The Joanna Stern model + Friday Links (a day early!)

Programming note: We have a new website! projectc.biz got a ground-up rebuild this month and it's a HUGE upgrade. Take a peek for links to Independent Journalism Atlas, the Top 50 list, our research, community info and the brand new Lizbot 🤖 , who will answer any and all of your questions about creator-model journalism. Go poke around and let us know what you think.

Something interesting happened this week.

Joanna Stern — who spent 12 years as the WSJ's tech columnist — left the Journal to launch her own creator brand, New Things, on beehiiv. Newsletters, video, live events. It’s the whole poly-platform playbook. But here's the part that caught my attention: she simultaneously signed on as NBC News' chief technology analyst, where she'll bring some of her exclusive reporting and analysis to their platforms — while keeping full ownership of her own brand.

This is not the model we've been watching play out for the last two years.

The model we've been tracking — and the one I wrote about last November — has largely been one-directional. Legacy media tries to absorb creator energy: hire a TikTok person, launch a Gen Z newsletter, bolt a "creator strategy" onto existing operations. Creators, for their part, leave institutions to go fully independent. Two lanes, moving apart.

What Stern is doing is a third thing (a “new thing,” lolz). She's not being absorbed by NBC. She's not rejecting legacy infrastructure. Like Amber Sherman at MLK50, she's building something that lets her own her IP, her audience, and her brand while also tapping into the reach and resources of a major news network — on her terms.

That distinction matters.

And here’s something else to ruminate on:

Earlier this month, Johnny and Iz Harris launched Newpress — a production company and incubator for creator-journalists. Harris built a 7.5 million subscriber YouTube channel after leaving Vox, and now he's using what he learned to help other journalist-creators launch their own shows. Newpress handles the business and production side — editors, sponsorship deals, infrastructure — while the journalists focus on making the work. Their collective already has more than 10 million combined subscribers.

These two announcements, arriving in the same month, tell a bigger story.

A year ago, we were still explaining what creator journalism is to a lot of the industry. Last summer, when we released the Top 50 Creator-Model Journalists list, the conversation shifted from "what is this?" to "okay, this is a thing." When we released The Independent Journalism Atlas, it turned into “not only is this real, it’s like a big movement.”

Now the infrastructure is showing up. Incubators. Hybrid partnership deals. Production companies purpose-built for creator-journalists. The roads are being paved.

This is the phase where a movement starts to professionalize. Not in a boring, institutional way — nobody's putting on a tie — but in the way that matters: the support systems, the revenue scaffolding, the legal and business structures that let talented journalists do the work without also having to be their own IT department, sales team, and accountant.

We're not there yet. Not even close. But the distance between "this is a hustle" and "this is a career path with real infrastructure" is shrinking every week. When someone with Joanna Stern's stature builds a model that bridges both worlds — and when someone with Johnny Harris's audience starts building the support layer for others — the conversation changes for everyone doing this work.

For the creators in our community: pay attention to these models. Not because you need to replicate them — most of us aren't sitting on 7.5 million subscribers or a contact list of network executives — but because they signal that the ecosystem is maturing in ways that will eventually benefit all of us. The production support Newpress is building, the hybrid partnership template Stern is creating — these things have a way of trickling through the system. What starts as a deal for the biggest names becomes a playbook for the rest of us.

I'll be watching both of these closely. We all should.

📌 Isaac Saul’s Tangle makes nearly $4M in subscription revenue despite giving most content away — 71K paid subscribers, 16% conversion rate. (Press Gazette)

📌 AI is making the one-person newsroom a reality — The Media Copilot profiles an investigative reporter who built a 19K-subscriber newsletter in 99 countries with AI as his co-pilot.

📌 Axios lays off 11 newsroom staffers, pivoting to "subject matter experts". The general news desk continues to shrink while the people who built expertise there head for the exits.

📌 WaPo's legendary food critic Tom Sietsema launches on beehiiv — after a quarter century and 1,000+ restaurant reviews at the Post, Sietsema is bootstrapping Next Course, a subscription newsletter debuting this week with a review of the controversial Noma LA. Another one joins the indie ranks.

📌 Indie weathermen are having a moment — CJR profiles meteorologists leaving broadcast to go independent, banding together through the Digital Weather Network to stream coverage 24/7. In an era of extreme weather, creator-model journalism is spreading to unexpected beats.

📌 Your Local Epidemiologist marks six years — Katelyn Jetelina's COVID-era newsletter, which started as a daily email to her university colleagues, has grown into a global public health resource with 500M+ views in 133 countries. A creator journalism origin story if there ever was one.

📌 Prison Policy Initiative names its first Creator-in-Residence — Alpha Jalloh, a formerly incarcerated filmmaker and Yale student, will produce videos breaking down the U.S. criminal legal system with the organization's research backing. A smart model for how nonprofits can support creator-journalists. Congrats to PPI an Alpha! 👏

📌 Web traffic "no longer measures anything real" — News Pain Points on the collapse of a foundational metric after 10 major tech pubs lost 58% of organic visits from Google.

📌 A freelance writer scammed publications worldwide with AI-written pitches — including The Guardian, The Cut, and Dwell, with fabricated quotes from high-profile sources. KCRW investigated. (h/t Yulia Denisyuk in the Project C community)

📌 Monique O. Madan's independent investigation on immigrants drafting wills out of fear was republished by the Miami Herald — a big validation of the indie-to-legacy pipeline. She's also been doing fearless reporting on immigration enforcement and asking ICE officers directly about their tactics.

📌 Former WaPo journalists are still reporting from Ukraine's front lines — after their Post layoffs, Siobhán O'Grady and Lizzie Johnson are working through Long Lead's Border Line War, a collaboration with Magnum Photos. Independent journalism in a war zone.

📌 Bryan M. Vance (Stumptown Savings) hit hit 4,000 subscribers, 6,000 TikTok followers and landed his first inbound ad deal from a local Portland frozen pizza company. Local news creator economics in action.

📌 Ulrike Langer celebrated one year of News Machines with an essay on writing with AI that's relevant for every creator journalist thinking about these tools.

📌 Amanda Shendruk pushes back on the "AI will take your job" reports — worth a read.

📌 Helena Bottemiller Evich launched American Dish — a new food policy podcast covering everything from MAHA to climate change.

📌 Ani Bundel launched TellyVisions — a new site dedicated to international TV coverage.