What creators want newsroom leaders to know about running successful partnerships from start to finish

Maya Srikrishnan
Maya Srikrishnan is a researcher for News Creator Corps.

One-in-five Americans get most of their news from social media – a number that’s even higher with younger users. Roughly three-quarters of news creators have no background or current affiliation with a news organization. 

Creators produce and share original content on social media platforms, ranging from sharing news and history to reviewing and selling products. News on social media often comes from mainstream media organizations and established journalists, but a new type of information provider has emerged: the news creator.

In the information-focused creator world, there are still different buckets of creators. Some are employed by newsrooms, such as journalists that have built an online following for their content or creators specifically hired to improve the newsroom’s social media presence. Some creators are independent journalists, who have degrees or previous experience in journalism, but now aren’t affiliated with a news organization. Finally, there are news creators, who share fact-based information and news, but have no background in journalism. This guide—along with the programming from News Creator Corps—specifically focuses on news creators who do not have a background in journalism.

While some newsrooms and independent creators have embarked on partnerships, it remains a source of largely untapped potential for both sides. There are many ways newsrooms can work with a creator. They can amplify your reporters’ work. You can interview them as sources. You can have your journalists be interviewed by them on social media livestreams as an expert. You can have them create original content for you. You can have them participate in or co-host events. The manner you choose will depend on your newsroom’s needs, resources and openness, the work of the creator and the content itself.

In a small survey conducted by NCC, newsrooms indicated that the primary benefit of working with creators is audience expansion, particularly with younger and more racially diverse audiences, to reach beyond most mainstream newsrooms’ typical audience demographics. They also recognized that many creators are trusted messengers to their communities and can more effectively share reporting and other information with those communities. Collaborating with creators is seen as a way to energize social media output and test new approaches for audience engagement. 

Creators, surveyed separately by NCC, said partnering with newsrooms could provide them access to verified, up-to-date and accurate information and editorial resources, like editors to bounce ideas off of or to help edit scripts and videos. They also recognized that newsrooms have different audiences and could help them reach people they are not reaching. Collaboration strengthens the accuracy and credibility of the content, lending more “weight” or “legitimacy” behind it, one of the surveyed creators noted. They see it as a two-way relationship where the newsroom brings depth and data, and the creator brings storytelling and reach. 

News creators have figured out ways to make complex issues resonate with audiences, but there remain gaps in how information-based creators and newsrooms operate and view the world that can make these partnerships intimidating.

Newsrooms surveyed for this report indicated that their concerns for partnering with creators mostly lay with editorial oversight and control, creators’ openly sharing their opinions on the subject matter they share and how to monetize creator partnerships. 

Creators also had an array of concerns when it came to working with newsrooms that newsrooms should take into consideration. Partnerships are most successful when both sides’ can work with each other with confidence and trust. Creators’ concerns included:

  • Creative and Editorial Control: Creators expressed a fear of losing their unique or authentic voice, the lack of editorial control over their final product and too much newsroom oversight on how content is relayed. They said they need clarity on expectations regarding tone and the speed of fact-checking and content approval.
  • Newsroom Perception and Treatment: Creators said they worry about the skepticism they receive from traditional journalists, who may not respect them or treat them as a peer. This attitude from newsrooms can sour potential partnerships.
  • Financial and Time Constraints: Creators showed a significant concern with the time and money involved in newsroom partnerships. They noted that newsroom partnerships can be time-consuming and pay poorly, especially when creators are independent contractors.
  • Authenticity and Trust: Creators expressed a desire to ensure the collaboration feels authentic, and not promotional, to maintain their audience’s trust.

This guide will lay out how newsrooms can work with information-focused creators successfully, so together they can help each other expand their reach, quality of work and the overall information economy. The research for this guide focused heavily on the creator experience with newsrooms, using two anonymous surveys of creators – one about partnering with newsrooms that received roughly 10 responses and one specifically about pay expectations, which received roughly a dozen responses. We also spoke with more than 10 creators 1:1 for this guide and seven newsroom leaders or staff that have engaged in such partnerships or are trying to bring them to their newsroom. Finally, we used a small anonymous survey of newsrooms, which had nine respondents. Many of those interviewed requested anonymity so they could speak candidly.

Table of Contents

  1. The Inner Newsroom Work: The mindsets, plans, and infrastructures to put in place prior to embarking on partnerships
  2. Finding Creators: How to find creators that align with your values
  3. Working Out The Partnership Details: Designing a fair contract
  4. Getting On The Same Page: Aligning on voice, tone, and content with a clear point of view
  5. Partnership Content: Examples of the many ways newsrooms and creators can collaborate
  6. Editing The Work: Best practices for ensuring accuracy and voice
  7. Case Study: McClatchy and Jen Ruiz keep things simple
  8. Case Study: Caliber Media lets creators take the mic
  9. Case Study: High Country News and Teal Lehto showcase how mutual respect leads to ongoing success

The Inner Newsroom Work

In order to have successful collaborations with creators, newsrooms must have certain mindsets, plans and infrastructures in place prior to embarking on partnerships. Newsroom-creator partnerships work best for newsrooms when they are part of an existing robust social media strategy; the partnership cannot be the sole distribution strategy. Newsroom leadership and staff should agree on the qualities they will look for in a creator and how they will measure success. Prior to reaching out to creators for partnerships, the newsroom should also ensure there is a workflow and infrastructure plan so everyone who needs to be involved in the partnership, from the audience team to legal to editors and reporters, are on board and know their roles.

Starting with a robust social media strategy: Understand your target audience. If a creator brings them to your door, how will you keep them? 

Creator partnerships are not an audience or social media strategy on their own, but parts of robust audience and social media plans. In order to have successful creator partnerships, you still need to understand your target audience and how to build and maintain their interest and trust.

Identify the specific audiences you currently aren’t reaching that you want to reach. Reflect on how the journalism you produce would be beneficial to them and why you currently aren’t reaching them. How would a creator’s platform and voice strengthen your outreach?

Know your target audience and understand how they behave on social media. If a creator shares your content and someone ends up on your Instagram or TikTok because they’re interested in a story, the tone, vibe and voice of your organization’s social presence need to engage them or they won’t stay. For example, users on social media often don’t want to be leaving the platform all the time, so if you just tease stories and videos that require them to leave, you likely won’t be successful.

Though having a creator cite a specific report or investigation may lead a social media user to go directly to the source (you) to read the whole piece, in general, you can’t count on click-throughs to your website from social media as a measure of success for a creator partnership. Creator partnerships need to be part of building an audience on your social media that will likely stay on your social media most of the time. It’s part of brand- and trust-building where evaluating and measuring success may require different Key Performance Indicators.

Designing workflows: Having the infrastructure to support creators ahead of time will ensure partnerships run smoothly.

Figuring out workflows before bringing a creator into the fold will ensure their experience – and that of your staff – will be much smoother. 

Identify all the different teams and people who will need to be involved. This will likely include people from editorial, audience, marketing and legal teams. Bring all of them together to figure out who needs to be included in what stage once a creator is identified and how they will communicate with each other. You can even create a “creator team” as a cross-functional group to liaison with creators. Some of the people involved and processes may change as you embark on partnerships and learn what works best, but it’s easier to change an existing process than build one up from scratch while simultaneously working with a creator. 

In order to figure out what workflow infrastructure needs to be put in place, we suggest starting with this list of questions to answer with the group of people who need to be involved. 

  • Who will find potential creators to work with, and who will decide which ones to pursue partnerships with?
  • Who will decide what stories, series, events or initiatives to work with the creator on?
  • What are the goals of a creator partnership, and who will be responsible for tracking aspects of progress? Some examples could be new followers on social media, shares of articles that were utilized in the partnership or new subscriptions.
  • What will the scope of work for partnerships include? Will it be simply sharing stories, co-reporting, events, etc.?
  • Who will work with the creator and journalists involved on bringing the content itself to fruition? How will the content planning, execution and editing work? Who needs to ultimately sign off on the final project before posting?
  • Where will the content live? Will it be on a creator’s platforms, the newsroom platforms or both in a joint post?
  • If the partnerships involve events, who would be brought into the fold to assist with the planning and execution?
  • What will the contract and pay look like, and who will handle those dealings and negotiations? At the beginning it might be a joint effort to create a contract for creator-newsroom partnerships, but there will need to be an ongoing point of contact.
  • What are the revenue opportunities? Who will manage different aspects of this, like using creator content for ads or having the creator help convert people to subscribers?

The Partnership 

Finding creators: Knowing your values will help you find the right people to partner with.

Identify what qualities you’re looking for in a creator. Here are some questions to consider when thinking about who you want to partner with. 

  • Who do you want to reach, and who is already reaching them authentically?
  • What types of topics or geographies do they focus on?
  • What are the platforms where you are aiming to expand your reach?
  • What are you comfortable with when it comes to a creator’s voice (i.e. if they use humor, openly share their opinions, etc.)?

There are many ways to find creators. Get on the platform yourself, if you’re not on it! It may take awhile to get the algorithm to identify the creators you want, but you should be familiar with social platforms anyway. You can also ask around your newsroom. There are probably people on staff following creators that may be a good fit to work with or maybe there have been creators who have been interviewed or worked with the newsroom in other capacities that you can reach out to for connections.

You can utilize your audience. Ask your audience on social media, in a newsletter or during an in-person or virtual listening session who are the creators they follow who talk about issues that your newsroom also covers. You should also check your personal networks – your friends, family, etc. 

It might take some connections and digging, but there may be local or topic-based creator meet-ups where you can build connections in person. We recommend you think of finding creators to work with like reporting information for a story – as a newsroom, you already have the skills to find who you’re looking for.

You can also look to organizations like News Creator Corps that train information-focused creators to discover potential partners. The American Press Institute has additional tips on how to discover and assess creators.

Finally, you can use paid agencies  – increasing numbers are popping up specifically targeting newsrooms. But this will cost more and is another wall between you and your audience. If you want to truly understand the audience you’re trying to reach, you should learn about the creators and other trusted community messengers where they currently get their information from.

Once you’ve identified one or multiple creators you might like to work with, make sure to spend a good amount of time going through their content and researching them prior to reaching out. Don’t just watch a few videos or look at the most recent posts. Go back through their content from at least a year, look at any Reddit threads about them, read through their comments and any press they’ve done previously.

Here are some things to look for:

  • Skeletons in closets. Be as certain as you can that nothing might come out about them that you don’t want associated with your newsroom. That includes membership in any collectives where they reshare or are in proximity to creators that are the antithesis of your newsroom work. 
  • How they respond to criticism or questions in the comments. Are they open about making corrections when they get something wrong?
  • How they present content. What are the ways they share information and how can you work with that? For example, will it make sense based on their profile to ask them to share your article on a green screen or interview your reporter during a live, or do they never do those kinds of things?

Once you’re certain you want to connect with a specific creator, send them a DM (direct message) on a social media platform or email them. If you’re using DMs, make sure to use the newsroom’s official account and offer up your work email in the first message, so they know you’re verifiably with the newsroom. Show you’re familiar with their work, explain you’re exploring partnerships and ask to set up a meeting or phone call. Or if geography allows, meet them in person. Creators tend to attend more in-person events than newsroom staff and make connections that way. 

Creators drove home the importance of newsroom staff making genuine efforts to get to know the creators they want to work with. Successful partnerships are built on mutual respect and trust, so relationship building should be a focus. Make space for creators’ ideas on how to collaborate. While you may have an idea from your newsroom’s perspective, don’t forget they have mastered an audience on social media that you currently don’t reach and may have good ideas you haven’t considered. 

Working out the partnership details 

Agreeing on a contract

Clear, fair contracts play a part in the relationship- and trust-building that’s essential for successful partnerships. 

While some contract language may be similar to freelance writing contracts, there are some clear differences to note:

Intellectual property language: Freelance writing contracts often contain standard language where the newsroom owns the reporting and writing produced. This language is not appropriate for creator partnerships, where the content often lives on the creator’s own platform or on both the newsroom and creator platforms. It is standard practice for the creator to own the IP (intellectual property) and license it to the newsroom in a limited capacity. 

Pay: While newsrooms vary on how much they can afford to pay creators — and creators vary greatly on how much pay they expect — there are some frameworks to keep in mind. Flat fees for specific deliverables (i.e. one video post) or retainers (i.e. a monthly fee for a set number of posts per month) are the preferred compensation structures for independent creators. 

Other details: Contracts for newsroom-creator partnerships should also include – or at least consider during negotiations – the following:

  • How long will creators be required to keep the partnership posts up on their page?
  • Will the content be used for an ad? 
  • Will you include community management? (We recommend this if you plan to use the content for ads). Community management includes things like responding to questions in comments and moderating comments for threats or misinformation that should be removed and reported to the platform.
  • Kill fees. Many creators said they would appreciate them included in contracts. 
Getting on the same page

The biggest concern newsrooms expressed to NCC when it comes to working with creators was that creators are often more open about their biases and opinions than most newsrooms are comfortable with. On the flipside, creators told us they are also concerned about not being able to use their authentic voice when working with newsrooms, which will erode trust with their audiences. We have a few tips on how to square these two perspectives.

  • Be clear on what ethics and standards your newsroom has. Adam Eisenberg, citizen journalism editor at PBS KVIE in Sacramento, said he plans to put together a one-pager on the newsroom’s standards to share with community reporters and creators they plan to work with. 
  • Do research: There is truly an endless world of creators out there. If you do enough research and reporting, there is a good chance you will find a creator who aligns with your newsroom’s values. Once you find a creator who seems interesting, thoroughly go through their pages and research them to give yourself certainty that they are value aligned. 
  • Ask the right questions when you’re considering working with a creator to ensure they  share your ethics. The American Press Institute and Center for Cooperative Media have guides on what to look for and what questions to ask as you embark on partnerships with creators and other non-news entities. 
  • Put on your editing hat. Work with the creators as partners, not as transactions. Talk about their ideas, give them feedback and work cohesively to strike a balance between your standards and their voices.
    • For example, Caliber works with creators so their scripts and videos have visual or verbal distinctions between when they are sharing fact-based information and when they are switching to their opinions. They also will help them structure scripts so all the factual information is in the first part of the video and any opinions are secondary. 
    • Treat the creators you work with as you do reporters. Try to catch inaccuracies while editing, and if someone makes a mistake, issue a correction. 
  • Work with creators on beats or verticals where overt opinions may not risk a news organization’s non-partisanship. For example, if you partner with a creator on lifestyle content and build a relationship with their audience, their audience may be more familiar with you and trust political content from your journalists more.
  • Partner with creators on videos that may be less polarizing, like explainers. 
Partnership Content

There are so many ways that creator-newsrooms partnerships can play out. Below are some ideas of how newsrooms and creators can work together, ranging from collaborations that require no pay or official agreement to instances where newsrooms largely hand over editorial control to a creator they trust. 

If you are uncomfortable working with creators who voice their political opinions on their platform, but come across several creators who are already reaching the audience you want, you can simply regularly share reporters’ work with them that you think they might be interested in. Then they can choose whether or not they will share that with their audience. Collaborations like these allow the creator to maintain their creative and editorial control, while still amplifying newsroom content. Some newsrooms have email lists of creators who may be interested in sharing their reporting where they regularly send stories to consider. But note, if you cannot or are unwilling to pay creators you cannot guarantee that they will share your content. 

If you want an official partnership to amplify your work, Technical.ly has some good examples of how to partner with creators.

You can have the creator interview one of your reporters, like in this collaboration where creator Shawn Singh, @ShawnTheFoodSheep, had a conversation with Houston Chronicle food critic Bao Ong.

Sometimes, the creator doesn’t even need a script or to say anything to get your content out to their audience, like in this video where creator Erika Lukas simply posts herself watching a Guardian video.

Some news organizations offer more control if they find a creator they are comfortable with. Evan Lovett (@lainaminute) works with several news organizations across Los Angeles in differing capacities. Some local broadcast stations give him segments, where he has total editorial control choosing the ideas and writing the scripts. He also does more collaborative partnerships. For example, he worked with L.A. Taco to produce a series on LA’s neighborhoods. Lovett does have a background in journalism, which may have made it easier for newsrooms to turn over more control to him.

Bring everyone who needs to be involved in the content discussions into at least one discussion with the creator (editor, reporter, social media editor, etc.). Later discussions can involve fewer people, but make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to ideas, expectations and workflow. Ensure the creator knows who to communicate with for what. Set clear deadlines for each stage: script, video, edits, etc. 

Editing the work

Your editing chops are a valuable part of the collaboration. Edit for accuracy, but remember that the creator’s voice is part of why you want to work with them, so let them do their thing. It can be helpful to think of them like a columnist.

It’s beneficial for newsroom audience teams to be looped in and to transparently explain the editing process so the creator feels empowered. Including the team that strategizes and posts to social platforms ensures there is no confusion with posting or tagging and creates opportunities for more collaboration. 

You want to avoid heavy video edits, so flesh out the ideas during the scripting phase. Create a clear timeline for this process so both creators and newsroom staff can effectively manage all their work and partnerships. Creators’ workflow – especially with video – is unique. They’ll often need a very quick turnaround on video edits. It’s easy for them to take things out of a video, but if they need to add something they haven’t recorded, they need to do it with the same lighting, makeup and outfit or the video will look off. If they end up needing to rerecord a whole video, that is hours of extra work that they should be paid for.

Continuing the relationship

Even if you don’t have a long-term partnership in a contract, if you thought the partnership went well, put effort into keeping in touch. An easy way to do this is to continue to send them investigations or projects relevant to the creator’s work—without an expectation for free exposure. 

With long-term partnerships, build in check-ins on how things are going and opportunities to collaborate with the creator in new ways. Partnerships are two-way streets where you can learn from their ideas, sources and experiences just as much as they can learn from you. Be open for creators to pitch projects to you and present new ways to work together outside of what you’ve done in the past. 

Oftentimes your first collaborations and partnerships with creators may be something small – asking them to amplify an existing article or using them as an expert source in a story. As you build trust with the creators you work with and confidence in how to work with them, continue to experiment, build to bigger projects and give the creators you’re working with more leeway to do what they do well.

Case Study: Keeping things simple

For a partnership arranged by NCC, McClatchy Content Production Manager Allison Palmer and NCC 2025 Trusted Creator Fellow Jen Ruiz collaborated for a newsletter on wellness travel. 

Ruiz went into the partnership thinking that it would result in a lot of unpaid labor and little return on investment for her. 

“As a creator, you have to figure out what is worth the time and what is worth the ‘ exposure,’” Ruiz said. “And so a lot of things are not necessarily worth the exposure.”

But Palmer pitched an idea that would work for everyone: She would write an edition of their travel newsletter with Ruiz’s tips, using Ruiz in a way that many journalists are familiar with – as an expert source. It was also published in The Miami Herald. 

“I like to think about what you could realistically execute,” said Palmer. “We had a quick deadline. I have some experience with social media, but we have a dedicated social media editor. It’s not my main area of expertise. I’m primarily a writer and editor and thought about how I could use my skills. I know I can write an article quickly.”

The article would give Ruiz a concrete link she could promote, and could drive newsletter sign-ups for McClatchy, as well. 

Ruiz, who shares travel information on her platforms, has extensive knowledge and firsthand experience of different destinations. 

“Our newsletter readers are looking for people who can be a trusted authority in this space and highlighting people like Jen who is a thought leader in their space is more inspiring and unique than an evergreen explainer by me,” Palmer said. “Jen has been all over the world. I can research places, but haven’t been there. Direct experience is better and adds that extra level of sparkle.”

Palmer had Ruiz send her notes and images of the wellness travel destinations she’d recommend, and Palmer wrote up the newsletter. Once it published, Ruiz shared it on her platforms, helping expose more of her audience to The Miami Herald and the travel newsletter, while the paper’s audience was exposed to her. 

“So now it’s not like, ‘We like you so much and we’re going to offer you exposure and future unpaid work,’” Ruiz said. “Like that’s not necessarily attracting top quality talent. But when you’re leveraging what you do have, which is the credibility of your outlet, that existing readership, the known bylines and and logos, I think there you’re going to get an abundance of people and really talented creators that are eager to partner together because it’s mutually beneficial.”

Ruiz said she benefitted from the publicity of being featured in The Miami Herald and newsletter. But if she had been asked to put more unpaid work into the collaboration then it wouldn’t have been worth it for her.

“My approach is always let’s try to keep this as simple as possible, that way everyone wins,” Palmer said.

Case Study: Letting creators take the mic

“We need news that reaches younger audiences and meets them where they are, and we wanted to do news differently,” said Ramin Beheshti, Caliber CEO and co-founder.

That’s what led to Caliber’s multiple brands, including The News Movement and The Recount, to utilize and trust creators to help them reach younger audiences that don’t tend to turn to traditional media for their news. 

Beheshti said that their work with creators adds credibility to the journalism they do. They’ll look for people who are authentic and have developed audiences already. Rather than sending a reporter to Gaza, they’ll work with creators who live in Gaza. They work with Black, trans and other creators representative of people experiencing issues they’re reporting on.

“You have really got to allow them to have their own voice and tell the story in their voice and not your voice,” he said. 

In order to do this, Beheshti said they have staff who spend time seeking out and vetting creators who they think can meet their journalistic standards. 

“The principle is to be constantly curious,” he said. “Who is talking about what we want to be talking about? How are they covering the stories we cover? And looking through their book of work and seeing they try to approach it with facts first and opinions second. Then we reach out to them.”

Beheshti said while his newsroom editors and other staff work closely with the creators, they try to be more in the background advising, rather than trying to micromanage. They will help them craft questions for an interview if they need assistance or try to catch errors in the editing process, but he doesn’t view that as much different than how an editor works with a journalist on staff.

@therecount

Angry about flight delays? Blame it on the trains. Countries like Japan, Spain, and China have thousands of more miles of high-speed rail than the United States. In turn, air traffic — and therefore flight delays — have plummeted in those countries. But between airline lobbying and other factors, it’s easier said than done in America: In the ’90s, Texas planned to build a train that could’ve gotten you from Dallas to Houston in 90 minutes. But then Southwest Airlines swooped in, sued, and squashed the deal. @Spencer Snyder breaks it all down. #flights #traveltok #traveltiktok #traintok #travelhacks

♬ original sound – therecount

TNM and The Recount don’t discourage their creators from voicing opinions in their posts, as long as the facts they’re presenting are accurate. But they do work with creators on their scripts so that there is a verbal or visual shift after the creators go from sharing factual information to giving their opinion. 

Beheshti also said that utilizing creators for non-political beats pays off when staff journalists cover political current events. For example, at TNM they have creators work on topics like sex and relationships. 

“We’re very much beside our audiences and not talking down to them, and that’s why we use creators,” he said. “We feel that brings trust with our brands, so when we cover an ICE protest as journalists, we already have that audience’s trust. What beats, what verticals are not mainstream politics where you are running the risk of overtly coming across as biased?”

The biggest challenges in working with creators, Beheshti said, was getting over the mental hurdles that newsroom leadership and staff developed from their traditional news backgrounds.  

“We built up our sea legs and confidence of how to do it as we went,” he said. “Thinking about everything ahead of time, it’s crippling. We just started smaller and pushed it further as we got more confident.”

Case Study: Mutual respect leads to great partnerships

Michael Leveton started as the community outreach manager at High Country News, an independent magazine based in Colorado, in 2022. Leveton’s role involved many things, including building HCN’s new social media and digital-first strategy, managing collaborations with outside groups and individuals and reaching new audiences. One aspect of this job included building HCN’s creator program. 

One of the first things Leveton did to begin building this program was “reach across the aisle” to design a workflow that worked for both editorial and marketing teams since the creator program was a function of both. It was essential to the program’s success internally that he had a clear mission, vision and explanation for what the end goal was while working with different teams and leadership. Leveton said bringing a lot of data and case studies helped teams, especially editorial, understand the importance of his social media strategy and creator program, to get fully on board. 

One of the creators HCN began to work with was Teal Lehto (@westernwatergirl) who the magazine continues to work with today. Lehto was on the staff’s radar broadly: Many followed her on social media already. She was from Colorado and talked about water issues in the West on her platform – a topic that HCN wrote about frequently. It was a natural fit.

Leveton reached out to Lehto to build a relationship and initiate a partnership.

“It wasn’t just about our contract,” Lehto said. “It was like we formed a relationship and a friendship, and that mutual respect really meant a lot to me.”

Lehto said she typically charges $1,000 to $2,000 per partnership video, but with HCN she gets paid $1,000 every two months for a set number of videos, usually two or three. 

“I’m okay with that because it’s a recurring contract, and I know I’m going to be continuing to work with them,” Lehto said.

Sometimes the videos include Lehto sharing an article and giving her take on it. Sometimes she’ll do videos explaining concepts like an acrefoot, that are essential building blocks to understanding concepts discussed in HCN stories and videos. She’s also done videos previewing and building excitement for investigative pieces that are going to come out soon for other news organizations she’s worked with.

@highcountrynews

What’s an Acre Foot and why do we still use this weird unit to measure water? Imagine a football field (no end zones) under 1 foot of water. That’s an acre foot — 325,851 gallons! It comes from 1800s farming in the arid West, and today it helps us talk about huge amounts of water, like the 16.5 million acre feet allocated in the Colorado River Basin. #HCNExplains #AcreFoot #ColoradoRiver

♬ original sound – High Country News

“I don’t do interviews,” Lehto said. “I’m not on the ground gathering info. But I’m taking a story and then I’m saying this is the way that I think about this. I am personally invested in the outcome of that story. It’s not just like it’s happening around me, and I’m reporting on it. And I think that that distinction is really important.”

Most often the process for Lehto’s HCN videos look like this: HCN sends her an article. She’ll take notes and write a script, and either an editor or the reporter who wrote the article will edit her script. 

Leveton made clear to editors and reporters that they can’t edit Lehto’s tone, which is what resonates with her audience. They can only edit for factual inaccuracies or risk of defamation or slander. Lehto said oftentimes creators phrase things more conversationally than they are phrased in the articles so people can better understand what’s going on.

Lehto and the editor or reporter will go back and forth on the script until everyone is good with it. Once the script is approved, she’ll record and upload a raw draft. Then, HCN has 24 hours to review the draft. Once a video is recorded, it’s fairly easy to edit things out, but if she needs to add things, a quick turnaround is appreciated because her lighting, hair, makeup, etc. needs to be consistent throughout the video. Once she gets the thumbs-up on the raw video draft, she’ll edit the clips to add in photos, the title, citations, captions, etc. Then she’ll post the video to social media and send the HCN team an email letting them know the collaboration invite on Instagram is in their DMs so they can approve it, and the video will show up on their page as well.

To help reporters and editors who were skeptical about giving Lehto so much freedom in script writing, Leveton said he described Lehto as a character responding to their articles. 

“That’s what you’re paying her for,” he said. “Her analysis is great. Her takes are funny, but that’s what you’re paying for. You’re not paying for her to do a dry recap of the story because no one wants that.”

Leveton also convinced the marketing team to give Lehto and other creators a limited number of free subscriptions to give away to their followers.

The creator program – in conjunction with a full social media plan and strategy Leveton worked on – paid off. Between 2024 and 2025, HCN saw an increase across its social media engagement and reach. On Instagram specifically, there was a 102% increase in accounts reached, and their post engagement rate increased by 16.5%.

Leveton has spent much time talking to other newsrooms at conferences about HCN’s success.

“I did see a lot from talking to different newsrooms, like there was a lot of rigidity in the way that news had to be and had to be performed,” Leveton said. “And if you can let go of that notion  just enough, I think there’s a capacity to do some really fun stuff.”

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