 50 Creator-Model Journalists list, the conversation shifted from "what is this?" to "okay, this is a thing." When we released The Independent Journalism Atlas, it turned into “not only is this real, it’s like a big movement.”

Now the infrastructure is showing up. Incubators. Hybrid partnership deals. Production companies purpose-built for creator-journalists. The roads are being paved.

This is the phase where a movement starts to professionalize. Not in a boring, institutional way — nobody's putting on a tie — but in the way that matters: the support systems, the revenue scaffolding, the legal and business structures that let talented journalists do the work without also having to be their own IT department, sales team, and accountant.

We're not there yet. Not even close. But the distance between "this is a hustle" and "this is a career path with real infrastructure" is shrinking every week. When someone with Joanna Stern's stature builds a model that bridges both worlds — and when someone with Johnny Harris's audience starts building the support layer for others — the conversation changes for everyone doing this work.

For the creators in our community: pay attention to these models. Not because you need to replicate them — most of us aren't sitting on 7.5 million subscribers or a contact list of network executives — but because they signal that the ecosystem is maturing in ways that will eventually benefit all of us. The production support Newpress is building, the hybrid partnership template Stern is creating — these things have a way of trickling through the system. What starts as a deal for the biggest names becomes a playbook for the rest of us.

I'll be watching both of these closely. We all should.

🔥 the latest things

📌 Isaac Saul’s Tangle makes nearly $4M in subscription revenue despite giving most content away — 71K paid subscribers, 16% conversion rate. (Press Gazette)

📌 AI is making the one-person newsroom a reality — The Media Copilot profiles an investigative reporter who built a 19K-subscriber newsletter in 99 countries with AI as his co-pilot.

📌 Axios lays off 11 newsroom staffers, pivoting to "subject matter experts". The general news desk continues to shrink while the people who built expertise there head for the exits.

📌 WaPo's legendary food critic Tom Sietsema launches on beehiiv — after a quarter century and 1,000+ restaurant reviews at the Post, Sietsema is bootstrapping Next Course, a subscription newsletter debuting this week with a review of the controversial Noma LA. Another one joins the indie ranks.

📌 Indie weathermen are having a moment — CJR profiles meteorologists leaving broadcast to go independent, banding together through the Digital Weather Network to stream coverage 24/7. In an era of extreme weather, creator-model journalism is spreading to unexpected beats.

📌 Your Local Epidemiologist marks six years — Katelyn Jetelina's COVID-era newsletter, which started as a daily email to her university colleagues, has grown into a global public health resource with 500M+ views in 133 countries. A creator journalism origin story if there ever was one.

📌 Prison Policy Initiative names its first Creator-in-Residence — Alpha Jalloh, a formerly incarcerated filmmaker and Yale student, will produce videos breaking down the U.S. criminal legal system with the organization's research backing. A smart model for how nonprofits can support creator-journalists. Congrats to PPI an Alpha! 👏 

📌 Web traffic "no longer measures anything real" — News Pain Points on the collapse of a foundational metric after 10 major tech pubs lost 58% of organic visits from Google.

📌 A freelance writer scammed publications worldwide with AI-written pitches — including The Guardian, The Cut, and Dwell, with fabricated quotes from high-profile sources. KCRW investigated. (h/t Yulia Denisyuk in the Project C community)

🫂 from the Project C community

📌 Monique O. Madan's independent investigation on immigrants drafting wills out of fear was republished by the Miami Herald — a big validation of the indie-to-legacy pipeline. She's also been doing fearless reporting on immigration enforcement and asking ICE officers directly about their tactics.

📌 Former WaPo journalists are still reporting from Ukraine's front lines — after their Post layoffs, Siobhán O'Grady and Lizzie Johnson are working through Long Lead's Border Line War, a collaboration with Magnum Photos. Independent journalism in a war zone.

📌 Bryan M. Vance (Stumptown Savings) hit hit 4,000 subscribers, 6,000 TikTok followers and landed his first inbound ad deal from a local Portland frozen pizza company. Local news creator economics in action.

📌 Ulrike Langer celebrated one year of News Machines with an essay on writing with AI that's relevant for every creator journalist thinking about these tools.

📌 Amanda Shendruk pushes back on the "AI will take your job" reports — worth a read.

📌 Helena Bottemiller Evich launched American Dish — a new food policy podcast covering everything from MAHA to climate change.

📌 Ani Bundel launched TellyVisions — a new site dedicated to international TV coverage.

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

🚀 Wednesday, Mar 25 | Fact-checking for Creators — Join Rose Thomas Bannister & Anna Pujol-Mazzini for a session on building trust through verification. 12:00 PM ET.

🚀 Thursday, Mar 26 | Building with beehiiv: Analytics & Audience Retention — Part 2 of our beehiiv series with Ryan Gilbert. 1:00 PM ET.

🚀 Monday, Mar 31 | Your Next Milestone: Spring Drive Edition — Blair Hickman helps you set your spring goals. 2:00 PM ET.

🚀 Thursday, Apr 9 | Building with beehiiv: Website Builder — Part 3 of the beehiiv series with Ryan Gilbert. 1:00 PM ET.

🚀 Mar 30–Apr 1 | ONA26 in Chicago — The Project C Creator Cohort will be there! If you're attending, come find us.

To get access to these events and the Project C Slack community, join here!

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

Earlier this year, in partnership with The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Online News Association, we put out a call for independent journalists working in the creator model to apply for the second Project C Creator Cohort at ONA26. Once again, the response blew us away.

This year, we focused on U.S.-based creator-journalists working at the hyperlocal level – people building direct relationships with their communities and doing the kind of original reporting that often goes uncovered. 

We received 60+ applications from journalists across the country – covering local government, immigration, food, public safety, the environment, education, and so much more. They're publishing on newsletters, podcasts, radio, and their own websites. Selecting just 10 was genuinely hard.

We're thrilled to introduce you to them:

(Left to right) Top Row: Nicole Jeanine Johnson, Megan Raposa, Maureen Kelleher, Natalie Bencivenga, Monique O. Madan
Bottom Row: Ben Camacho, Arianny Valles, Bryan M. Vance, Cody Short Johnson, H Kapp-Klote

⭐ Arianny Valles | Pendiente Mi Gente — Radio/audio/social media

Arianny Valles is a journalist, communicator, and radio producer with over 30 years in the media world across Venezuela and U.S. She works at the intersection of technology, social media, art, and community. She’s the host and producer of Noticias Enlace, the morning news show on La Onda 1190 AM/99.5 FM, and the founder of Pendiente Mi Gente — a platform devoted to uplifting and serving the vibrant Latino community in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun. On top of all that, Arianny leads Arianny Rocks LLC, her digital communication consultancy, where she fuels purpose‑driven marketing, impactful content, and community connection.

⭐ Ben Camacho | Inadvertent — Investigative journalism/documentary photography

Ben Camacho is a multi-award winning investigative journalist and documentary photographer whose work focuses on state-sponsored violence and the communities impacted by it. Inadvertent reports on local government, the police, politicians and corporations — bringing transparency to some of the most secretive agencies and offices in Southern California. He was sued twice by the City of Los Angeles in a failed effort to censor public records. Ben co-founded The Southlander, LA's first investigative news cooperative, and co-founded the West Side Storytellers, a documentary production team whose flagship project received the Charles M. Rappleye Investigative Journalism Award from the Los Angeles Press Club. In 2023, he was named a "Distinguished Journalist" by the Society of Professional Journalists-LA.

⭐ Bryan M. Vance | Stumptown Savings — Newsletter/website/social

Bryan M. Vance is a Portland, Oregon-based local journalist and strategist turned content creator. He publishes Stumptown Savings, a hyperlocal news outlet (newsletter, website and social media) focused on helping Portlanders navigate rising food costs through smarter shopping. A 2025 Project C Top 50 Creator-Model Journalist, Bryan brings a mix of public media, legacy, and startup news chops to the creator journalism ecosystem.

⭐ Cody Short Johnson | Codyonair — Podcast/audio/video

Cody Short Johnson is a veteran journalist, producer, podcaster, and media personality based in Birmingham, AL. With over a decade of experience in media, Cody has built a media business named after the blog that started her career while in college. She's worked as a digital news reporter, radio reporter, and TV producer, and is the recipient of the Edward Murrow Award for her coverage of Deion Sanders as head coach at Jackson State University. In 2025, Cody earned a Master of Science degree in Communications with a focus in Journalism from Syracuse University.

⭐ H Kapp-Klote | Chicago 312 — Newsletter

H Kapp-Klote is an independent journalist and creator of Chicago 312, a weekly local news roundup investigating how power works in Chicago. He has a background in movement communications, including work with the Chicago Teachers Union, Forward Together, and housing organizing groups across the city. He is currently studying for his amateur radio license.

⭐ Maureen Kelleher | Board Rule — Newsletter

Maureen Kelleher is a veteran Chicago education journalist who now produces Board Rule, a deeply reported weekly newsletter on Chicago Public Schools and its board. A former high school English teacher, she spent eight years as an award-winning associate editor at Catalyst Chicago — whose reporting won honors from the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the International Reading Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists — and has since contributed to Education Week, The 74, Chalkbeat, and the Center for American Progress. She graduated magna cum laude from Yale and holds a master's degree in teaching from the University of Chicago.

⭐ Megan Raposa | Sioux Falls Simplified — Newsletter

Megan Raposa is an award-winning journalist and a lifelong South Dakotan. She founded Sioux Falls Simplified in 2021 after nearly six years working at the legacy print publication and has since developed a passion for improving the civic health of Sioux Falls through simplified, bullet-pointed local news.

⭐ Monique O. Madan | Two Can Be True — Newsletter

Monique O. Madan is an award-winning investigative journalist and founder of Two Can Be True, a narrative newsletter and brand that opens the reporter's notebook to the public — blending investigative storytelling with lived experience. Shaped by nearly two decades in newsrooms, her work is anchored in a core belief: two things can be true at the same time. Madan has spent her career covering immigration, criminal justice and government accountability at The Miami Herald, USA TODAY, and The Markup. Her reporting has also appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Boston Herald, and El Nuevo Herald. She is a 2025 Women's Leadership Accelerator fellow at ONA, a Lead Storytelling Advisor at The Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, and the principal of The Madan Creative Group. A graduate of Harvard University and Emerson College, she's based in Miami.

⭐ Natalie Bencivenga | Facts Over Fear — Newsletter/video/podcast

Natalie Bencivenga is a socially conscious, award-winning independent journalist and entrepreneur based in Pittsburgh who uses her platforms to build equity in communities. She launched Destination with Natalie Bencivenga in collaboration with WQED and hosts and produces Week in Focus for the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Her previous series Facts Over Fear won a Keystone Media Award in 2024. A Pittsburgh Magazine 40 Under 40 honoree, she has also penned the nationally syndicated Ask Natalie advice column since 2015. She holds degrees in Social Work, Biology, and Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.

⭐ Nicole Jeanine Johnson | Nicole the News Lady — Investigative journalism/newsletter

Nicole Jeanine Johnson is a writer and multimedia journalist who covers Black stories at the intersection of equity, education, politics, and liberation, with a focus on Chicago's South Side and southern suburbs. Her accountability reporting has exposed how power, policy, and community intersect — from municipal corruption to environmental justice and childcare access. Her work has appeared in the Chicago Defender, the Harvey World Herald, City Bureau, Southside Weekly, WBEZ, and the Chicago Sun-Times. She is a graduate student at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and a former fellow at Capitol News Illinois. She is also a published author and holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, and National Louis University.

⭐ Additionally, news-focused creators from Lenfest’s 2026 Philadelphia Media Founders Exchange News Creators Network, a four-month incubator that builds partnerships between independent news creators and local news organizations, will also be joining the cohort in Chicago.

Follow and support their work

We hope you'll take a moment to explore and support what these journalists are building. Each one is doing original, community-rooted work that often doesn't get the national spotlight it deserves. Give them a follow, subscribe to their newsletters, and share their work widely. This is what the future of journalism looks like.

Cohort members receive:

• Complimentary ONA26 registration + one-year ONA membership, courtesy of ONA

• A $1,000 travel/lodging stipend, courtesy of The Lenfest Institute for Journalism

• One-year membership in the Project C Community, including the private Slack

• Access to ONA26's creator-model journalism track, plus exclusive cohort networking events

We'll see you in Chicago — March 30–April 1! (It’s still not too late to register to attend!)

🙏 Huge thanks to The Lenfest Institute for Journalism and the Online News Association for making this cohort possible.

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

🚀 Thursday, March 19 - Building with Beehiiv: Monetization & Audience | Members Only

🚀 Wednesday, March 25 - Fact-checking for Creators | Members Only

🚀 Thursday, March 26 - Building with Beehiiv: Analytics & Audience Retention | Members Only

🚀 Tuesday, March 31 - Your Next Milestone: Spring Drive Edition | Members Only

🚀 Thursday, April 9 - Building with Beehiiv - Using the Website Builder | Members Only

To get access to these events and the Project C Slack community, join here!

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 200+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!

Happy Monday. This edition is jam-packed with GOOD STUFF, starting with some recent Project C research and then rounding up a ton of updates and opportunities. Things are starting to snowball (with apologies to my friends in the Northeast who are digging out today) as the momentum around creator journalism is picking up, umm, more snow. ❄️  

Talking through the research in December at Medill’s 2025 Chicago Local News Summit. (Image courtesy HANNAH IN CHICAGO PHOTO)

Last year, Project C published The News Ecosystem 2025 - a framework capturing the range of news sources available to American consumers at a moment in time. It was based on a good amount of study and common sense, but had never been tested in an actual market – until Mackenzie Warren at Medill’s Local News Initiative suggested we do that test in Chicago. 

The results of our research and analysis are now live. You can read some of our major findings in this graphic - or dive into the full report.

My suspicion as I set off on the work with researcher Eric Rynston-Lobel was that there were likely dozens of news sources not captured by Medill’s existing list of Chicago news sources. I thought we’d find scores of creator-model journalists working and reaching audiences in Chicago outside mainstream media channels. 

We did. And we’re continuing to index them in ongoing work with Medill and Press Forward Chicago. You can scan the growing list of Chicago-based creators here in the Independent Journalism Atlas (just click on “Chicago” and build your own shareable Starter Pack - like mine below). National names like Parker Malloy who call Chicago home are listed side-by-side with Chicago-focused folks like Chicago 312’s H Kapp-Klote, historian Sherman Dilla Thomas and sports-obsessed The Bigs.

See my starter pack here - or build your own.

But we found even more of what we ended up curating in a new category, Niche for Profit – small publications, some digital, some print, some hosting real life events – quietly serving very specific communities, identities or topics in Cook County. Outlets like Chicago Southsider, Lumpen Radio, and Chicago in Arabic.

We also added one more new category to the taxonomy – Community Utility – to capture hyperlocal information providers that function more as essential resources than traditional newsrooms.

The expanded ecosystem with the new categories added after we put it to the test in Chicago.

In all, we uncovered about 100 previously unindexed news and information sources providing real service to Chicago-area audiences. Read more about them, how they’re serving Chicagoans and sustaining their own businesses in the full report.

Huge thanks to my partner in this work, Eric Rynston Lobel, and to data viz whiz Amanda Shendruk for designing the final report and making it all those numbers make sense visually.

🔥 the latest things

📌 Reuters is in the creator business, per an email blast that went out Saturday touting a new Reuters for Creators program that promises to connect content creators with “ready to publish video, live news feeds, breaking news text, graphics” and content from “over 100 trusted media partners.” What does this cost? How does it work? Not clear. I’ve reached out to ask for more details, but if anyone has gotten an answer or if someone from Reuters wants to fill us in, just hit reply to this email. 

📌Johnny and Iz Harris’ NewPress – flush with four creators and an expanded staff including former AJ+ executive producer Jon Laurence (full disclosure: a friend) – announced the launch of its next phase: a paid community where subscribers get access to curated stories from Johnny, Sam Ellis, Christophe Haubursin, and Max Fisher and the opportunity to interact with them.

📌Aaron Parnas says he’s “decided to pursue a career in journalism as my full-time job.” Which kind of reminds me of that time in 10th grade when I told my friend Kathi I had “decided to be totally punk in my own way.”

📌Stop me if this sounds like you: A new Pew study finds that three in 10 Americans get news from newsletters, but many admit they don’t read all the newsletters they get. 

📌Substack and Polymarket are teaming up to add more predictions into the many newsletters you subscribe to but don’t read.

📌Media observer Lachlan Cartwright reports he’s matched his legacy media salary after just one year of Breaker Media.

🛠️ the useful things

📌 On latest episode of Creator Spotlight, Francis Zierer talks to From Boise’s Marissa Lovell, who went from barely paying her bills to making six figures in one year. How’d she do it? She hired a hungry, motivated new-to-sales rep.

📌 Vivian Tu, aka super-successful creator YourRichBFF, is diversifying her already successful business by launching a new AI-driven service called Ask Dolly, billed as “an AI chatbot designed to be a personal wealth advisor in your pocket.” Meanwhile, Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg launched a dating site, KissMe, for her readers.

P.S.

📌 In more Project C news, I’m delighted to join ASU’s Knight Center for the Future of News as one of two inaugural fellows. I can’t wait to get to know fellow fellow Rashida Jones and work closely with Knight Center director Andy Pergam.

🤑 funding opportunies

📌 IMI is funding 50 video creators across the U.S. (one in each state) to publish 50 videos in celebration of American science. See the details and apply here.

📌 The Next Challenge added a new category this year: The Pioneer Award for Local Creator Journalism will award up to $50,000 to an independent creator journalist using emerging digital platforms to strengthen civil discourse in their local community.

📌 If you live and work in one of the 26 Knight Cities, you may qualify to apply for the Knight Cities Challenge. Awards will go resident-driven solutions to local challenges and help promising ideas take root and grow (including strengthening local news and information systems.)

What’s coming up at Project C!

Each month, we bring members of the Project C Community at least one, but usually more, live events. Here’s what’s coming up:

🚀 Friday, Feb 27 | Fundraising Series, Part 3: Managing A Grant-Funded Project - ​Join Marcia Parker and Nick Swyter of the New York Times' Philanthropic Partnerships team for an introduction to philanthropic funding and sponsors. This time, we’ll concentrate on what happens after you get the grant. | MEMBERS ONLY!

Join the Project C Community!

If you’re ready to go deeper and connect with 160+ other creator-model journalists building their own stand-alone ventures, $39/month gets you into the growing Project C Slack community, access to our best resources and exclusive invites to monthly members-only events. JOIN NOW!