This edition sponsored by Outpost for Ghost publishers

Are you following Project C on LinkedIn? If not, now’s the time as we kick off a series of profiles of Project C community members. This week we profiled JD Shadel, Amy Miles and their new worker-owned collective anxiety.eco – a smart needed take on the intersection of fashion and sustainability. (I’m a big fan of their public-facing editorial policy.)

Okay, so here’s a light question for a Friday morning:

Can legacy media authentically adopt creator behaviors – or is the very act of systematizing “authenticity” what makes it fall apart?

I’m wondering about this (again) after reading about the launch of The Financial Times’ Gen Z-targeting newsletter, Alphaville, on Substack. What follows isn’t a critique of Alphaville. It’s a question about what it signals when legacy institutions migrate onto creator-native platforms.

[Disclaimer: These are early thoughts, not a finished theory, and I’d genuinely love your feedback.].

I’m of two minds: One mind, the product of 20+ years in trad news, wants to always believe there are ways legacy media can and should change to meet next generation audiences where they are. We know there are brands out there doing this well. Back in October, Ryan Kellett wrote here about 10 examples of rock star in-house creators in legacy newsrooms and LNI Media’s Dave Jorgensen is a rising indie brand now, but he built his audience and reputation while at The Washington Post.

But, my other mind – the one that left that world in 2023 to help build the future for indie creator journalists is stuck in this thought loop: as we’re seeing more and more publishers adding “creator strategy” as a line item to check off, are legacy media’s attempts to blend in on social platforms, center personality-driven audience strategies and, like, be cool actually the ultimate uncool thing? Not because they’re trying, but because they’re trying in a way that misunderstands the medium and the audience?

Maybe?

This fall, as part of my role as a Terker Fellow at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, I talked with a lot of college students. I didn’t do an official survey when I visited classes (but will this spring, now that I think of it! 💡) but when I asked if these young Gen Zers were at all drawn in by traditional news organizations showing up on TikTok or pushing personalities, responses ranged from cringe to indifferent to satirical. One student, who I’m paraphrasing here, said watching traditional broadcast anchors trying to TikTok or sharing the news while on morning walks just felt lame and kind of like their parents trying to understand 6-7.

This reaction wasn’t because these students dislike news. But because they instantly sense when the tone is off – when something meant to feel intimate or goofy or conversational gets flattened by brand safety.

Creators succeed because of personality, authenticity, and direct audience trust. Legacy media’s success was built on rigor, scale, and institutional trust. But with scale and institutional trust eroding, legacy brands are trying to borrow creator playbooks and often adopting the aesthetic of creator culture without the underlying incentives, intimacy, or credibility that make it work.

The danger is in taking something that is growing organically and trying to turn it into a process, a strategy, a product. If you’ve worked in a large organization you’ve seen how what starts as a good idea can sometimes be made better by the benefit of going through a vetting process, but we’ve also all seen something that starts out as fresh and dynamic go through a car-wash like conveyer belt of meetings and cross-functional input and come out the other end anodyne or not at all resembling the original intent. It’s just how big organizations work. Legacy systems will always try to standardize everything in the name of efficiency and profit. Even things that can’t by their nature be standardized.

So I want to hear back from all of you:

We can keep things anonymous. I’m honestly just curious. Either reply to this email or email me directly at [email protected].

📌 Can independent creator-model journalists do deep investigative work? Hells yes. Read about how The Food Section’s Hanna Raskin took North Carolina’s state liquor board to task by filing 171 public records requests, visiting more than 70 stores and producing a smart package that combined narrative and data-driven findings to expose a monopoly in need of deeper scrutiny.

📌 Pew Research, truly masters of the slow drip of juicy data points, is out with another drip: Earlier this month, they shared the latest stats about Americans’ rising reliance on social media for news and now they’re back to tell us that YouTube and Facebook are the platforms of choice for most Americans, though TikTok, Reddit and WhatsApp continue to gain ground with younger audiences.

📌 OG creator Hank Green’s Focus Friend is Google Play’s app of the year.

📌 Sammy Roth’s Climate Colored Goggles and The Elizabeth Chou’s The LA Reporter are both shouted out in this NiemanLab piece about the people, brands and funders stepping in to fill Los Angeles’ not-so-obvious news desert.

📌 One-time Recode and Fortune reporter Jason Del Ray is going solo. He’s launching The Aisle, as part of the beehiiv Media Collective, to cover the AI era of commerce.

📌 So many DMs and Slack convos this week were had in response to the continuing saga of Olivia Nuzzi and Ryan Lizza. And while I admit I will never get the time back I spent reading the NYT’s fawning profile of Nuzzi or Lizza’s latest mic drop, Marisa Kabas weighed in with the take we should all be considering – what all this says about the continued loss of trust in journalism and journalists:

“…[W]hat’s been reinforced is a crisis of elite control of journalism and of profound rot. That rot appears in journalists in different forms: debasing themselves at the feet of power because it’s rewarded; allowing themselves to be debased by the powerful to maintain status and access; and identifying more with their powerful subjects than regular people because they believe it will insulate them from retribution.”

📌 Defector is out with their yearly (and much anticipated) report on how the last 12 months went for the business. It’s an especially useful read this year: not only did the worker-owned collective sustain their own brand – they also won a Press Forward grant to help build infrastructure for others to follow in their pioneering footsteps. The TL;DR: “It remains tough sledding to convince new people to buy a subscription,” podcast ad revenue grew, events were flat and 👀 “Apple News+ payments” contributed nicely to the bottom line.

📌 If you’re a working creator-model journalist, take 10 minutes to complete this CNTI/Project C survey. Your answers will help us understand what’s working, what’s fragile, and what journalists working out there independently really need next. If you complete the survey, you’ll also be registered to win one of two $50 gift cards.