In the run-up to the local primaries last year, non-profit newspaper The City sought to educate its readers about processes and tactics employed by politicians in New York. They could have simply trusted in their own platforms and channels to get the news out, but – building on a similar project in 2024 – they instead chose to partner with a local creator.
The City team drafted Gerrie Lim, an Instagram and TikTok-specialist comedian, to spread their journalism. By repackaging the content and rebadging it in Lim’s particular style, the City reached a far wider audience than if it had simply published on its own channels: “The average views of our collaboration was 42,033 – a 115% increase compared to our 2024 performance prior to Lim”.
Trust in individual creators in the news sphere is growing, as are their audiences. It shouldn’t surprise, then, that news outlets looking for new potential subscribers or donors are incorporating creators into their growth strategies. According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, “half [of publishers] said they would be partnering with creators to help distribute content, around a third (31%) said they would be hiring creators, for example to run their social media accounts”.
As publishers confront ongoing audience fragmentation and platform-driven discovery, creators are emerging not simply as partners, but as a new layer of distribution in part because they often reach audiences that traditional channels no longer can. Despite the wide reach of the legacy news ecosystem, individual outlets reach only a fraction of the overall population on a daily basis. It makes sense, then, to partner with creators where there is potential synergy between the media outlet’s audiences and the creator’s.
In the particular example of The City and Lim in 2024, the news site found that 83% of viewers were not already following The City’s Instagram account when exposed to Lim’s video. It is, then, an effective way of raising awareness of a news site at the very least. Though the million dollar question is still how monetization follows audience acquisition.
Creators as a new distribution layer
While The City’s work was explicitly about expanding the reach of its journalism, other media brands have been partnering with creators for years.
Previous collaborations like that of Tasty (BuzzFeed’s food vertical) and its partnership with food content creators like Tue Nguyen, in fact, were held up as BuzzFeed’s major path towards growth as late as 2023.
It isn’t just creators on TikTok and Instagram who newspapers are seeking out for partnerships. Emma Rowley, Head of Culture & News, UK, Partnerships at Substack, told me: “Absolutely there is a hybrid model, and we’re already seeing it. On Substack, there are journalists across all kinds of roles – columnists, staff reporters, editors, freelancers – who are working with established media outlets while also running their own Substacks.
“Many of them are using the platform to lean into their own ideas and interests, as well as bringing insights into what they already do. That might be adding context to a column or sharing more of the behind-the-scenes of their work elsewhere.” Rowley cites the example of the Daily Beast, which allows individual journalists and content creators to publish their own branded newsletters on Substack while also writing for the core site.
Crucially, despite the fears of legacy publications only a few years ago, this model is seen as complementary and additive to the Daily Beast’s operations, rather than as competition.
From partnerships to hybrid creator models
There is evidence, in fact, that there is a financial incentive for newspapers to emulate – or lease – content that is creator-led. Wired, for example, is seeking to turn its journalists into something more similar creators, a practice that its global editorial director Katie Drummond believes is responsible for an increase in subscriptions.
A similar partnership has been in place at The Guardian US, where beauty blogger Jessica DeFino runs her Ask Ugly column off the back of her substack Flesh World and previous content creation work for the Kardashian-Jenners. The Guardian US uses DeFino as a beacon to attract readers to its site, where its much-vaunted messaging can scoop them up and make them supporters. In that sense, the role of the partner-creator is in widening the top of the funnel for the organisations that partner with them.
You could argue that the shift towards creator partnerships is inevitable, and a consequence of the rise of digital platforms like Patreon that allow audiences to directly support individual creators. As Rowley says, “Individual journalists have been able to act as independent creators for a long time – just ask any freelancer! But what’s changed is how easy it is now to publish and distribute your own work, and to be paid for it directly by your audience. That is a fundamental shift.”
Anna Codrea-Rado is a journalist who was one of the earliest to make a go of a paid-for newsletter in addition to writing for legacy outlets. She believes that, while those partnerships make sense in some cases, there is still a question about whether creators are being adequately compensated for their work on behalf of the legacy organisation.
She cites the comedians John Robinson and Ellis James, who have a podcast on the BBC’s podcast platform Sounds. However, she said, it was only recently that they were able to monetize that content in a way that makes more sense in 2026, as new BBC rules allowed them to appear on other platforms and open subscriptions on Patreon.
Who owns the value…and the audience?
Codrea-Rado says that “It would be great to see this model in other spaces. What does that look like for the written format, what does that look like for legacy media? The issue that legacy media has is that they’ve always been kind of quite nervous about [working with] someone whose individual brand eclipses the media brand.”
These partnerships, then, need to be truly symbiotic. In an era of gatekeeperless distribution, an individual creator can command an audience larger than that of legacy media. There is a mutual benefit to both parties in partnering in terms of reach and legitimacy among complementary audiences.
And if, as Wired’s strategy implies, people are more likely to subscribe if there is a creator-like voice at the heart of the subscription marketing, then adopting a creator-first mentality can benefit both acquisition and conversion strategies. As with every partnership, though, the terms of the deal must be mutually beneficial. If media brands want to take advantage of creators’ ability to attract new audiences, they should recognize it needs to be a partnership of equals.
