‘I’m playing the long game’: Journalists are striking out alone and discovering the business is toughest beat of all

“It is not one-way traffic with journalists leaving to become creators,” said Laura Darcey, research analyst at Enders Analysis. “Journalists that have grown up within legacy media can find new freedoms and monetization opportunities by branching out alone, but we’re not about to see a mass exodus. Journalists will find themselves competing in the broader attention and subscription economy where challenges of subscription fatigue and limited discretionary spending apply.”

Tara Palmeri is working through exactly that learning curve — and it’s starting to pay off. 

After years at ABC News, the New York Post and Politico, Palmeri left media startup Puck last March and launched her own YouTube channel. Within a year she’d garnered a million watch hours, built a Substack that broke into the top 100 newsletters on the platform and launched her fourth podcast sponsored by Sony Music. Her free subscriber count went from 1,000 to 150,000 after she shifted from breaking news toward commentary.

“I’m playing the long game,” she said. “I left a well-paying job to do this. I’ve been willing to take that bet for a while.”

Despite the success, the business model around her brand is still taking shape. Hard-hitting news can be an anathema to image-conscious marketers, making subscriptions the likely foundation for the foreseeable future. For now, she’s leaning on the fwd. network, a women-focused business collective to bridge the gap while she builds toward something more permanent. The network works with a range of partners, from Fortune 500 companies to direct-to-consumer brands.

“Tara brings a level of access, credibility, and directness that’s hard to replicate,” said Cathy Csukas CEO of AdLarge and the fwd. network. “We’re currently getting brands in categories like clothing, home goods, insurance and health, proving her appeal extends beyond traditional news and into lifestyle.”

Lighter fare fares well

It’s not just hard-hitting news that’s performing well outside of traditional media pipelines. Digiday spoke with several other creators who make informative content about sports, geopolitics, and science about their independent successes.

Take Dave Jorgenson, for instance. He played a major role in building up the Washington Post’s TikTok presence before realizing he had hit a ceiling at the news organization. 

“There were things I could do as a news creator I just couldn’t do at the Washington Post. By 2022 it had become about making tons of videos and building a bigger audience, and I had larger ambitions than that,” Jorgenson said. 

He left in August in 2025 to launch Local News International, a Daily Show-inspired YouTube channel, and has since grown to 320,000 YouTube subscribers and 290,00 on TikTok with a brand partnership with Harry’s razors already in place. 

In that time, Jorgenson has learned that his viewers are more interested in deep dives, long-form videos that present the news in a concise but not condescending manner than most legacy news outlets realize.

“I look at TikTok Reels and YouTube shorts and the wider, long-form content on these platforms as well as when there was CBS, ABC, NBC back in the ‘40s and ‘50s. These are now the news channels,” he said. 

Adam Cole concurred. He is one half of Howtown, a science-based YouTube channel, and a former NPR and Vox employee who worked on both publications’ YouTube output. 

“The risks of going independent started to look smaller and smaller compared to the risks of staying at a media corporation where you don’t own what you create,” Cole said. “We decided to just go for it.”

Cole and his Howtown partner, Joss Fong (also a former Vox video employee), launched their channel in May 2024, with the plan to “try it” for two years — a timeframe based on the money they had saved. 

Almost exactly two years later, Howtown currently has 1.3 million subscribers on YouTube, and Cole said the duo’s decent income (he declined to share details) is split evenly between AdSense, Patreon, sponsors, and grants. “It’s gone better than I’ve expected,” Cole said.

Fellow Vox alumnus Sam Ellis reached a similar conclusion by a different route.

He started working at Vox in 2016 as an animator and editor, staying there for seven years and learning the mechanics of digital journalism. But he said that, when his former coworker Johnny Harris approached him to start their own YouTube channel together, it was a “no brainer.” Harris was able to pull some sponsors (Nord VPN and Ground News) from his 7.1 million subscriber channel called Newpress over to the new channel, named Search Party, to help bolster revenue.

Search Party covers sports and geopolitics, a combo Ellis admitted is “odd.” Nevertheless, it’s worked thus far. The channel has amassed over 915,000 subscribers over the last two and a half years with only 41 videos (averaging around 15 minutes long) on the channel.

“Because of the niche we have, I’m able to do some interesting stuff, and treat Search Party as my long-form magazine that comes out twice a month,” Ellis said. “I’m trying to bring my audience the most interesting story that I’ve been able to find over the last few months.”

Creators building their own news networks

The independent journalist isn’t a new phenomenon but it’s never been a more viable one. The trend has been building for years. First it was bloggers, then podcasters, then newsletter writers, then YouTubers. Each wave was dismissed as a niche until it wasn’t. What’s different now is that the infrastructure has matured, the audiences have splintered around individual voices and the money has followed. 

Legacy publishers, meanwhile, have spent years cutting staff, narrowing editorial mandates and tightening corporate control — accelerating the exodus rather than stemming it. 

The journalists leaving today aren’t just frustrated, they’re calculating. Platforms have made distribution free, newsletters have made monetization straightforward and audiences have shown they’ll pay for a trusted voice over a trusted brand. 

Former Polygon staffers Maddy Myers and Zöe Hannah launched feminist-focused gaming site Mothership three months ago, tripling their pre-launch paid subscriber target in a fortnight and reaching 2,200 subscribers — a number they’d hoped to hit in two years. But before publishing a word, they secured $2 million in libel insurance and pro bono legal review, a reminder that independence means absorbing risks that major publishers absorb for their journalists.

“We’d love to be able to work with advertisers in the future…but we had to get that legal stuff button up before we even launched,” Myers explained. 

Growth is now the common thread across the creators Digiday spoke with. Search Party hired a full-time employee and secured studio space in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood for World Cup coverage — a step up, Ellis noted, from filming in his apartment. Palmeri hired a full time writer for The Red Letter. The bet, it seems, is starting to look like a business. That said, the reluctance of the journalists Digiday spoke with to discuss actual earnings is a reminder of how much remains unresolved. 

“While going it alone creates a direct avenue for reaching a journalist’s most ardent fans, and global distribution platforms create meaningful scale effects, many independent journalists have small audiences, with most Substack newsletters remaining small scale in terms of paid subscriber numbers,” said Enders’ Darcey.