I didn’t know I was a content creator. I didn’t wake up one morning with a plan to build out a content calendar or make a strategy for maximum reach and growth. But I wanted to be a journalist, and for someone with my background, an orphaned college dropout raised by immigrants, the cards were stacked against me working in a traditional newsroom.
After a few freelance gigs, I signed up for a new platform called Twitter, where I could post vignettes of what I saw without being tied to a major publisher. Emboldened, I took the lowest budget trips you could imagine, and I posted and posted and posted; the bunkbed hostels, public bus excursions, mulled wine stands and wearing the same dirty pants for a week.
As it turns out, I wasn’t alone. The Twitter #traveltuesday hashtag was a chat space where travelers logged on at a specific time each week and shared conversation and tips. Here, I spoke with National Geographic editors, decade-long adventure podcasters, and English teachers in Thailand who ran YouTube accounts. Advice was plentiful: what camera to use for the best still shots you could sell, how to circumvent scams and find safe budget places to sleep. Someone offered to fix my blog when I screwed up the WordPress template. Other bloggers wrote for me, and I wrote for them, powered by paid destination chats and tiny ads that we downloaded into our templates ourselves.
Together we explored Denver, Athens and Vancouver. We held cameras for each other’s YouTube videos and shared cheap street food on paper plates. Eventually my love of current events turned my travel storytelling into a newsroom job, because everything I learned, from visual mediums to events management, I owed to the years on the ground with this group. I had transferable skills that were in big demand.
Today’s content creators are in the same boat. Powered by personality, they show us places and people we don’t see covered in traditional media, with immersive storytelling front and center. They jump from newsletter to audio to video without blinking. They’ve formed houses and collaborative models based on partnerships. They are paving the way for new formats in information sharing. But, we’re often told that this is at odds with traditional media.
Somewhere along the way, we bought into the idea that it’s us or them: traditional media or creators. That there’s fact-based media organizations and publications, and there are creators who aren’t concerned with helping an audience receive facts. This couldn’t be further from the truth, with creators working hard to build trust and authenticity with their audiences, follower accounts grown from zero, without the help of a marketing team. TikTok reporters are the next generation of broadcast reporters on the street. Newsletter writers are great essayists. YouTube hosts some of the best documentary work out there today. And though we’re often sold the tale that digital storytelling is first-come-first-served, time and time again we see that together, we’re stronger.
There’s so much skillshare to engage in, from coding blogs, to shooting b-roll to editing podcasts. Together, we come up with stronger story ideas for our audiences. We grow the number of people who see those stories when we create together, and tag partners. As a collaborative, we build support systems of information sharing that hold us all to higher standards, keeping us aware of misinformation and scams. And science tells us that there are neurological reasons why content creators are so powerful: personal storytelling activates the hormones that control trust, memory and motivation by making us feel partnered with the storyteller.
News Creator Corps, grown out of passionate conversations about how to make the internet a better and more safe place for everyone, will lean on that ideal of holding ourselves accountable for a higher standard of content by starting at the source: the creators who build and engage around the content. Through a series of workshops, creators will learn the fact-finding skills usually reserved for professional newsrooms, from understanding and citing research studies to interviewing sources to filing FOIA requests.
The first News Creator Corps class will be important for many reasons, but first in my heart is the community that will be created across beats and mediums as this group grows together. As I’ve been putting together the workshops and programs, it’s been exciting to consider what the group will also teach me and what we’ll learn from each other. Through forums and posts, we’ll understand each other’s missions, and expand our knowledge on fast-changing mediums. We’ll work together to realign an information system that’s been held largely unaccountable for the damage misinformation has caused. Out into the world, with their partners and audiences, this cohort will influence the information ecosystem of the future. Across mediums and skillsets we become better. Together is the only way through the confusion and vitriol of bots, pink slime and errors.