How Newsrooms Can Take Creators More Seriously

Including the need to listen to customers and adopt more flexible practices

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

One of the most interesting—and I think hopeful—developments in and around journalism these days is the rise of the creator economy, independent journalists operating under new brands of their own. This burgeoning trend is not being taken sufficiently seriously in some precincts of the more traditional news business, and this week I want to address that, and, in some small measure, urge a redressing of the balance.

Resentment and disrespect

At a conference I attended a few weeks ago, V Spehar of Under the Desk News observed that “journalists think creators make money they haven’t earned, while creators feel they don’t get respect from journalists for the work they do.” That seems right. Haven’t heard of Under the Desk News, by the way? Well, they have 3.5 million followers on TikTok, almost twice the New York Times or Washington Post (which are thought by many to be among the traditional news leaders on that platform, although CNN is far ahead of all of them). Even away from TikTok, Under the Desk has more followers on YouTube than my alma mater ProPublica, and more than twice as many on Instagram.

This is hardly a fluke. Consider the following comparisons:

• College professor Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter “Letters from an American” now has more than 2.6 million subscribers. It’s hard to imagine how that doesn’t make her the most widely-read (and almost certainly also the highest paid) political columnist in America, today’s lineal descendant of Walter Lippmann and James Reston, leaving contenders like David Brooks in the dust.

• Late last year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman left the New York Times, apparently because he had tired of its editing his work and because he wanted to publish more often than the Times had appetite for. His Substack now has about 370,000 subscribers, which likely gives him a regular readership fairly consistently higher than before, while he takes in more income. While I don’t have access to the numbers, I would also guess that Krugman’s audience now generally exceeds that of my other favorite economics writer, Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal

• In a more specialized news niche, for instance, the reach of Katelyn Jetelina’s Your Local Epidemiologist, also with about 370,000 subscribers (disclosure: a consulting client of mine) is almost certainly greater than most of the excellent pieces offered by STAT or KFF Health News. On Facebook, YLE has more than 400,000 followers, well more than STAT and almost 10 times as many as KFF, although STAT and KFF remain substantially ahead on Twitter.

• In science publishing broadly, Science News remains robust, but new entrants like Howtown are a force to be increasingly reckoned with. Science News is still way ahead on Facebook, although Howtown explainer videos receive millions of plays there; on YouTube and Instagram Howtown is a much larger force, with well more than 10 times as many subscribers/ followers. (Thanks to my teaching colleague, Amanda Yarnell, one of the most thoughtful people on this subject, for this last example.)

Reach isn’t by any means the sole issue here, as the Spehar quote and the Krugman saga indicate.

As the digital news revolution has rolled along over the last 30 years, legacy and then even upstart newsrooms have had to adapt themselves to cascading developments—lowering barriers to entry, especially for opinion and analysis; social media; podcasts; generational stresses on newsroom hierarchies; vertical video. In a significant sense, the rise of the creator economy is the combination of all of these, and the adaptation in this latest case still has a long way to go.

Listen to the cash register

First, resentment gets you nowhere. Indeed, what readers, listeners and viewers will pay for should always be taken as one of the most important signals a publisher can receive. It has long been my view that paywalls and paid subscriptions of all sorts in news generally work only when a publisher can offer high quality content in high quantity. That is the through line that runs from the New York Times to the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Atlantic, New Yorker, Economist and Financial Times, to the best “trade” offerings in many industries, and locally to outlets like the Boston Globe, Minnesota Star-Tribune and emerging Baltimore Banner.

If creators are clearing this bar—and, as we have seen, many are—and you think they are somehow an exception to the rule about high quality, perhaps instead you need to broaden your definition. The judgment about quality isn’t an objective one; it’s in the mind of the customer, and they are telling you something abut what they value every time they choose to pay.

And while it’s true that some successful creators aren’t doing much if any original reporting, perhaps it’s worth recalling that Walter Cronkite, often cited as the embodiment of legacy news, was so famous not for the reporting he did during the Second World War, but for his later years as what the Brits and others call a “newsreader.”

Ways to adapt

Next, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Traditional newsrooms simply need to get much better at working with creators, and adapting to the impulses that are fueling their rise. The Krugman case is a perfect example. While everyone benefits from editing, letting a star columnist go because he wants to publish more often than you do is a new one on me, and hard to understand given the unlimited “news hole” of web sites.

Even with respect to editing, is it really necessary—apart from ensuring accuracy and preserving standards of fairness—to take the same editing approach to all the work you publish? Especially in the area of opinion, why? It’s time to start questioning premises like these. That may mean revisiting style guides, headline rules, marketing practices, even form factors, all with an eye to greater flexibility. Readers will, I think, be more tolerant of such variance than publishers may expect—at this point, they’ve seen a lot.

There is also something to be learned from creators, and emulated, regarding much greater transparency— in processes, plans and the acknowledgement of mistakes and changes of direction and focus.

I’m not advocating compromise about core editorial principles, but I do think it’s worth occasionally revisiting which principles are truly core, and which are just time-honored.

There’s a great deal going wrong in and threatening the news business these days. But two big things are happening that hold enormous promise, I think. One is AI (at the same time, of course, also a threat) and the other is the rise of the creators. I hope regular readers of this column recognize that I spend plenty of time on the problems and threats, as we must. But recognizing the promises, and adapting to them as well, are among the critical tasks at hand.