Journalists who built careers in traditional publishing are leaving it for the creator economy
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Last week, Goalhanger, the UK’s fastest-growing business according to The Sunday Times, launched Goalhanger X, a model for “building complete media ecosystems around exceptional creators”.
The model aims to marry Goalhanger’s talent for IP development, audience-building, and sales with individual creators of a certain status.
The first personality to join Goalhanger X is journalist Marina Hyde, who left her Guardian column this month after 26 years to launch ‘Always On with Marina Hyde’. (Hyde will continue to co-host the Goalhanger podcast The Rest Is Entertainment.)
Her venture is essentially no different from any other independent writer/creator, except that it has the resources and financial backing of Goalhanger.
Always On is a YouTube show (with 11,200 subscribers), a Substack (with more than 23,000 free subscribers), and a social media brand.
Free at launch with paid tiers to come, it is essentially Hyde’s column with multimedia bells and whistles. Her first editorial video, a scripted analysis about U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth, earned 76,000 views as of the time of writing. (YouTube counts a view as any time a user watched the video for any amount of time.)
Hyde joins former Today presenter and short-lived Celebrity Traitors contestant Amol Rajan as the latest in an ever-growing list of established journalists who have tossed aside traditional publishing brands — the brands from which they nurtured their own personal brand — in favour of independent (or, in Hyde’s case, quasi-independent) projects built on the back of Silicon Valley tech platforms.
Building audience, or losing it?
Opting for the indie scene necessarily trades scale for niche. While no doubt Hyde’s 23,000 Substack subscribers are an impressive number for a new brand, they also amount to a fraction of her potential audience at The Guardian, which counts 122m global monthly average readers.
Rajan’s YouTube channel, meanwhile, has fewer than 10,000 subscribers as of the time of writing. His first editorial video, a two-hour interview with former England national team manager Gareth Southgate, earned 13,000 “views” on YouTube in its first four days.
Rajan acknowledged the modest figures in a LinkedIn post this weekend, revealing the Amol Rajan Connection has 12,000 “members” (including his free tier) and 27,000 social media followers.
For reference, Rajan could previously boast of reaching 5.8m weekly Today listeners, 2m University Challenge viewers, and 100,000 Radical podcast listeners per episode.
Rajan’s BBC-built brand strength meant that, before releasing a single video, he had already booked a 12-month brand partnership with NatWest. Rajan commented, “Counting NatWest as a launch partner gives me huge confidence in my start-up journey.”
Smaller audiences don’t appear to be scaring off brands; in fact, the opposite appears to be true.
According to a forecast by eMarketer, nearly half (45%) of influencer marketing spend in the US market is expected to go to influencers with fewer than 20,000 followers this year, as brands target smaller creators with dedicated niche audiences. “Nanoinfluencers” — creators with fewer than 5,000 followers — are expected to grow their market share from 2.1% in 2021 to 19.9% this year.
The brand opportunity
For its part, Goalhanger, which will bring all ad-sales in-house next year, is pitching Goalhanger X as a “new opportunity for advertisers” shaped around each creator’s unique audience and editorial proposition. Brands can get involved through sponsorships, paid social amplifications, and more, with details likely to come at Goalhanger’s inaugural upfront event this Thursday.
While it’s an evolution of Goalhanger’s high-profile, talent-led business model, the strategy is hardly new. Traditional publishers like the Daily Mail and Independent have for years been developing their own creator networks. At its recent upfront event, Hannah Blake, MD of the Mail‘s social publisher DMGNewmedia, said the company is now “thinking more and more like a talent agency” and “commissioning like a broadcaster”.
Puck, now five years old, was founded on the idea that news journalists should be treated more like social media influencers, with greater independence, individualised newsletter products, and promotion of personal brands.
Goalhanger is cultivating a more magazine-like approach than a news publisher might, with verticals in politics, history, science, entertainment, books, and sport, but the strategy is broadly the same: attract premium talent and package their individual output.
Call it “fit-for-TV” or “the new primetime“, the pitch to brands is to advertise directly with these creators because they have a proven track record and a cultivated community of followers, rather than those creators in the long tail that don’t.
Advertising and brand partnerships, meanwhile, become increasingly important for creators looking to supplement what can be modest subscription revenue, with subscription fatigue already biting the broader entertainment industry.
Winners and losers
Individual personalities have long proven they can find entrepreneurial success on platforms. Piers Morgan has exclusively published his show, Uncensored, on YouTube since February 2024. This summer, the company completed a $27m capital raise, with backers, including Elisabeth Murdoch, valuing Uncensored at $145m.
In the US, former MSNBC presenter Mehdi Hasan founded the Substack and YouTube channel Zeteo that same year; its commercial success led to the title launching in the UK this September. Meanwhile, ex-CNN media correspondent Oliver Darcy’s Beehiiv-hosted title, Status, counts 130,000 sign-ups and over 109,000 YouTube subscribers.
London Centric, the former Guardian journalist Jim Waterson’s local news startup, celebrated its second anniversary this month by reaching 5,500 paid subscribers and more than 42,000 free subscribers, enough to cover a staff of three.
That’s to say nothing of far-right independent media, with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly carving out significant independent audiences through podcasts and platform-based video distribution.
‘The division between church and state isn’t sustainable’: Journalists weigh-up life as a creator
What Hyde, Rajan, Morgan, Waterson, Hasan, Darcy, Carlson, Kelly and the rest have in common, though, is that their independent success has derived from traditional media, with decent-sized audiences carrying over after decades-long careers in print and TV. Less clear is how independent media offers an on-ramp for the next generation of journalists to do the same one day.
Goalhanger has attempted to offer something of the sort via its Creator Accelerator incubator, holding an “Accelerator Draft” event this month to promote its cohort of six up-and-comers. But each of those creators — Cody Dahler, Tolly Shoneye, Sophia Smith-Galer, Dr Eliza Filby, Tom Nicholas and Andrea Valls — is already established, with audiences that most indie creators only dream of. (Incubator applicants were required to average more than 100,000 monthly views across social media platforms.)
Not all journalists actively choose to go independent. As Media Leader columnist and former Times media editor Raymond Snoddy wrote in a recent column, “Substack is always a welcoming port in a storm for any journalist whose contract hasn’t been renewed.”
This has become commonplace as job cuts hit newsrooms amid an ongoing collapse in web traffic, driven primarily by Google’s AI Overviews, which has led to falling digital advertising revenues.
Substack, Beehiiv, and Patreon have emerged as the three major platforms where creators can host and manage their newsletters, podcasts, and other accoutrements, with Beehiiv presently the only one to support advertising.
Ironically, as opportunities at traditional publishers dry up, in part because of Google’s search changes, more journalists are also being pushed into Google’s hands, opting to become creators on algorithmic distribution platforms like YouTube, where Google can monetise them with a 45% revenue share.