The newsroom layoffs have been happening for years. Local TV news is shrinking. Newspaper circulation has declined to fractions of what it was in 2005. And yet more people are getting information about what is happening in the world than at any point in history. The gap between where traditional journalism was pulling back and where audiences needed to go has been filled by a specific type of creator: people who cover real events, develop real points of view, and build audiences through vertical video on platforms that were designed for entertainment but have become something else entirely.
Nieman Reports published a detailed look at creator-journalists this spring, focusing on how independent operators are reaching audiences that legacy media has stopped serving. The pattern is consistent. A creator identifies a community that is underserved by mainstream coverage. They build a vertical video format that is native to how that audience consumes information. They develop trust over time through consistency and proximity, covering the stories that matter to the specific people watching, not the stories that maximize national reach. The result is an audience that trusts them more deeply than it trusts any publication or network, and that trust is why brands and advertisers are now paying close attention.
The IAB's most recent data confirms what independent creators have been experiencing on the ground. Creator content has been reclassified from an add-on marketing category to a core media channel. That shift in language reflects a shift in where advertising budgets are actually going. The total spend on creator marketing hit $37 billion last year and is projected to reach $44 billion in 2026. Ninety-two percent of marketers report working with micro-creators, defined as creators with audiences under 100,000. Only 29% are prioritizing celebrity partnerships. The audience is moving toward trust, and trust lives with people who are perceived as real rather than institutional.
The vertical video format is central to why this is working. Short-form vertical video matches how Gen Z consumes information across every platform, from TikTok to Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts. A news story told in three minutes of vertical video, with graphics, direct address to the camera, and a clear point of view, is more digestible to a 22-year-old than a 1,200-word article with a dateline. That is not a statement about attention spans; it is a statement about format matching. People have always consumed news in the format that fits their context. Vertical video is the format that fits how Gen Z moves through the day.
What separates successful creator-journalists from unsuccessful ones is not the platform; it is the depth of the relationship with the audience. The creators who have built durable news franchises are consistent, specific, and honest about what they know and what they do not know. They cover a beat with the same seriousness a traditional journalist would bring to it, but without the institutional constraints that determine what stories get assigned and how they get framed. That independence is part of the value proposition. Audiences increasingly distrust media they perceive as captured by institutional interests, and a creator operating independently without advertiser pressure on editorial decisions is positioned differently in that environment.
The skills required to do this well are not entirely different from traditional journalism, but the packaging requirements are entirely different. You need to be able to identify what is actually happening in a story and why it matters, which is a core journalism skill. But you also need to understand how to build narrative tension in under ninety seconds, how to open a video in the first three seconds in a way that earns the watch, and how to translate complex policy or business news into language that lands for someone watching between meetings or waiting for the train. Those are content creation skills. The people doing both are the ones building the most valuable media properties of the next decade.
For independent creators watching this space develop, the opportunity is specific. Generalist news coverage is saturated. But specific beats, specific communities, and specific intersections of news and identity still have enormous room for original voices. Black business news, immigration law updates for specific communities, policy coverage aimed at working-class households, and technology journalism written for people who are not already in tech are all beats where the demand is real and the supply of trustworthy sources is still thin. The tools to build a vertical video news brand in 2026 cost almost nothing. The barrier is not access to equipment or platforms. The barrier is willingness to show up consistently and build something that earns trust over time.
The legacy media institutions that dismissed creator-journalists as amateurs are now studying them. Some are trying to hire them. Others are trying to replicate the format without replicating the relationship that makes the format work. The audience knows the difference. They always do.