Liz Kelly Nelson, the founder of The Independent Journalism Atlas, talked with Nieman Reports about the importance of covering the creator economy.
Here is an excerpt:
Q —Why should journalists pay attention to the creator economy now?A —It’s very important that we put our focus on it, because we care about journalism, right? And because the audience is already there. There is not one creator that’s losing sleep wondering, “Is The Washington Post or The New York Times taking my audience?” Because that’s not happening, but the reverse is.
For audiences, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha, these distributed platforms are their primary news sources. I have a 15-year-old son. He’s not unusual for his generation in that his primary news source is YouTube. There’s never going to come a point where [he’ll say], “It’s time for me to get a Time subscription [or] to start watching the evening news.” That is a generational behavior that is just not a part of what he and his peers are doing.
We need to be paying attention to that, because, if the ultimate reason that we do the work that we do is because we believe in the value of fact-based information and its ability to help people understand their world, then we need to make sure that the lessons and the pieces of what we know makes rigorous journalism are getting into those feeds.
