Note: Last week, we announced the Journalism Creators Startup Lab launch with our first North American cohort. In August, we’ll follow up with a cohort of journalism creators from the Middle East, Europe and Africa. If that sounds like you, find out more and fill out the interest form here. - Liz

Yesterday, I sat on a panel in front of a room full of biotech communicators (definition: heads of comms departments, agency people, the folks whose entire job is getting the right story about biotech developments to the right journalist/messenger). I’m writing about it today because it was a small window into something I think is genuinely good news for everyone reading this newsletter.

These are smart, experienced people and they kept circling the same questions: how much of a thing is indie creator journalism, how much do I have to pay attention to them and how do I get THEIR attention? The call was organized because these comms teams are starting to realize that the journalists who cover their issues aren't just in the trad media list anymore. They’re starting to see the power in pitching Katelyn Jetelina and Tara Parker-Pope (who was also on the panel) vs. the Times or Prevention.

I shared with them what you already know: One in three journalists now publishes independently. Three thousand five hundred newspapers have closed since 2005. Audiences are increasingly turning to social platforms for news. Journalism creators are on Substack and YouTube and Bluesky building loyal, paying audiences around exactly the topics these brands care about, but to a comms team working off a 2015 contact list, creator journalists are effectively invisible.

What's interesting is that they’re curious. They know they need to be here. Boeing posted a job this month for a News Creator Engagement Lead. Muck Rack's latest numbers say 82% of creator journalists report that some stories start with a pitch, and roughly a third of you already count PR people as essential partners. The PR pitch process for the wider influencer ecosystem is already well established. Now those same comms pros are starting to understand that creator journalists are a different beast.

Here’s what I spent some time explaining to the biotech comms folks: While an influencer's worth is reach and aesthetic, a creator journalist’s is credibility and trust. An influencer can pivot from skincare to home goods to whatever's converting this week; you can't – and that's not a limitation. It’s actually how you’ve built a solid, trusting relationship with your audience. The instant your readers or viewers suspect you've been bought, they leave, and their subscription dollars and potential as an advertiser-friendly audience goes with them. A bad brand deal costs an influencer one awkward post. It costs you everything. Which is exactly why your “yes” is worth more than any influencer's: the selectivity that can feel like a constraint is actually the product. The trust you've built is the asset. Not the follower count.

We’re starting to develop the language to explain that nuance:

For years the creator-economy conversation has been measured in reach: who's got the biggest audience, the best engagement rate, the most reposts and – having lived through it – chasing those numbers didn’t provide a ton of value for brands in trad media. That goes double for the creator journalism ecosystem. The valuable thing was never the size of the audience, but the quality of the relationship – and creator journalism businesses are built around trust and loyalty. It’s a special thing to see. Just this week, WTFJHT’s Matt Kiser published his Summer 2026 reader update where he details all of the tweaks he’s made over the last quarter in response to audience feedback.

The risk is that the PR world flattens all of this back into “influencer with a press pass” – that the rush to work with you erodes the exact thing that made you worth working with. That's the line we all have to hold. It's why disclosure matters (I wrote a whole thing about that last month). It's why “creator journalists are not influencers” deserves to be a sentence in every media kit and why I added that distinction to Project C’s official definition of a creator journalist.

And full transparency: explaining this distinction to brands and comms teams is now part of what I do – it's work The Independent Journalism Atlas takes on, and if you're curious how we're describing you to the people on the other side of the table, that page is public.

So if you take one thing from me this week: the outside world is finally coming around to what you already knew. Your credibility a massive asset to you, and brands. Guard it like the treasure it is – because everyone else is starting to realize your superpower.

📌 Kevin Roose and Casey Newton sign with UTA — The follow to last week's announcement that Roose is leaving the NYT> Hard Fork wraps in August, the two are building their own shingle, and now they've got agency muscle behind it. Again, publishers/editors need to rethink how they incentivize top talent to stick around. 👉 Variety

📌 Reuters Institute: how news creators went mainstream — The deeper chapter from this year's Digital News Report in a piece from Nic Newman, on the global rise of news creators. The stat that should reframe every “creators vs. journalists” argument: people who use creators trust them more than they trust journalists. 👉 Reuters Institute

📌 beehiiv opens the books on paid newsletters — The numbers our community will actually use: paid revenue on the platform hit ~$19M (up 138%), $10/month is still the default price regardless of size, and annual plans are the single biggest churn-killer there is. The gap between the top 10% and everyone else is execution, not luck. 👉 The State of Paid Newsletters 2026

📌 Evan Armstrong on building a premium one-person newsletter — A great profile of The Leverage: $15/month (steeper than NYT or WSJ, on purpose), three revenue legs, and a quality obsession that includes grading his own past predictions with AI and vowing to shut down if his accuracy drops below 85%. His mantra (“the number one thing you can do to increase your income is increase your prices”) is worth taping to your monitor. 👉 Creator Spotlight

📌 Cloudflare and beehiiv give independent publishers AI crawl controls — You can now decide whether the AI bots get to scrape your newsletter for free. A small piece of leverage handed back to the little guy. 👉 BusinessWire

📌 What 667 news creators say is actually hard — News Creator Corps mined 600+ fellowship applications and found the biggest challenge isn't visibility or monetization — it's misinformation and eroding trust (57% named it), with AI concern up more than 7x in under a year and burnout hitting full-timers and part-timers at nearly identical rates. 👉 News Creator Corps

📌 Forbes launches a Creator Network — Another legacy brand deciding to build with creators instead of competing against them. File it next to CNN hiring Kyla Scanlon as the “the institutions are assimilating, not fighting” beat. 👉 Forbes

📌 “Huge if true”: an indie outfit hiring a full-time production manager — Cleo Abram’s wildly successful Huge If True YouTube channel is hiring with a starting package of $120k-145k based on experience, plus bonuses. 👉 Google Forms

📌 6AM City runs 400 newsletters with no editorial staff — Abandon hope, all ye who enter here: A provocative (and ominous) counterpoint to everything I just wrote above about the value of a human, trusted voice. Read it and tell me where you land. 👉 A Media Operator

🏆 Nicole Jeanine Johnson (Nicole the News Lady) won two Peter Lisagor Awards for her investigative reporting. Investigative accountability work, done independently, recognized by the field. We're so proud of you!

🐺 Soleil Ho and the Coyote Media Collective landed a terrific CJR feature on their Bay Area political-independent-media project. Go read it.

📰 Monique O. Madan (Two Can Be True) published her second partnership with a local newsroom as an independent — proof that the indie-plus-newsroom collaboration model keeps getting more real.

🎬 James Bareham (MBH4H) shipped his first editorial package: dueling essays on whether AI is good or bad, argued through Arrival and Elysium. A genuinely fun format experiment.

📣 And a huge thanks to Jennifer Chowdhury, who plugged Project C from the stage at an IRE panel! Love to see this community evangelizing in the wild.

📹 Absolutely loving this Instagram vid from Journalism Creators Startup Lab member Arianny Valles!