Legacy media shouldn’t see social media ‘news creators’ as rivals, but as an “opportunity for collaboration with mutual benefit” which could help them reach the younger audiences they’re struggling to attract, FT Strategies head of insights George Montagu has said.
The FT Strategies team, together with WAN-IFRA, has spent six months mapping the burgeoning news media landscape that now exists outside of the ‘legacy’ newsbrands for The News Creators Project, funded by the Google News Initiative.
The research, published this month, identifies news creators as individuals or small teams who are consistently creating and sharing news-related content across primarily social, video or digital-first platforms, such as TikTok, YouTube, Substack and Instagram.
Three broad categories of “news creator” were outlined: Investigators, who uncover new information; Explainers, who help make sense of news events; and Commentators, who interpret and react to the news with their own opinions and insights.
Some of them can have millions of followers and work across multiple platforms.
News creators have ‘outsized influence over public opinion’
“News creators are rising in importance and they’re offering something really valuable to audiences,” said George Montagu, head of insights at FT Strategies.
“It became obvious to everyone with the latest US election that creators, and people in the alternative or the social media sphere, have an outsized influence over public opinion and the outcomes of key events, like elections.
“The Reuters Institute and their 2025 Digital News Report backs that up – a lot more people referenced US podcaster Joe Rogan as a source [of news] than some of the big mainstream news brands. That woke everyone up to the idea that these people are not just speaking to a few strange people out on the streets, they are actually speaking to millions and millions of people and are very trusted individuals.”
The FT’s own 2023 report, Next Gen News, also found that young people valued individuals over brands when it came to the news. “Who are those individuals? How do they operate. What is it that they’re doing? These all need to be answered as a result,” said Montagu.
Answering those questions has been the work of The News Creators Project, itself part of a wider Google project looking at Global News Gaps and the emerging news providers filling them, of which news creators are a part. Google’s parent company Alphabet owns YouTube.
‘It takes millions of followers to make thousands of dollars’
“There’s a general mischaracterisation that news creators are just people on TikTok doing 20-second clips of reading out the news from CNN, or other sources,” said Montagu.
“That is a total mischaracterisation, because there’s so much variety, there are so many different levels of value, so many different approaches, so many different types of people. And so we really wanted to understand a bit more about that.”
The research involved interviews with more than 15 creators, among them V Spehar, creator of Under The Desk News, with some 4.5m followers across TikTok and Instagram. The project also formed an advisory board with 25 members across multiple platforms and countries.
Despite the large followings of some news creators, the research found that many have second jobs to support themselves and their work.
“One of the biggest things that struck me was quite how financially precarious these people are,” said Montagu.
“It can take millions of followers per month to make thousands of dollars per month. That means you can’t hire anyone else until you reach this huge level of terminal velocity in terms of views.” And any algorithm change can scupper views and reach, and so income.
The FT has created a Financial Sustainability Diagnostic for News Creators, which will help them to assess their financial sustainability and identify areas for improvement.
Montagu said that many news creators were “not doing it for the money or fame,” but for many of them it was born of their “enthusiasm for helping people understand the world around them”. He said a number of them talked about how publishing something inaccurate would “feel like the death of me” and a betrayal of their audience. “We heard that time and time again. They were uncompromising, many of them, with the approach they took because they felt this weight of personal responsibility on behalf of their audiences.”
‘Rising tide lifts all boats in information ecosystem’
But as news creators have often not had formal journalism training or experience in a newsroom, they operate under their own editorial code. As part of the project, the FT has worked with news creators to build a framework centred on accuracy, integrity and transparency, which they can use. These information guidelines also come with a recommendation to platforms to add or restore functions such as overlaid text and links out, which will make it easier to issue corrections and be transparent on sourcing.
But why is a legacy newsbrand like the FT engaged in research to help rivals on social media?
Montagu said the FT has “always felt that the information ecosystem is ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’ situation”, adding: “If audiences and people are engaging with information and news, ultimately that helps everyone… I don’t think it has to be a zero sum game necessarily.”
He said newsbrands had to accept the fact that “everyone can publish content online and reach millions of people, potentially, if what they produce is important and engaging” and “many people do things that look like journalism, whether they’re a journalist or not”.
Distribution and attention, once a matter of “if you write it, they will come” for newspapers, was no longer guaranteed and highly competitive, Montagu said.
Legacy media and news creators ‘need each other’
But, he added: “There’s room for both [legacy media and news creators] and they need each other in some ways, at the moment at least.
“A lot of news creators don’t have a dependable source of income, so partnering with news organisations that can pay them to produce one video a week on their behalf, that would be a lifeline for many creators and also brilliant for news organisations, because a lot of the journalists in the building right now aren’t social experts and it’s very difficult to deliver on social if you don’t understand and immerse yourself in those platforms.
“And to the same extent, news organisations need to reach younger audiences – they’re finding it very difficult at the moment. What better way than someone that’s already got three million captive people that listen to everything they say? And it’s not expensive, it’s very easy, and it’s probably better sometimes than building a million-pound video studio in the basement.”
The News Creators Project report, produced by FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA as part of the Google News Initiative, is free to access and download.
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