Also this week: beehiiv launched native podcast hosting on every plan and took aim at Substack and Patreon in one move. The New Yorker profiles a Spanish-language news creator reaching millions of followers. An honest take on the ethics of paywalling your own work. And the Daily Mail hired 25 creators and is producing 20 videos a day. All that and more in the links below. ↓

But first…

In February, The Washington Post cut roughly a third of its staff. Around the same time, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced 50 cuts, about 15% of the newsroom. Press Gazette is running a live tracker of 2026 journalism layoffs, and at the current pace, we'll blow past all of 2024's total well before summer.

These cuts are sending a ripple through the journalism world. Journalists who are still inside these newsrooms watching the cuts happen around them start comparison shopping newsletter platforms and they book coffee chats with friends who've already made the jump. They look at their own personal social followings (usually modest as they’ve been posting as part of a brand for years), their own savings accounts (also modest), and try to figure out if the math could even work.

Here's what I've noticed after three years of running Project C: the math almost never adds up the way people think it will. Not because going independent is a bad idea (I wouldn't be doing this if I believed that!) but because the math is more complicated than the stories we keep telling about it.

There are a few things going on here. 

Now, I also want to push back on the flip side of this, because there's a counterargument floating around that I hear more and more from folks committed to trad media: that it's basically impossible to make this solo thing work. That there's a top 1% of creators who are going to get rich launching Substacks and everyone else is just out of luck. That is just not true. It is entirely possible to build a sustainable career doing independent journalism. I work with people in Project C every single day who are doing exactly that. But "possible" and "easy" are very different words, and the gap between them is where most of the hard conversations need to happen.

I had a conversation at ONA (the Online News Association annual conference that this year had a ROBUST creator track) this week with someone who's been in the journalism world a long time and is genuinely supportive of this movement in the creator space, but is skeptical about the monetization possibilities. His question was basically: "Isn't it going to continue to be a challenge to find people who want to advertise next to news content?" Basically: If we can't get advertisers to buy ads against news content in newspapers and at digital news sites, how are we going to do that for individual creators? He's not wrong. That's a big question hanging over all of this.

Because while it's not that difficult for someone who is producing journalism content more closely related to cultural criticism or covering restaurants to find ads, it will probably never be the case that somebody wants to advertise next to Monique O. Madan's investigative work on immigration enforcement. That means trying the other usual sources of income, philanthropic and reader revenue, but also, in many cases, it means getting super creative. We'll come back to that.

The Publish Press ran the results of their annual creator salary survey this week, and it's a useful data point, but you have to read it with the right lens. This is a survey across ALL kinds of creators, not just journalists: lifestyle, entertainment, sports, beauty, the whole spectrum. The spread runs from a first-year video essayist making $7,000 to an "edutainment" team pulling in $7.5 million, and still 53% of those surveyed made less than $100,000 last year. Those numbers are the ones that tend to circulate in the "can you make a living as a creator?" conversation, but they're describing a fundamentally different economy than the one journalism creators are operating in.

When we published our study with the Video Consortium and Fordham University in January, specifically on the economics of creator journalism, the numbers were harder.

Fifty-six percent of the creators we surveyed said they aren't earning enough to support themselves. Only 28% fully fund their livelihoods through their independent work. Forty percent say a job outside of their independent practice is still their most consistent income source, and 52% are using personal savings to fund their work, not as a bridge to something more stable, but as an ongoing subsidy.

One creator put it to us plainly: "I work contract jobs to pay the bills. It doesn't feel like three jobs, it is three jobs. My independent stuff is rewarding, but I'm skating by."

Only 23% reported steady, predictable income. Everyone else surveyed is managing month-to-month uncertainty, income swings, or no sustainable income from their independent work at all. The study's own framing, which I keep returning to: audience appetite for creator-model journalism has not translated into financial sustainability for most creators.

I can tell you that we heard this echoed loudly at ONA this week. In session after session, I heard directly from creator-model journalists and aspiring creator-model journalists about not just how hard it is to make money, but how hard it is to figure out how to make money. These are journalists. They were trained to report, to write, to produce. Nobody taught them the business side. And that gap, between the journalism skills they have and the business skills they need, is a huge part of what's making this transition so difficult for so many people.

What was really interesting at ONA was hearing how different the answers are depending on who you ask.

Amber Sherman, the creator-in-residence at MLK50, led a packed room through her approach. Amber's income is a mix: her partnership with MLK50 around news content, brand deals for more lifestyle-inflected content, plus speaking engagements and appearances that are all starting to contribute to her bottom line. It's a portfolio model, and she's making it work, but it took real intention to build. Crucially, though, Amber also shared that she still has a full-time day job she loves as a policy organizer, so she's not looking to her news content to pay her bills or provide her with health insurance.

In another session, Matt Brown from Extra Points and Matt Kiser from What the Fuck Just Happened Today walked through how their business models work. Both are more than sustainable at this point. And the most interesting thing about that conversation was how completely different their approaches are, which really speaks to the fact that there is not, at this point, a one-size-fits-all solution. In many ways that's a good thing because you can figure out a model that suits your personality or your skill set or the kind of time you have. But it's also still limited by the available options and the infrastructure (or lack of it) that exists to support these businesses.

Remember earlier when I said journalism creators need to get super creative? Matt Brown is a great example. Beyond his newsletter subscriptions, he's built a premium database product and games that his audience pays for, revenue streams that have nothing to do with traditional advertising and everything to do with understanding what his specific readers will find valuable enough to buy. Justin Bank wrote last fall about Matt and some other journalists who have built some pretty novel revenue streams, too. 

But getting creative has limits, and those limits are different for journalists than for other creators. Remember Kevin Ortega-Rojas, from the CJR piece? Kevin’s creativity led to him taking a paid partnership with Kalshi that would have been less remarkable for a lifestyle influencer. His audience held him to a different standard. He pulled the post within an hour and gave the money back. "In my mind, I'm talking to Black and brown people, and trans and immigrant populations," he told CJR. "People who already have a lot to deal with in this world. I don't feel right about making the news accessible to them and then turning around and asking them to support me financially." That's the tension at the heart of all of this. As Kevin put it: "At the end of the day, the only thing I really have is the audience's trust. If that's gone, none of this works."

Marissa Lovell's story is a good example of what the timeline actually looks like. Creator Spotlight talked to Marissa about From Boise, a twice-weekly local newsletter launched in March 2021. She hit 10,000 subscribers in her first year, which sounds great until you know that she was also juggling contract PR work and freelance clients the entire time to pay the bills. By mid-2025, she hadn't paid herself in months and was seriously considering going back to full-time employment. Then she made a critical hire, someone who could actually sell sponsorships, and revenue tripled in a single quarter. By the end of 2025, From Boise crossed $100,000 in revenue, nearly five years after she launched it.

That's a success story. And it took five years, a baby, a cashflow crisis, and the willingness to keep freelancing on the side the whole way through. Marissa is exactly the kind of creator journalist I'm talking about when I say the massive middle class: she built something real, she's earning a living from it, and she did it without an existing platform or a tech salary cushion. But nobody would call that timeline fast.

The people I've watched make this work almost always have some version of Marissa's story. They built before they leaped, or they had a runway (severance, a partner's income, savings) that gave them 12 to 18 months before the numbers needed to pencil out, or they kept a foot in freelance or consulting while the subscription side grew. The transition was a process, not an event.

The people I've watched struggle are the ones who, whether by choice or by layoff, found themselves doing the math at the moment of crisis and decided six months of savings was enough time to figure it out. Sometimes that's all the runway they had. And in my experience, it almost never is enough.

Here's what I want to push back on a little, even in my own framing: the onus shouldn't be entirely on the individual journalist to learn business skills, build a revenue strategy, and figure out the monetization puzzle solo with what is available now, today, in April 2026. We can do better. We can build a support system for creator journalists that helps them succeed. The wider business community and the journalism industrial complex need to build the infrastructure, tools, and business models to make this easier.

Some of that is starting to happen. At ONA, Nick Swyter from the New York Times led a session on how creator journalists can go after grant money, which is an increasingly interesting avenue for independent creators. But the philanthropic world is still playing catch-up in figuring out how to support and give money to creators who are mostly for-profit entities. The grant infrastructure was built for nonprofits, and a lot of creator journalists just don't fit neatly into those boxes. That's why I'm heartened to see the work that Lenfest is doing to bridge the gap between creators and newsrooms.

There are also people trying to solve the bundling problem. Michael Jarjour's Trustfnd model is an attempt to help creator journalists make money by bundling together and selling subscriptions, with the idea that there's strength in numbers. Think of it like if you took the Substack model of recommendations, but instead of recommending a gajillion other newsletters, you're saying, "Here are two or three that I think are really top quality. If you pay for all three of us together, you'll be supporting the kind of work you actually want to see in the world." It's early, but it's the kind of creative infrastructure-building that this space needs more of.

I'm not writing this to talk anyone out of making the leap. I run a community for people doing exactly that, and I believe in what we're building and that independent creator journalists are a growing part of the future of news and information. That’s why I partnered with Justin and Ryan Kellett to build The Independent Journalism Atlas, which is growing by leaps and bounds every day.

But I spend a lot of time in conversations with journalists who are weighing the jump, especially in weeks like this one when the layoff tracker keeps refreshing, and what I notice is that the conversations they most need to have almost never happen. The conversations about timeline, about which revenue streams take how long to build, about what the first 18 months actually look like financially and emotionally and logistically.

The creator journalism success stories are real. The ownership, the autonomy, the feeling of building something that's actually yours: I experience that every week and it's worth a lot. But the math is slower than the stories make it look, and the journalists most vulnerable to making the leap without adequate runway (the ones at the outlets that just announced cuts, the ones with the least savings, the least access to a financial cushion) are often the ones who need the honest version of this conversation the most.

In the Project C community, this is what we work on every day. We're continuing to do monthly training and programming, and for the rest of this year, we're going to hone in even more on the business side specifically. That includes sessions with coaches to help creators set up business plans and figure out how to get started with a real revenue strategy and with the builders who are trying to pioneer new paths to monetization for creator journos. We're also exploring partnerships with groups like Lion Publishers to bring to bear what they've learned working with independent news businesses, along with what organizations like the Independent Journalism Atlas and News Creator Corps are building. The roads are being paved. We just need to pave them faster.

If you're weighing the jump, or if you know someone who is, come be part of that work. Join the Project C community →

📌 Beehiiv just launched native podcasting — The short version: you can now host, distribute, and monetize your podcast on beehiiv. Auto-distribution to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Castro and more. (Also takes from: Semafor, TechCrunch)

📌 The Rise of a Spanish-Language News Influencer — The New Yorker profiles Carlos Eduardo Espina, who has built a massive following delivering news to Spanish-speaking audiences on TikTok.

📌 I Thought Paywalls Were Unethical. This Is Why I Started Paywalling. — In Lex Roman’s Revenue Rulebreaker, Project C member Kaitlyn Arford writes a piece that’s for you if you've ever felt like charging for your work makes you a bad person. Kaitlyn spent a year convinced that "good people make their content free" – and it nearly killed her newsletter. After a year of paywalling, she tripled monthly paid reader revenue.

📌 Inside the Daily Mail's Creator-Led Content Playbook — DMG Media hired 25+ creators and now produces 10–20 original videos a day across its social channels. Videos are averaging 250K–300K views and outperforming their traditional content.

📌 ChatGPT is the worst AI at crediting news outlets (per new study) — Nieman Lab covers a new study showing that all major AI models fail to properly attribute journalism, but ChatGPT is the most egregious. Relevant for creator journalists thinking about AI traffic and attribution — your work is feeding these systems either way.

📌 The Guardian is experimenting with republishing its food newsletter on Substack — Legacy outlets are finally starting to figure out that their own platforms aren't where their audiences are. Worth watching whether this becomes a broader pattern.

📌 Your open rate is a lie — Newsletter writers take note: Adam Ryan at A Media Operator on how email open rates are increasingly unreliable. If you're making decisions based on open rate data, this is worth reading.

📌 Shape the future of the journalism creator movement – Syracuse University is now accepting applications for an executive director for their new Center for the Creator Economy, a joint initiative of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

📌 Have you tried Surf yet? – If so, hit me back with your thoughts about this new platform that promises to build a one-stop-shopping social web experience for you and your followers. I’m going to goof around with it this weekend.

🎉 Bryan M. Vance was accepted for the National Press Foundation's Local Business Journalism Fellowship. Nine 🔥 emojis from the community. Congrats, Bryan!!

💸 Julia Barton (Continuous Wave) sent a fundraising ask to her readers this week — and nobody unsubscribed. "I asked for money and no one unsubscribed??! (yet) 😱" — Eight 💪 emojis from the community. A reminder that asking works.

🎙️ Ani Bundel hit 30 days since relaunching Telly Visions — and reports 71 paid subscribers and 3,902 free subscribers. That's a start-from-scratch comeback worth celebrating.

🏛️ Jayne Lytel was invited to serve as an advisory member of the National Press Club Journalism Institute's press freedom initiative. She called it "the best wins are unexpected." Congrats, Jayne!

🎤 Andy Dehnart (Reality Blurred) was selected for the AIR New Voices cohort — a podcast support and development program. Congrats, Andy!

📹 Vanessa Armstrong (TubeTalk) cold-emailed publicists she knew from her freelancing days – and landed an interview with the directors of the new Ken Burns-produced Thoreau documentary. "They said yes!" Five 🎉 emojis. This is how it works.

👕 Monique O. Madan (Two Can Be True) launched merch to fund her independent journalism — T-shirts, sweatshirts, and totes, launched at ONA26. She's also offering founding subscribers a sweatshirt if they sign up in person. Direct, scrappy, entrepreneurial. Go support her.