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
More food for thought:
“Most people who get news from creators are using them alongside traditional media – not instead of it. In fact, those who access creators consume more traditional media than the average respondent.”
📌 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
Substack mini-stack:
📌 Substack is launching a sponsorship program – the platform is building native brand sponsorships and Creator Kits so writers can pitch advertisers directly. The monetization layer just grew up overnight. 👉 Nieman Lab
📌 Substack hired Dan Robbins to run brand sponsorships – the personnel side of the same story; Substack is staffing up to sell ads at scale. 👉 Axios
📌 How to set up a Creator Kit on Substack – the actual how-to, worth linking as a member utility since the sponsorship series starts next week. 👉 Substack Help (from the Atlas channel)
📌 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!
