The Wrong Creators Problem
Newsrooms are partnering with the wrong creators. And it's making the trust crisis worse.
The news industry spent the last year deciding it needs creators. Good. But it picked the wrong ones.
While newsrooms scramble to partner with people who “look like journalists” on TikTok and Instagram, they’re walking right past the scientists, professors, doctors, and researchers who already hold the trust that legacy mastheads have been hemorrhaging for a decade.
The creator strategy isn’t broken because it’s new — it’s broken because it’s narrow.
🩺 The Pain Point
Most publishers treat their creator strategy as a distribution hack: find someone with followers, hand them a link, hope for clicks. But that approach mirrors the same transactional thinking that eroded audience trust in the first place.
According to the Reuters Institute’s 2026 trends survey of 280 senior news executives across 51 countries, roughly 76% of publishers plan to encourage journalists to develop creator-like personas, and half intend to partner with influencers for distribution.
The problem? Nearly all of that energy flows toward “news influencers” — people who already operate in the media orbit. Meanwhile, high-trust subject-matter experts (the climate scientist with 200K YouTube subscribers, the economist with a loyal Substack following, the public-health researcher whose threads go viral) sit outside the newsroom’s field of vision entirely.
These aren’t just potential amplifiers. They’re trust brokers. And newsrooms are ignoring them because they don’t fit the legacy definition of a “media partner.”
🔴 Pain Point Score: HIGH
This is a compounding problem. Every month newsrooms spend partnering exclusively with personality-driven news influencers, they reinforce the perception that news is entertainment, not expertise.
The trust gap widens, and the subject-matter creators build direct audience relationships that make future partnerships harder to negotiate.
📊 Why It Matters
The trust numbers are brutal and it’s getting worse. Gallup’s latest survey found that just 28% of Americans express confidence in mass media to report news fully, accurately, and fairly. Yikes! That’s a record low, and the first time the measure has fallen below 30%. Five years ago, that figure was 40%.
Pew Research Center data from a September 2025 survey shows trust in national news organizations fell 11 percentage points from a brief uptick earlier that year, landing at 56% — and down 20 points since Pew first asked the question in 2016. The decline cuts across both parties and all age groups.
At the same time, audiences are gravitating toward individual voices they perceive as credible. Pew data shows that 38% of adults under 30 regularly get news from influencers on social media; and the behavior is bipartisan, with virtually no difference between Republicans and Democrats.
But here’s the catch: Reuters Institute research across 24 countries found that much creator content skews toward opinion and partisan commentary rather than reported news, and that most popular news influencers have no obligation to report fairly or accurately, even if many try.
That means newsrooms partnering only with opinion-forward creators risk reinforcing the very dynamic that’s eroding their authority. Subject-matter experts offer a different proposition — credibility rooted in domain knowledge, not personality.
Ryan Kellett, a Nieman-Berkman fellow at Harvard and formerly the audience lead at Axios, raised this point at the World News Media Congress in Krakow. He acknowledged that newsrooms have legitimate brand-safety concerns about partnering with non-journalists.
Kellett suggested that those uncomfortable with such partnerships should consider working with academic and expert creators who have real, verified expertise.
🤔 Who Should Care
Newsroom leaders and audience strategists — you’re the ones setting partnership criteria that may be too narrow.
Independent and local publishers — you have the most to gain from expert-creator partnerships because your audiences crave local authority.
News product developers and app builders — there’s a discovery and matchmaking gap here that technology can solve.
Journalism funders — your grants support creator programs, but are they broad enough to include non-journalist experts?
🏗️ The Structural Root Cause
The diagnosis: newsrooms are applying influencer-marketing playbooks to a trust-building problem, which requires a completely different logic.
Journalism innovator Liz Kelly Nelson has warned that the real risk isn’t just how newsrooms partner with creators — it’s who builds the infrastructure that governs creator journalism.
Writing in Nieman Lab, Nelson described two divergent paths: one where platforms build creator programs optimized for their own needs, using engagement metrics and ad inventory rather than journalistic integrity, causing the most sensational voices to rise while careful, community-embedded reporters remain invisible.
The other path involves creator-governed systems for discovery, standards, and partnerships where journalists and creators can be found based on beat expertise, geographic coverage, and demonstrated trust-building, not just follower counts. Nelson, along with Justin Bank and Ryan Kellett, is launching an infrastructure project to help close that gap before platforms define the terms alone. (More on that later.)
The root issue is that newsrooms still define “authority” through a legacy lens. A credible partner looks like a journalist, talks like a journalist, or used to be a journalist. But audiences have already moved on from that framework.
Audiences trust the epidemiologist who explained COVID variants better than the evening news did. They trust the local urban planner whose YouTube videos make zoning laws digestible. These people command deep loyalty in niche communities — exactly the audiences newsrooms can’t reach through traditional channels.
The American Press Institute, which has been running newsroom-creator collaboration experiments, references a taxonomy from consultant Adriana Lacy that categorizes potential partners into four types: niche content creators, community leaders, micro-influencers, and macro-influencers.
For local news organizations, API argues, what matters most is that a trusted messenger’s community overlaps with your market area and has a need for your journalism. That category of “trusted messenger” includes activists, nonprofit leaders, and small business owners whose influence comes from community embeddedness, not audience size — and it’s the one most newsrooms underinvest in.
💡 Who’s Solving It (+ How)
Influencer Journalism, founded by Adriana Lacy — an award-winning journalist, educator, consultant, and entrepreneur whose background spans the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Axios — is one of the most direct attempts to bridge this gap.
The platform helps newsrooms and media organizations combine journalistic excellence with influencer partnerships and modern storytelling techniques. Through strategic partnerships, video production training, and engagement workshops, Influencer Journalism empowers media organizations to reach today’s audiences on social platforms without compromising editorial standards.
In addition to partnership facilitation, the company provides short-form video consulting and training programs that help journalists adopt proven creator engagement practices. The approach treats creator partnerships as a strategic function — not a one-off campaign.
The American Press Institute has been running structured experiments across two cohorts of newsrooms, providing grants and hands-on support for creator collaborations.
A 2024 pilot through the Knight Election Hub supported six newsrooms experimenting with influencer partnerships around nonpartisan election coverage. In 2025, API expanded the program to 16 local and community news organizations, each receiving $3,000 grants to test creator collaborations that went beyond content marketing.
These weren’t transactional distribution deals but true collaborations built around listening, sharing control, and reaching audiences in ways newsrooms can’t do alone. The Houston Chronicle worked with food influencers to bring new energy to dining coverage. CivicLex in Kentucky tapped local creators to inspire small but meaningful acts of civic engagement, from litter cleanup to shadowing public officials.
Across both cohorts, API described its role as not just a funder but a guide and partner, helping newsrooms step outside their comfort zones and reflect on what real impact looks like.
Project C, led by Liz Kelly Nelson — who developed the concept during a 2024 Sulzberger Fellowship at Columbia — has built a Slack community of 60-plus 200-plus independent journalists who connect daily to support each other, share strategies, and collaborate.
The initiative also runs “Going Solo,” an accelerator co-created with Ryan Kellett, Blair Hickman, and Caitlin Dewey that provides practical training for journalists transitioning into the creator space.
The News Creators project from FT Strategies has proposed Information Credibility Guidelines for creators who feel a strong personal responsibility for accuracy but lack the formal frameworks of a traditional newsroom.
🛠️ The Build Opportunities
Opportunity 1: A creator-expert discovery platform purpose-built for newsrooms, not a recycled influencer-marketing tool. Think of it as a matchmaking engine that surfaces subject-matter creators (scientists, academics, policy experts, community leaders) by beat, geography, audience trust signals, and editorial alignment.
Current tools like CrowdTangle are gone, and nothing has adequately replaced them for this specific use case. A product that indexes expert creators across YouTube, Substack, LinkedIn, and podcasts — scored by domain credibility rather than follower count — would fill a painful gap.
Opportunity 2: Beyond discovery, there’s an opportunity to build partnership infrastructure: standardized contract templates for expert-newsroom collaborations, shared editorial guidelines that protect both brand safety and creator independence, and measurement dashboards that go beyond clicks to track trust indicators like audience retention, community sentiment, and subscriber conversion from creator-sourced traffic.
💬 Closing Provocation
“Publishers will finally learn the value of news creators” isn’t the real prediction for 2026. The real question is whether they’ll learn the value of the right creators — the ones who don’t look like journalists but hold more trust than most mastheads.
The newsroom that figures this out first won’t just grow its audience. It’ll deserve that audience.
“Audience members want to follow faces, not mastheads. … Individuals command the attention that institutions need to survive.” — Jeremy Gilbert, Knight Professor of Digital Media Strategy, Northwestern Medill (Nieman Lab)
⚡️ tl;dr
Newsrooms are rushing to partner with social media creators, but they’re picking the wrong ones. Instead of teaming up with “news influencers” who mostly offer opinion and commentary, they should be partnering with trusted subject-matter experts — scientists, doctors, professors, local community leaders — who already have the credibility that traditional media keeps losing.
Public trust in news is at record lows, and these expert creators offer something personality-driven influencers can’t: authority rooted in real knowledge.
A few organizations (like the American Press Institute and Influencer Journalism) are starting to figure this out, but most newsrooms are still stuck thinking a credible partner has to look and sound like a journalist.