For the past few years, “creator journalist” has been a useful shorthand – but one that’s also produced plenty of assumptions and knowledge gaps, many of them untethered from the reality of the work. That’s made it harder to develop clear language, shared frameworks, and funding structures to support this growing space.
The new Rise of the Creator-Journalist report from the Video Consortium, produced with Fordham University and Project C, starts to close that gap. It grounds the term in research, documenting what creator-journalists’ work looks like in practice – specifically for video-first, independent journalists – and what they actually need to sustain it.
Insights and actionable data like this will be crucial to helping frame the kinds of infrastructure I’m building here at Project C and with The Independent Journalism Atlas – and how the Video Consortium continues to evolve to meet this moment.
At 26-ish pages, the report isn’t long and well worth your time – full of new data and insights directly from our interviews with video creators. Still, here’s a quick TL;DR of some of the more useful takeaways:
👉 Backgrounds are varied; practices are not accidental.
Creator-journalists come from a wide range of paths, including legacy newsrooms and entirely independent routes. What connects them isn’t credentialing, but intentional journalistic practice shaped by platform-native video formats and audience expectations.
👉 Sustainability is fragmented, not immature.
Rather than pointing toward a single “emerging” model, the report documents a patchwork of revenue approaches (platform monetization, audience support, sponsorships, and hybrids) along with the tradeoffs each introduces. The instability here is structural, not a lack of seriousness.
👉 Practice is outpacing recognition.
One of the most useful contributions of the report is naming the gap between how creator-journalists understand their own work and how institutions, funders, and sometimes journalism itself categorize it.
This matters for Project C readers because many of the questions explored here – legitimacy, independence, sustainability, and audience relationships – are already familiar. Video is simply where we chose to test those questions most directly in this research.
Read the full report here: The Rise of the Creator-Journalist
If you want to talk about it with me and the other framers of this work – Video Consortium’s Sky Dylan Robbins, Fordham University’s Beth Knobel and lead researcher Lauren Holt – we’ll be digging into the findings at the upcoming Future of Nonfiction Video summit in New York Feb. 6-8.
As always, feel free to hit reply and tell me what resonates (or what you think still needs more clarity).
