As my four-year-old son trotted into his first day of Pre-K on the first anniversary of News Creator Corps’ launch, it was impossible to ignore the impact becoming a parent had on my thinking on audience, creators, and information. I have been extremely lucky to have an incredible local community of families throughout my parenthood journey. I’ve seen parents divide and conquer all of the things we need to figure out, the text reminders to bring in a t-shirt for tie-dye, the generosity of providing one big tub of sunscreen for an entire summer camp group. I’ve seen the power of relational trust and benefitted from treating information as mutual aid.
This is the same magic that creators bring to the information ecosystem.
Good information doesn’t do much good sitting in a database, press release, or behind a paywall. As we launched News Creator Corps last year, our bet was that by investing in trusted messengers and training them in accuracy, sourcing, and verification, we could reach communities underserved by mainstream media faster than any institution could stand up an outpost to serve them. Supporting creators as trusted messengers adds capacity to the whole information ecosystem.
A year into this work, we’ve learned a few things:
Creators care about getting it right. The proof is in the demand: We’ve received more than 1,200 applications in our first year. Applications rise every cycle for a program built around fact-checking, sourcing, and verification. Creators aren’t signing up to rocket their reach; they are raising their hand to add rigor to their work. They care deeply about the communities they serve, and they want to get it right for them. The trust of their communities is their most valuable asset.
We are at our best when we center creators in everything we do. We thought that a real share of the work would be connecting creators to newsrooms, and that our media connections would be the primary value we brought to this work. Creators told us their bigger needs were elsewhere: safety, legal protection, infrastructure, community. We adjusted how we spend our energy and resources to focus on building what they can’t get anywhere else. We still do some partnership work, but it’s no longer the center. I am most proud of how our small team has pivoted in our first year to ensure we’re having the largest impact we can.
Lifestyle creators are strong civic messengers. We’ve seen across our cohorts that the people carrying accurate information furthest aren’t always the ones talking about hard news and national politics every day. We are the only program we know that meaningfully combines news, politics, and lifestyle creators in our cohorts. Audiences trust creators they already feel kinship to. If you are aligned on parenting styles with a specific creator, their word carries weight when they discuss the changing vaccine schedule. Every creator has applied our fact-checking and reporting lessons in their own ways, and they’ve all strengthened their corners of the internet.
Leading NCC has pushed me personally to make space for truths outside of what I’ve held true after nearly two decades in newsrooms. Working with creators, seeing how they relate to their audiences, and watching them gather IRL or clear Amazon wish lists together has given me a more nuanced understanding of what communities actually need. I’ve gotten clearer about my purpose: making sure every community and every person has the information they need to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. There isn’t one way to accomplish that, but I know I can make a real impact by empowering the creators who work with the communities that need this the most.
As we move into year two, we’re clear on our role: We need to make the work of news creators more durable.
- At the end of 2026, we will have trained 70 creators from 27 states. In 2027, we plan to run four fellowship cohorts, training 80 creators total. These cohorts will continue to expand into new themes, like a focus on health- or education-focused creators.
- We are working with Trusting News and Project C to develop a framework that will allow creators to develop and communicate their own accountability standards through our Creator Code of Ethics project.
- We will launch the Creator Story Fund, which will provide direct funding for NCC-accredited creators to report the original stories their communities need.
- We will continue to build the infrastructure creators need, pushing the bounds of traditional structures like insurance that have historically left independent workers out, to ensure news creators have the physical, legal, and digital safety they need.
Making the work durable is only half of it. Good information competes for attention with misinformation that’s often louder, faster, and better tuned to the algorithms that decide what any of us see. Part of our job is helping audiences understand what’s true and making sure accurate information travels as far as the falsehoods it’s up against.
The bet we made a year ago held. What we learned is that believing in trusted messengers isn’t enough on its own. We have to make their work sustainable, so getting it right doesn’t cost a creator their safety, their livelihood, or their independence. Getting accurate information to the people who need it, through someone they already trust, is the gap we exist to close. A year in, I’m more certain than ever that it’s the fight worth having.