Newsfluencers: ‘neither first nor last’ chapter in the #NewMediaPlaybook

A newsroom leader in digital strategy, journalist and media executive Ryan Y. Kellettis a 2025 Nieman-Berkman Klein fellow for Journalism Innovation at Harvard University. Most recently, he was VP of Audience at Axios Media, where he helped scale Axios Localto 30 cities across the US, and launched an in-house creator team.

He had joined Axios after 11 years at The Washington Post, exiting as Senior Director of Audience, building international digital readership and the subscription businesses.

A multi-award winning team leader, Ryan is a co-founder of Going Solo, a course for traditional journalists to become creators, an instructor at the Harvard Extension School, and a board member of the Online News Association.

Ryan Kellett will join WAN-IFRA's World News Media Congress in Krakow, Poland, 4-6 May 2025, to share leadership lessons on navigating a lasting transformation.

He shared learnings from deep dives into rising phenomenon of the creator journalism, in our latest Editor To Editor interview…

As a current Nieman-Berkman Klein fellow, what does studying new models for distributing and sustaining journalism entail?

I'm mainly researching and working around creator journalism and trying to figure out what's next. My guess is that, alongside AI, creator journalism will play a big part of what the industry will look like in the next 10 to 15 years.

I don't think journalists are first, or last, to be a part of the creator economy, which is really large - projected to be upwards of $2 trillion by 2026. Journalists have tiptoed, and are maybe even being dragged into this space.

And there's this tension where many creators currently use - sometimes abuse - journalism in their own work, as aggregators or analysts on the internet.

By bringing journalism into the space, we have to reclaim it: To have high quality, fact-based information, transparency, ethics, and standards that sets a new-ish calling card. That, to me, is one of the more important things now: to bring journalism and next generation content creation together.

How are newsrooms responding or adapting to this new trend?

There's a theoretical resistance in the minds of many publishers who don't want to work with outsiders, or don't want to deal with content creators as they'd have to police their ethics.

But if you look internally within almost all news organisations, you'll see that publishers all have people who trade on their personality and who are using social media to get their work out. For instance, someone like Derek Thompson at The Atlanticis so popular on social media that the distribution of his journalism, I would argue, is equally that of publisher, reporter and writer.

Derek would not call himself a newsfluencer, but I would include someone like that, who's working for a publisher, but really trading on some of the major traits of what I would call a creator journalist - that's the term that I use, because it indicates journalists participating in the creator space, even if they think of themselves as journalists first. What can journalists learn from content creators?

Content creators value relatability, accessibility, transparency and responsiveness much more so than traditional journalists do. And that's exactly what I hope we borrow for journalism.

More specifically, good content creators often read every single comment, DM and email they receive. And then they respond to those queries a lot more regularly than traditional journalists do. Creators talk openly about their experiences that led them to their interest in a topic, including their biases and relationships. They talk about how the work gets created and why. Great creators talk like regular humans, repeat themselves and slow down when newcomers join them.

People often ask me how content creators could be more transparent than a traditional journalist. One way is that they often talk about how they make money publicly in a way that traditional journalists and most publishers would never. Audiences that don't hear regularly about the revenue model will fill in the blanks in their heads with wrong assumptions, as was often the case at the publishers I worked for.

What advice to publishers hoping to bridge the audience gap in trust?

Most people understand that it's easier to connect with a face and a name than it is to a brand - that's been true in social media for a long time now. But publishers tend to want to put the brand ahead of the name, and that's fine.

I don't think it's so surprising that the parasocial relationship created with the audience is really important. It often means being a little bit more personal, knowing more about who's behind the byline. But that can go further: What about your personal story and experience as a journalist will resonate with the audiences you want to reach? They don't want to follow a robot, they want to respect and trust a human first, journalist second.

Being a full-formed human is such an important piece to closing the gap with the audience. It builds trust, and journalism is having a moment where we're really grappling with trust.

'One way to look at that trust is to see that it's not only a matter of trust between the brand and the consumer, but also between the individuals - the reporters, the writers, the producers, the creators - and the consumer.'

And if you could close the trust gap in any possible way, wouldn't any of us jump at that chance to earn back a little bit of what we've lost as an industry?

If you were to start a new publication today, what would your audience strategy be - and what would you discard?

I would really be looking at collectives of creators, a la 404 Mediaand Defectorwith an even heavier emphasis on individual voices and creatives. These offer more interesting ownership models for journalists, and that's a little bit closer to where I think we probably want to end up as an industry.

I'm interested in co-ownership, as that feels more inclusive. We've previously only had a few models that all have major drawbacks: Private equity, corporate model, and philanthropy. Can we build another way?

And part of the shared ownership is shared decision-making specific to audience building and audience growth. There's a benefit in having a more loose connection model of contractors, or brand associates, because they have higher ownership. You want someone to be a part of your brand because they want to, not because they're "just" on the payroll.

And I, of course, want to keep the parts of journalism that are core to journalism! You can't discard the core truth-seeking, healthy skepticism, and independence that makes you a journalist. That's the good part!

'The people who are thinking about really high quality work, real journalists that double down on credibility, will succeed.'

Lucinda Jordaan

lucinda.jordaan@wan-ifra.org