Former CNN anchor Don Lemon says people have proved “more than willing” to pay for independent journalism as long as it is “authentic”.
Lemon streams two videos a day (at 10am and 5pm on the East Coast US) with interviews and discussions covering topics from “social issues and race to current events and the fight for democracy”. He has also just launched a daily newsletter round up of stories on Substack.
He has just crossed the ten million follower mark across Instagram, Tiktok, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Substack, Threads and Bluesky. His streams also go out as podcasts on Apple and Spotify.
Lemon Media Network generates revenue via Youtube’s revenue share (channel owners take 55% of money from advertising on their videos), brand sponsorships, memberships on Youtube and Substack, and speaking engagements. It has no outside investment.
Lemon told Press Gazette in an interview on Wednesday: “Yes, I’m profitable but you have to manage that. You have to make sure you scale the business in order to make a profit.
“I think the mistake that many people make is that they try to do it through a broadcast news model, and it doesn’t work for independent media.”
He explained that his team remains just five people, including himself.
Expanding team
He has just hired a Washington DC correspondent, Daniel Grimes formerly of Spectrum News, to enable greater coverage of the upcoming midterm elections and then the 2028 presidential election.
“I could have done it myself, but I’m already burning the candle at not both ends, but four ends, from the top, bottom and the sides,” Lemon said.
He has also hired a director of operations, Douglas Robins joining from McKinsey & Company, to lead day-to-day operations, business strategy and analytics.
Lemon said Robins would help him “see what’s working and what’s not, to analyse algorithms, and all those things are very important when you’re doing independent media, because you’re working with different platforms, and not everything works on every platform. It’s not one size fits all.”
Lemon also uses social media contractors to help cut up content for different platforms.
“If you can afford it, I would say do it,” he advised other independent players. “And if you can’t, I would still say, try to find someone on your team who can address social media and have that be their sole mission, or job description, to do that.”
Instead of worrying that he and other creators have become too reliant on one platform for their business, Lemon said: “I think Youtube is the biggest television network in the world, and so it would behove people to get on Youtube.”
He said Youtube is “one of our biggest profit centres, but it is also one of our biggest distribution centres”.
Paid memberships ‘keep us powered’
Lemon said his channel is a “shining example of memberships” on Youtube where users pay from $4.99 (£3.66) to $9.99 (£7.33) per month (plus a $49.99 (£36.70) option) for perks such as members-only live chats, the ability to call in when he is streaming, shoutouts, and members-only shows. The Substack edition costs $8 (£5.87) per month.
Lemon said memberships are “significant” for the business and said he has “no idea how many but it’s enough to help to keep us powered”.
He said: “In this environment, people are more than willing to support independent media or journalists who are doing things that are authentic and appealing.
“And I think that the audience, whether it’s in the US or wherever, is hungry for that, because they feel let down by corporate media.”
Lemon did not unreservedly recommend going independent to other journalists, however, and said it was a “personal choice” people would have to make.
He said: “I don’t know if more people should be doing independent media. I think more people are going to be forced to do independent media as the business model for corporate media continues to diminish. Not everybody can do it and it is hard work.
“You have to be tenacious, and you have to be always on. I work 24 hours a day. If I have an idea in the middle of the night, I’ll text or email my team.”
He spoke on stage at the Truth Tellers Summit in London at about 12.40pm on Wednesday and met Press Gazette shortly afterwards. The rest of the day, he explained, included speaking to his team about guests for his show, doing vox pops asking Londoners how they feel about Donald Trump and America in the wake of the Iran war, doing his live show at 10am ET (3pm BST), filming videos for paying members who receive extra content, and planning and putting out his second show of the day at 5pm ET (10pm BST).
“So you are constantly working when you’re in independent media. You can’t take your foot off the gas, and you have to be really nimble and be ready to pivot at any moment, because the news changes just that fast, and you don’t necessarily have the built-in audience of corporate media.”
Lemon added that not all journalists would be “capable or qualified” to go independent and that it was “a very serious decision to make, because it’s hard to get into, and then it’s hard to get out of, because people will say, well, what happened? You just shut down, or you just stopped doing it.”
Lemon said he has no plans to slow down: “I’m here for the long haul. I’m a soldier, I’m gonna fight.”
Lemon facing conspiracy charge after covering immigration protest
In January Lemon was arrested, alongside four other people, while covering an immigration enforcement protest at a church in Minnesota. He has since pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to deprive rights and interfering with religious freedoms by allegedly obstructing someone’s First Amendment rights by force.
Lemon told the Truth Tellers Summit that the slow-moving case is “taxing” on him and his family but said: “The real thing that worries me is the attack on the First Amendment and on freedom of press, because the moment people start telling you, which they do in authoritarian countries, what you can report on and where you can report then the whole thing is over for press freedom.
“And so this case is bigger than me, way bigger than me. It has ramifications for not just broadcast journalism, print journalism, making magazines and also publishing where they can go through things and say, you can’t report this, you can’t talk about this.”
Police seized and have not yet returned Lemon’s phone. “I don’t imagine that they would give up [on the case],” he said. “But the thing that gives me solace is that whatever they’re looking for is not there.”
Lemon said he had not planned to go to the church protest but that he had asked his team: “Hey, I’m going to be too early to go to the federal detention centre so is there anything else I can cover?”
The messages on the phone would therefore show this was “not a conspiracy”, he said.
He added that he did not believe it would be a case at all if Donald Trump did not dislike him. The US president previously called the journalist “the dumbest man on television”. Lemon said the case “became about me” even though he was not involved with the protest but “because I’m there it makes a good story, a good case for them”.
Cancelled by Elon Musk
Lemon was fired from CNN after 17 years in 2023 after accusations of misogyny, later receiving a settlement reported to be worth about $24.5m (£18m) to cover the three-and-a-half years that had been left on his contract.
Among the controversies leading up to his departure, Lemon said on CNN’s morning show in February 2023 that then-51-year-old Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was not “in her prime” as women are “considered to be in their prime” in their 20s, 30s and 40s, adding: “That’s not according to me… don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just saying what the facts are.”
Lemon said he was glad the clip was played at the Truth Tellers Summit, telling the event: “I said to the audience, that’s not according to me. That’s the way society treats women. Somehow everyone thinks that was my sentence.”
Lemon first started his venture on X in 2024 under a deal where he was paid by the platform and promised a share of advertising. But the show on X was prematurely cancelled after an interview he carried out with the platform’s owner Elon Musk. He told the summit: “I’m not sure that that was such a good relationship to have, considering the toxicity of his social media platform.”
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