YouTube content creator Johnny Harris shows how independent journalism can thrive

Johnny Harris speaking in Perugia

Credit: Francesco Cuoccio #ijf25 via Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-ND 4.0).

Independent journalist Johnny Harris has about 6.5m subscribers on the video platform YouTube. He learned his trade at Vox doing innovative visual storytelling projects, but built his own success from highly-produced, 40-minute documentaries on all sorts of obscure topics that attract millions of views.

"I don't think I would have ever made it as a journalist in the old way because I wouldn't have been able to fit within the norms of traditional journalism," he concedes at last week's International Journalism Festival in Perugia.

He was talking about the emerging content creator economy that journalists can take advantage of. This bustling space has given him a place - and an audience - for detailed explainers on complex topics that might struggle to work for traditional media.

"Especially at the beginning, you have to be on a treadmill for a lot of years," he explains.

"You have to publish a lot of stuff to win those views and at the end of the day you have to play the game of the attention economy and a lot of us hate that because we want to do the Lord's work. We want to do journalism."

However, journalism skills do not always translate to business skills. He has to learn skills that the average journalist would not possess: management, hiring, finances, brand deals, and critically, delegation.

Over time, he has been able to grow a team of 17 to keep his operation running smoothly. He now has the luxury to spend months on "loss leaders" like a piece on deep sea mining, which he could not afford to do even three years ago.

The workload reality

Harris is trying now to become less dependent on advertising funding, and grow his paid-subscriber base. Reason being is that algorithms can quickly incentivise which stories to focus on and which ones to tackle less frequently.

Speaking on the panel, Taylor Lorenz, founder of User Magazine tech newsletter and host of the weekly tech podcast Power User, gave another reason.

It is easy for journalists to get caught in a constant publishing cycle because they are afraid of losing subscribers and readers. Social media has increased people's expectancy of content output.

"I have been very nervous not to overly affiliate with Substack or be seen as a Substacker, even though it definitely is how I primarily monetise right now because I'm still getting started," she says.

"But I'm trying to kind of hedge it with growing my YouTube, monetising my podcast, and sort of juggling all these other platforms."

Making independent journalism financially viable (again)

Noosphere is a monetisation platform for journalists that is trying to solve this exact conundrum. Rather than appease algorithms, it provides a way to go to direct to subscribers.

Founder and CEO Jane Ferguson, also an Emmy and Peabody award-winning journalist emphasised that bundling journalists together on a single platform provides better value for subscribers.

"I mourn the death of many legacy media organisations," Ferguson says. "I've been privileged to work with extraordinary ones, but the business model is not working, certainly in broadcasting. And not only can we fix that, but we can actually make journalism a lucrative career once again."

What not to do

When asked how to avoid failure in the creator economy, Harris offered reassurance: "The reason why 90 percent of startups fail is because they are trying to reinvent or start something totally new. We don't have to do that. There is a demand for good information. There always has been."

His recommendation was to find a specific niche that resonates personally: "Find the niche that lights you up, that you love, that you feel like you could do for decades."

Ferguson advised journalists to "literally just figure out how much you need to make and then just do the maths backwards" to determine how many subscribers or viewers are needed.

Lorenz warned about unexpected costs, noting that beyond production expenses, legal protection can be substantial burdens for independent journalists. Healthcare, too, for American journalists.

We used a transcription tool, Good Tape, and a generative AI ClaudeAI, to help structure this article before it was edited by a human

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