Seven Things TV News Can Learn From Creators (2025)

Editor’s note: This post is part of News From Creatorland, a column where journalist and entrepreneur Fernando Hurtado shares learnings and observations from the frontlines of creator journalism.

As I was preparing to leave NBC to launch my independent YouTube channel In The Hyphen, I had a few informational interviews. All of them were extremely enlightening, but one of them sticks with me to this day.

That conversation was with Cleo Abram, the former Vox journalist who in 2022 launched Huge If True, where she tells optimistic stories about science and technology. I didn’t record the conversation, so I don’t have verbatim quotes, but this was the gist of it:

“When are you launching?” I remember her asking me.

“As soon as I have five long-form videos in the can,” I said. “That’ll give me a nice production buffer.”

“Five? That’s too many,” she said. “You want to be listening to your audience in real-time. Having too many videos pre-produced will prevent that. I would have max two.”

That piece of advice went against much of what I’d been practicing at my job at NBC. As a manager of digital video, part of my job was overseeing production of a few evergreen series. With those, the goal was always to have as many episodes pre-produced as possible before launching. The other half of my job was producing breaking news videos for the NBC and Telemundo stations, where you simply can’t prepare anything in advance, so I tried to get control wherever I could.

Since that call with Abram, I’ve learned so much about running a creator-model journalism business, many lessons I would’ve found helpful while still working in legacy media. I’m sharing some of my learnings here, and I’m also sharing learnings from other creators.

1. Find A Niche

When I was preparing to launch In The Hyphen, I listened to as many episodes of The Colin & Samir Show as I could in the span of a year.

The show is hosted by Samir Chaudry and Colin Rosenblum and features interviews all types of creators about their career, business and audience

One question they ask almost every guest is “how did you find your niche?”

Every single creator they interview has a niche, a hyper-specific topic they cover or talk about on their YouTube channel. For Abram, it’s optimistic tech and science journalism. For Michelle Khare, it’s completing daredevil challenges and adventures.

One thing that helped me identify my niche was to do as Chaudry and Rosenblum said in an X thread: “Look for what the audience already has and what you can give them that is better and different.”

That helped me identify my niche of covering U.S. Latinos with deeply researched, visually rich English-language stories, and it’s a way of thinking I wish I’d adopted while still at NBC.

Niches are similar to reporter beats, but they don’t have to apply to a specific person. They can apply to the station or brand as a whole. Executives in the local TV news industry might think their niche is already determined for them. If you’re a local news station in Dallas, it’s natural to think your niche is local Dallas news. But when that is also your competitors’ niche, it’s a good idea to go deeper.

You see news stations get close to doing this when they launch robust marketing campaigns around their investigative teams or their team of meteorologists. That’s a good start, but I would encourage executives to think about “how” their teams do what they do to further define the niche. How does your investigative team cover stories differently than everybody else? Are they experts at making white board explainers about complex topics? Does every single story use augmented reality?

2. Use Comments As An Assignment Desk

My first job out of college was with Sinclair’s now defunct Circa outlet. The editorial meetings were some of my favorite parts of that job. Colleagues would share news tips and pitches. It was a great way to get a sense of what has happening in the news cycle and identify places where our coverage could add value to our target millennial demographic.

At least for me, the ideas I pitched usually came from wires, the assignment desk or posts in obscure corners of the internet.

But one place I never really looked for story ideas until now: the comments.

Because I’ve built a defined niche with In The Hyphen, my audience knows what kinds of stories I cover, and they don’t hesitate to pitch ideas to me. One of my favorite comments I’ve ever received was on a video about Mexico’s nutrition labels. It’s a 1,000-word comment with 30 suggestions for my next video.

One of the ideas mentioned validated a pitch I had hastily written down a few months back but had put on the back burner, planning to launch it later in the year after I got to what I thought were better ideas.

After reading that user’s comment, I decided to prioritize that video and release it earlier. If he’s interested in this topic, I thought, it might be a sign that other subscribers are, too. The result was this video about how Latino parents who aren’t fluent in Spanish are raising Spanish-fluent kids. As of this writing, it’s my second best-performing video.

Listening to viewers about what they’d like to see investigated has created a nice feedback loop for me, and it’s something reporters at local TV stations can help a newsroom effort through the comments sections on their YouTube, TikTok and Instagram posts.

3. Content Is King. So Is Consistency

By and large, the No. 1 thing I heard in all the informational interviews I did before launching my channel was this: Be consistent.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re posting three videos a day or three videos a month,” I was told. “Just be consistent in your output.”

I’ve since realized why they said that. I don’t have a high-volume output, but posting one long-form video and four short vertical videos every two weeks has helped me gain a small but growing audience.

More than that, though, it’s helped me gain a small but growing faction of return viewers who show up for every upload and let me know they are doing so in the comments.

Traditional newsrooms are good about consistently putting on a 5 p.m. newscast, but that consistency rarely translates to the digital realm. Yes, many newsrooms consistently post a lot of content on social media, but some good questions to ask yourself next would be: What kind of content am I consistently putting out on social? Is there a specific format my viewers can expect on my YouTube channel every Tuesday?

4. Don’t Break Your Audience’s Trust

This tip comes from Phil Edwards, a former Vox journalist who makes history, business and technology videos on YouTube.

“Business-wise, I really have a sense of what lines I can’t cross with my audience,” he said. “I have my own personal sponsorship preferences and red lines, but my audience also alerts me to the brands that would violate my trust with them (so I’ve avoided that). Many traditional journalism outlets have such a church/state divide that they end up booking sponsorships that alienate their brand’s audience because it advertises scammy or exploitative products.”

5. Consider Equity-Based Compensation Models

When it comes to creators and creator journalists, Francis Zierer might be one of the top experts. He hosts and writes Creator Spotlight, a Beehiiv podcast and newsletter featuring interviews with creators.

“If there’s one thing legacy TV companies can learn from how creators run their businesses, it’s a scaling, equity-based compensation model,” Zierer said.

He points to the deal comedian Macy Gillam just signed with Morning Brew. According to The Publish Press, Gillam and her reps at UTA negotiated a creator contract with the outlet that nearly doubles her compensation. “​​It includes a cut of all show revenue, from merch to advertising, that can increase based on video performance,” The Publish Press wrote.

This deal addresses a pain point many journalism creators might have, according to Zierer. “The best creators are entrepreneurs driven in part by a financial upside they might never be able to achieve in any traditional media job,” he said. “If you want to attract these people, make sure their compensation scales with them.

“Some creators never want to be part of a larger organization and only want to build their own business,” Zierer added. “But there are so many creators out there with immense creative talent who might lack the requisite marketing, sales and business skills to truly capitalize on it. Most people can’t do it all. I’d urge legacy TV companies to build excellent talent scouting functions to identify those people.”

6. Humor Might Have A Place In Your Content Strategy

Nicole Phillip and I used to work together at NBCUniversal, specifically with the Gen Z and millennial news network NBCLX. She was a social media manager for the network before leaving to join Hubspot.

In 2024, she left that job to go independent and create travel content anchored in her experience as a Black woman. Her journey as a creator has taught her to embrace something she felt she had to repress working at places like ABC News.

“I’ve learned humor and short quips are a great way to get people of all ages to digest tough topics and return for more,” she said. “The industry really needs to master this type of wit. Legacy media should learn how to address certain issues with the right amount of levity to draw in people who may have otherwise tuned out entirely. That’s how you earn that ‘cool’ factor. Usually, when legacy media tries to do humor it’s cringe, dad-joke-level ledes or kickers, and younger audiences don’t respond well to that.”

7. Create For Reader Loyalty

Lindsey Stanberry spent much of her career explaining business and finance news through Fortune, CNBC Make It and Refinery29.

She left the traditional media landscape in 2013 to launch The Purse, a newsletter about “money, motherhood, work and relationships.”

One of her biggest learnings has been rethinking how she views distribution channels. That learning is inspired by flashbacks to the “pivot to video” many media companies went through around 2015.

“Rarely when creating content to feed a distribution channel did we think about what our audience wants, and as a result, it’s been difficult for brands to maintain any kind of reader loyalty,” Stanberry said. “If every outlet is writing the same stories, why would a reader feel any loyalty to a publication? And as an extension, why would they pay for a subscription when they can find essentially the same story for free on another platform.”

For Stanberry, the solution for traditional media companies is thinking about her reader first.

“They really need to understand who their audience is and focus on creating content that makes people want to come back to the site day after day. Yes, we still need distribution channels, but it’s a mistake to write a story for a distribution channel and not a reader.”

I think an example of Stanberry putting this into practice is her Home Economics series, where she takes a deep, unfiltered dive into the finances of a random household in the United States.

Readers submit their household profile for consideration via this Google Form, and she publishes it via her usual newsletter. More than a year later, the series is resonating. It’s on its 25th installment, and it’s not unusual for those editions to get 75 or 100 comments. It’s even inspired readers to mention it on Reddit.

That is a clear example of a journalist putting the reader first and giving them what they want. If there is another pivot to video, Stanberry could adapt the series to fit that medium if she wanted to, but she doesn’t have to.