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A few years ago, Liz Kelly Nelson was the vice president of Vox and found herself holding the same exit interviews over and over again. Talented journalists kept leaving for independent ventures on Substack and YouTube, and she didn’t know how to get them to stay. She’d always been a believer in traditional media: she’d worked at the Washington Post; the Desert Sun, in Palm Springs, California; Gannett. But now, talking with colleagues departing Vox, as she told me, “when I started having conversations with them about the reasons that they were making this decision, and then studying audience habits, and where next-generation audiences were going to get their news and information, I found that I agreed with them.” Soon, she left too.

In 2024, Nelson became a Sulzberger Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The fellowship served as an incubator for what became Project C, whose focus is to help “journalists navigating the independent creator economy” on platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, and Substack. Nelson now runs Project C as a newsletter and resource through which journalists leaving traditional newsrooms (by choice or by layoff) can pay for her expertise, which she continues to develop via research partnerships with the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and a nonprofit organization of visual journalists called the Video Consortium, among others. Project C’s signature “Going Solo” workshop lasts ten weeks and features a range of instructors tackling everything from audience development and editorial planning to ethics and standards and revenue-generation. The aim of Project C is to support those who “create rigorous, fact-based work,” Nelson said. “We have one journalist who launched a Twitch channel, Brian Fung, who’s a former CNN tech reporter, and he plays first-person-shooter video games while talking about tech policy. Our work is to help journalists navigate that sort of shift.” Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. 

JH: Something that stuck out to me in your description of Project C is “thought leadership.” Tell me about that.

LKN: Yeah, I know—I hate those words. It just sounds so LinkedIn. But basically, if there were a better way to describe it, it would be about changing minds. When I started the Sulzberger Fellowship, there was a perception in the traditional legacy journalism world that it was an “us versus them” mentality, and that if people were following and getting their news from creator journalists or news influencers, that they were not getting it from news organizations. And so part of the thought leadership that I do, it isn’t necessarily for the creators. They get it, right? And the journalists who are making the shift get it. The thought leadership is for the journalism industry because it’s the industry that I came up in. I’ve been working in traditional journalism for twenty-five-plus years, and so I want there to be a continuity and a passing on of the skill sets and the values and everything that we hold dear about the mission of the work that we do to this new space and to this evolution of journalism. So the thought leadership, for me, it’s really about showing up in places where traditional journalists meet, and especially where folks are studying journalism or making decisions about how journalism is getting funded, to help them understand that this is an evolution and an expansion of the work that we do, not an either/or. It’s not a binary.

One of the things that’s interesting to me is that it’s sort of taken for granted that journalists of a certain age, with very few exceptions, need to have the creator thing explained to them. Or the TikTok thing. There’s this uncontroversial sense that guys like me just don’t get it. But on the flip side, a lot of creators really don’t know how journalism works. Some of them have really wild ideas about how news gets made. I’m wondering if this is something that ever comes up in the course of bridging the gap between worlds. 

I never make an assumption that somebody, because of age or because of their position in journalism, needs this stuff explained to them. I mean, Paul Krugman is now on Substack, right? He didn’t need it explained to him that this was a place where he could go and find an audience. Derek Thompson, too. We see a lot of folks who have been in this game for quite a while who get it.

To be fair, Paul Krugman and Derek Thompson probably had some very good financial reasons for figuring that out very quickly.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Right now it’s like, the getting is good for people who have a name and a following they’ve established at places like the New York Times or The Atlantic or the Post or Vox, to translate that into direct reader revenue or advertising.

I mean, that’s sort of the opposite of “You need to build a brand.” That’s more like you have a brand; here’s where you can bring it next.

Yeah, exactly. At Project C we specifically work with people who fall into what we call the journalism creator space or the creator journalist space. They are people who we believe create rigorous, fact-based work. Now, “news influencers” I look at as kind of the opinion section of the internet. And so there are news influencers who have experience working in journalism shops, and there are those that don’t, but it’s all a little bit more Wild West. At Project C we very much want to create space, in all of these feeds, in these algorithms, where there is work that has the characteristics of, for lack of a better phrase, traditional journalism ethics. So that it becomes a little bit of a news-literacy thing. 

If audiences see somebody like Bisan Owda reporting from Gaza, doing very specific things in her reporting to say who her sources are, or if they see Joss Fong, on YouTube, who has an ethics statement that’s posted about her advertising policy—we want that to be really obvious, so when they see content that’s being produced that doesn’t have that, they know there’s something wrong there. With the firehose of what I would call “news influencer content,” and now AI, it’s hard to be visible about disclosures, but it’s something we continue to push for. In the workshop that we offer, one entire week is devoted to news ethics and transparency. We partner with an independent group called Trusting News, and we are doing research together: into how creator-model journalists can learn from traditional journalism, and also how traditional journalism can learn from creator-model journalists about how they build trust with audiences.

What do you hope this space will look like in the near future? 

Where I’d like to see things trend five years from now is stronger partnerships between independent creators and newsrooms, because what the independent creators have now is the audience, especially the younger audiences. But there needs to be an understanding in news organizations of how to work with these people as equals or as partners—a model like what ProPublica does in partnering with newsrooms around the country. Right now, I can’t tell you how many news organizations I’m hearing from saying: Can you teach us how to get our talent to work like creators so that we can get that same audience? It kind of has all the earmarks of the pivot to video. Right now we’re pivoting to the creator. 

That kind of runs contrary to this thing that results from all the rules and norms of being in a newsroom, especially at places like the Times or The New Yorker, where the whole point of the endeavor is to collapse everything into an institutional voice and suck all the individual personality out of whatever the thing is, since the creator economy stuff seems very much built on personality. One recent example of the creator pivot, I suppose, is that the Times now seems to be pushing a lot of reporters who have maybe been doing some podcasting or writing a column in front of the video camera. 

Yeah, I’ve seen all those Ezra Klein videos on Instagram too. 

It’s good that they’re experimenting with stuff, but part of me wonders, well, is this thought out? Or is this just pivoting to pivot? 

I think it’s probably complicated. It’s probably a lot of that, but I think there are also reporters who are eager to build more of a personality and a following. 

I guess the question is, does sitting in front of a camera automatically give you a personality? Does it translate? 

Not for everyone. It’s nothing new that there are a few personalities in news organizations who have a following. I mean, I worked with Ezra when he was at Vox, and I can’t tell you how many people followed Vox because of Ezra, and I think he now has that sort of following at the Times. Kara Swisher is another person who has been able to take her audience from ReCode to the Times and now to her independent ventures. Howard Cosell. Walter Cronkite. These are all personalities. 

I think because of the future we are now living in, there are a few factors that have come together, and one is just all these algorithms and platforms vying for our attention. Personalities tend to connect better in those models and in those mediums. It’s that parasocial relationship, and there are now many more ways to connect with people in a parasocial way. One of my first jobs at the Post was running live chats called Live Online. We did seventy hours of programming a week, and they were text-based chats, almost like a chat room where on any given week we would have Dana Priest come and talk about her national security beat, and half the questions were about her beat and the others were like, Dana, what did you have for breakfast? So that was an early example of the parasocial relationships we’re developing, and that was twenty years ago. We just now live in a place where that’s the currency. 

Another thing that’s happened, and there are tons of studies showing this, especially for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, is this huge decline in trust in brands and institutions. And so what has taken the place of that is trust in personalities and people. They trust people who look like them, sound like them, and, increasingly, who do not paint themselves as impartial. That’s a big part of the creator journalism space and the news influencer space. A lot of the trust that’s being built with creators is being built because the creator or the journalist is saying, I do have a stance on this particular thing that I’m reporting on.

You’ve compared news influencers to the opinion pages, and I think that’s a fairly apt comparison. But it makes me wonder if you think there’s any chance of doing better than we have at keeping the broader public in step with the difference between the opinion pages and the rest of the newspaper? Can you imagine us doing better in terms of having people understand the difference between a creator who is doing journalism or talking about journalism in a rigorous way versus someone doing sponsored content that looks like journalism? 

That’s not only a hard job, in some cases it may be impossible. And that’s not to say we can’t do a better job. I just think that the audience, the public, the consumer, even twenty years ago, didn’t understand the difference between the news pages and the opinion pages in the way that we do. We traditionally would have people cancel their subscriptions to newspapers when an endorsement ran, or a particular op-ed piece that they didn’t agree with. And though they may have understood that it was an opinion coming from an opinion page, it still colored their view of the entire institution. So again, it’s back to the idea that there just isn’t a belief in impartiality anymore, and the question of how journalists signal what our specific boundaries are or what our specific guardrails are when it comes to these things that I do think we can do a better job of. 

One of the things I’m working on with Trusting News is we’re actually creating a framework, a rubric for trusted creator-model journalism—a red-yellow-green rubric that basically outlines the characteristics of a trustworthy journalist working in the creator space. Because again, it’s like, the word “creator” as a noun to describe these people isn’t quite right. They’re journalists who are working in the creator ecosystem. They are monetizing their work in the way other creators are, but they have posted ethics policies. They’re transparent about their advertisers and what kind of advertising they will or will not accept, and what kind of control those advertisers may or may not have over their content. They are showing their sourcing clearly. They are telling you whether or not their work is being fact-checked. They have a corrections policy and will address their corrections. Obviously, the folks on the red side of the spectrum are doing the exact opposite of that. 

What did you learn about the appeal of the creator economy from your exit interviews with journalists who were leaving Vox in the fall of 2023?

At that time there were two journalists who I was working with, Joss Fong and Adam Cole, who were working on the Vox video team. They were incredibly talented, and I wanted to understand how we could keep them. They ultimately made the decision to leave and launch their own YouTube channel. But in talking to them, I found there were three reasons they left. One was that they wanted complete editorial control, to be able to decide what they were putting out into the world. The second was they wanted to be incentivized for their work in a way that many newsrooms, except for those few in the one percent at the top, are not willing to provide, even when it comes to people who are bringing a larger audience. And then the third reason was continuing newsroom layoffs. I heard from journalist after journalist, “I just don’t feel like I have any job security anymore in a newsroom.” And that was not just at Vox, this was across many different news organizations. So, suddenly, for these people to launch something independently didn’t seem a lot riskier to them than working within a news organization where they didn’t know if they were going to be the target of the next ax that would be swinging. 

On the Project C website there’s a news-ecosystem chart that includes newer categories like “creator journalist” and “news influencer,” and also stuff that’s less individual: Defector, for example, and other collective organizations that are a whole different beast requiring a great deal of coordination, cooperation, and fundraising. I’m curious if you have any thoughts on which of these newer categories you think will grow in the next couple of years and which might be restrained somewhat?

In terms of growth I think we are going to see a lot more worker-owned collectives coming together. We actually have some that are members of the Project C community: folks from The 51st, a worker-led newsroom covering Washington, DC, and 404 Media, founded by journalists covering tech. And there’s the Coyote Media Collective, which is a new one in the San Francisco Bay Area. And while that’s not the focus of Project C, we see them as cousins in this new independent space. They are helping each other in ways that are pretty inspiring—404 and Defector both share their playbook for how they set up their organizations and how they’ve monetized growth and revenue. 

As you said, not everybody is ready to be in front of the camera or has the stomach for being an independent creator, out there by yourself. It’s a really lonely job. And so collectives are a really amazing way for people to create something that resembles in many ways a traditional news organization, but do it in a way that feels more equitable. So we’re seeing a lot of growth in that space, and I think we’ll continue to see growth in the journalism creator space. We see a lot of press about folks like Paul Krugman or Taylor Lorenz, the big names, the folks that are out there after walking away from a big newspaper or from CNN, and they instantly have four hundred thousand subscribers on Substack and they’re making tons of money. And that’s great, but there’s also something more akin to the rank and file in a traditional news organization, where you have your masthead superstars up here, and then you have everybody else who is coming in and reporting on a beat every day. 

Now, the people who are going to rise to the top are the people who have a very specific, narrow niche. But there are a million niches and there are a million small, loyal audiences that are funding journalists. We have folks in our group who report on everything from being a remote queer worker to the Olympics coming to Los Angeles in 2028 to small towns everywhere. So we’re seeing what we call the niching down of media, and that’s really key to the success for many of these folks, that they are able to accrue loyal audiences who are interested in these very narrow topics, because consumers are not subscribing to general-interest publications anymore—or if they are, that general-interest publication is just the Times. 

It’s fascinating to learn how much of this is being driven by anxiety over layoffs in the media industry. 

For many of the people I mentioned who were worried about their job security or getting laid off, they’re not looking to make millions in the same way as a journalist who is a big marquee name on Substack and looking to replicate the salary they were making at some news organization. Having been a veteran of working with Gannett newsrooms across the country, I can tell you these people don’t make a lot of money. There are still journalists working in newsrooms in small markets around the country that are making forty thousand dollars a year, and that’s not a difficult thing to replicate in the creator economy. We can actually do better. So what I’m interested in doing with Project C is making this attainable for not just the big marquee names but the rank and file—the newsroom rank and file who want to be reporting on something because they’re so passionate about it and care about it so much. And that is primarily who we see coming to Project C for training, and who join our community, and they do find community with us. 

I thought we might end on a little experiment, which is that I would love to hear your pitch to a journalist like me. I don’t do any other work besides freelance magazine writing, and I don’t have a beat. I go from one topic to the next—and because I write exclusively for magazines, I’m very often doing what journalists wouldn’t do in a newspaper, by telling readers what I’m thinking. I’m telling them about my biases and fears and anxieties and doing all these other things that give personality to magazine writing, which is to say, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for me to do more of that on TikTok or Substack. So why am I resistant to that? And what do you say to someone like me to convince them it’s worth an extra few hours of work every week?

I don’t know that I would need to convince you of anything if what you are doing is working for you. It doesn’t sound like you are lacking anything that launching a Substack would add for you. The one thing I would want you to think about is: What would you do if all that dried up tomorrow? How does the audience that appreciates your work find you, and how do they stay with you? That is something that we talk a lot about, not just with people who are making this transition, but even journalists that are working within newsrooms—that you need to have some sort of way of being able to be in touch with your audience so that they can follow you, because you, as a journalist working at, say, the Poughkeepsie Journal, could be laid off tomorrow. If you have an audience that loves the work you are doing, covering arts and culture in Poughkeepsie, New York, how do they find you, and how do you find them, if suddenly you are cut off from the connection that you had with them? 

And one way of doing that is by hanging out a shingle of some sort, whether that is launching a TikTok feed or a newsletter. We actually encourage folks to launch a newsletter before anything else, because that’s the only way you truly own your audience. That’s where you can actually get their email addresses. When you’re working on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, you don’t actually have that. There you’re at the mercy of the algorithm that is serving you up.

This piece is part of Journalism 2050, a project from the Columbia Journalism Review and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, with support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

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