TL;DR
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Like many other information providers, including legacy journalism, indie info providers depend on a wide range of distribution platforms to make their content visible to potential and current audiences. They also face similar challenges deciding where to be when.
These platforms — social media sites, newsletter aggregators, private chat portals and more — make it possible for an individual to attain broad reach. But these platforms also mediate between indie info providers and their audiences in two ways: they control access to information about the audiences, and they control what content those audiences see. These platforms can — and do — unilaterally change their features, including how they surface and prioritize content, and even which content they allow at all. This creates uncertainty that indie info providers have to navigate. These concerns are not unique to indie info providers, but they may be especially vulnerable to platform risk because of their small size.
Why and how we did this
Note on terminology
There is no consensus on terminology, even among our interviewees. We primarily use the term “indie info provider” and sometimes “creator-journalist,” which was the term used in our survey and interviews. If anything, creator-journalists are a subset of indie info providers: they have journalism backgrounds and typically see themselves as journalists, even if they don’t use the term publicly. Both terms appear throughout the report to refer to the same group: “people who are working to provide verified factual information with a personality- or voice-driven brand that leverages the creator economy.” That definition encompasses a tremendous amount of variation.
Why we did this
According to our research, about one in five people in the United States get news from individuals rather than organizations, and it’s more common for younger people to get news and information this way. A glut of new platforms and technological tools also make it easier to run a solo or small info provider business.
Featuring individual voices over institutional brands has been paying dividends in terms of both audience trust and the flexibility to try out different formats, tools and platforms. Legacy media is paying attention to this trend and newsrooms like The Washington Post and ESPN are now partnering with indie info providers.
To date, research on this trend has largely focused on the broader landscape of content creators, including entertainers, politicians and other creators who do not necessarily focus on informing their audiences. And most research to date has focused on content sourcing and linking strategies. To enable a future for a plurality of fact-based sources that readers and viewers find relevant, our project sheds light on who indie info providers are, and how they approach their role in the broader news landscape.
How we did this
In partnership with Project C, CNTI recruited 43 adults in the U.S. to take a screening survey and chose 26 for a 60- to 90-minute virtual interview. CNTI selected interviewees to represent a range of professional backgrounds. This report is based primarily on insights from the interviews, with data from the survey as a secondary source.
In keeping with Project C’s focus, most interviewees were former journalists — but we prioritized interviewing people from non-journalism backgrounds, and we were able to interview science communicators, subject-matter experts and civic-minded community members without journalism experience.. Throughout this report we call out contrasting examples that suggest larger differences between former journalists and indie info providers from other backgrounds. We also spotlight examples from indie info providers outside our sample, where relevant to point to the broader diversity of backgrounds and experiences.
In interviews, we asked participants about their backgrounds and motivations, audience engagement, their relationships with other indie info providers and legacy news outlets, platforms and algorithms, revenue and business strategies, and their view of success and satisfaction with their own work.
We developed codes using a bottom-up and iterative approach as themes emerged through the analysis. Code categories largely reflected the range of interview topics as well as the addition of the broader themes “freedom” and “small business owner.” These methods provide richness and depth; however, it’s not possible to generalize about the frequency of behaviors from these interactions, so we limit our use of quantitative terms to our interviewees throughout this report.
CNTI research and professional staff prepared this report. This project was made possible by the financial support of the Lenfest Institute and a second anonymous donor.
Selecting platforms requires balancing format affordances, audience preferences and perceived revenue potential.
Interviewees cited a range of factors when they talked about which platforms they use.
- Format affordances: Some platforms primarily encourage users to post text, while others are image- or video-first. Many indie info providers gravitate more to one format or another rather than spending additional time adapting a story into multiple formats.
- Audience preferences: The demographics of the user base on each platform varies at any given point in time. For example, as of early 2026, older adults (55+) were overrepresented on Facebook, while 12- to 34-year-olds were overrepresented on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram.
- Revenue potential: Many platforms offer native monetization opportunities as well as indirect ones like sponsorships. Many of these opportunities depend on reach, which in turn depends on algorithms that prioritize some content over others.
All of these factors change over time, so which platforms an indie info provider focuses on is a decision that needs to be revisited regularly.
Moreover, these factors are not independent of one another. One interviewee took a step back to explain how they are closely intertwined:
I don’t think it makes as much sense for me to be as focused on TikTok where the audience is much younger, because while I could reach a larger scale that way, I don’t think that’s where my paying customers are, necessarily. I don’t care about reaching 200,000 people in a short form video if nobody buys anything, or I’m not in a position to monetize that. Since the dominant social platforms for my peers and for our audience tend to be text-driven places, [those were] an easy place to start.”
Many interviewees are frustrated with the need to stay present on so many platforms, but it can be a way to offset risk.
Most of our interviewees were on at least three platforms such as newsletters, their own websites and a range of social media. Maintaining a presence in so many places at once is time-consuming and frustrating, but feels necessary to combat limited visibility and manage the risk of platforms changing how they prioritize content performance.
One major reason interviewees cited for using multiple platforms is a lack of transparency about performance. Those who consistently see better performance on one platform typically attributed it to audience habits. For example, indie info providers reaching a professional audience largely find more traction on LinkedIn than elsewhere. Engagement also varies across platforms and even from one post to the next. Some actively try to tailor content for different platforms, but many simply cross-post, especially those who see social media platforms primarily as sources of more direct forms of traffic.
In addition to challenges around transparency, interviewees also highlighted the financial risks of platform dependence. Many of the indie info providers have had bad experiences with specific platforms that leave them wary of putting all their eggs in one basket. After one platform “nuked the reach of links,” an interviewee found that they needed to spend more time to achieve the same reach. Another person observed, “Seeing what happened to Twitter, it was very clear to me that any tech company could implode that quickly.” After a bad experience with Twitter, this person preemptively moved away from Substack when they saw warning signs that the platform was compromising creator revenue and access to audience data.
Interviewees also raised concerns about content deletion and demotion on social media platforms. Platforms don’t provide transparent information about whether content is affected or how. That leaves indie info providers guessing, choosing to self-censor or abandon platforms where they have seen their reach shrink dramatically.
Indie info providers say making money means prioritizing platforms that offer more control over audience experience and data, such as websites and newsletters.
Interviewees see email newsletters and websites as the most predictably monetizable platforms: in their current form, they seem to provide direct audience access. In turn, that means that advertising revenue is direct and indie info providers have more control over subscriptions and paywalls. Their reasons for choosing between different tools in this space tend to be feature-driven, since they would ideally use a single tool to manage everything. In fact, all interviewees use just one newsletter platform (Ghost, Beehiiv, Substack or Mailchimp), although there is variation between using separate platforms for their websites and using integrated functions within newsletter platforms.
While our interviewees largely saw newsletters as a safer financial bet, there are indie info providers finding financial success on YouTube between Google AdSense and sponsorship deals. Among them: Cleo Abram (Huge if True), Joss Fong (Howtown) and Johnny Harris. Vertical video, on the other hand, has been harder for many indie providers to monetize directly.
The deep dive: newsletter & website platforms
For newsletter and website platforms, this group of indie info providers use WordPress, Ghost, Beehiiv, Webflow and/or Substack. Because of the way questions were framed, we have likely undercounted the use of website tools such as WordPress (which powers more than 40% of the internet).
Beehiiv users cited its “creator-first” model, including customizability, accessibility for those with less coding knowledge and the ability to export audience data and content if they choose to leave. One person who participated in Beehiiv’s creator program also noted that the platform offers a health insurance stipend, a lawyer for pre-publication review and a designated support person for participants. (Project C, CNTI’s recruitment partner, has a relationship with Beehiiv, which is reflected in its preeminence as a newsletter platform among interviewees. The relative frequency of Ghost, Substack, Beehiiv and WordPress among our interviewees is almost certainly not reflective of the broader population of indie info providers.)
Ghost users said they value that it is open source. Users also like that they own their data and are not concerned about the cost going up.
Substack users cited prior familiarity with the platform, brand recognition and awareness of other creators using it as their primary reasons for choosing it. Substack also provides an example of the instability of platform features over time: several interviewees had moved away from it because they saw Substack’s branding competing with their own or because Substack had begun reducing access to subscribers and control over user data.
What stands out is what went unsaid: Both Ghost and WordPress offer paid hosting and other support services. However, the underlying software is open-source, which means that users can deploy them locally and do not need to rely on the companies for hosting. It also means there is built-in portability that proprietary tools lack. Ghost, in particular, is non-profit, which means that the paid services are offered to support a mission rather than to increase shareholder profit.
Casey Newton of Platformer has written at length about choosing distribution platforms as an indie info provider, offering an example of an approach that takes advantage of platform’s strengths while retaining as much independence as possible. That includes constantly revisiting their options rather than assuming what a platform offers will remain consistent.
Indie info providers use social media to expand reach, despite not necessarily being able to monetize it.
On social media, indie info providers are trying to meet audiences where (they think) they are. (As several acknowledged, their understanding of who uses which platform is constrained by the data that the platforms themself provide. If a platform doesn’t measure a particular group, it is hard to be certain.)
Many said using social media aligns with their mission of informing the public. It can also help drive audiences to platforms where they can earn more money. For social media, their rationale for choosing particular platforms is audience-centered and format-centered. After all, using any particular social media platform does not preclude them from using others, although there can be trade-offs in terms of time.
The deep dive: social media platforms
Among our interviewees…
Instagram users typically had an established presence there before beginning their indie info provider venture, making it a natural starting point.
TikTok users see it as necessary for audience growth and many crosspost content from Instagram reels and YouTube shorts.
Facebook users value the existing interest-based communities related to their topic area. It is also a legacy platform, and some continue to post simply because they have not left.
Bluesky users prefer it to X (Twitter) because it does not deprioritize links, making it better suited for driving traffic to sites they own. Many made the comparison explicit, noting “the presence that we had on X was sizable enough, but not worth the headache [for the ROI]” or “X is like an ‘I hate journalism’ machine … whereas Bluesky loves links and loves journalism and sends all of the traffic to you.”
LinkedIn users typically serve B2B audiences. They value the ability to target particular professional communities.
YouTube users described it as the “gold standard” for content creators in terms of profitability and durability.
Interviewees try to avoid platforms that aren’t values-aligned, but they say that’s not always possible.
Some interviewees raised concerns about value misalignment with particular platforms. Substack and X (Twitter) stand out in this regard, with the most common concern being these platforms’ willingness to “actively host Nazi-affiliated content.” They also identified lock-in as a challenge: both platforms make it difficult to migrate content and followers elsewhere. Many interviewees have left these platforms for alternatives or, if they maintain an X account, use it primarily for “broadcasting” but not to engage bidirectionally.
In other cases, value misalignment means that platforms were a poor match for interviewees’ business goals. For example, several said that certain platforms have deprioritized posts containing links, so they are no longer a valuable traffic source. They perceive some platforms as increasingly “pay to play” or have concerns about platforms’ brands competing with their work rather than supporting it.
While not mentioned as much as other examples of value misalignment, interviewees also brought up value misalignment around labor issues. The specific issues they raised were about platforms exploiting and extracting value from their labor, and platforms using their content to train AI models without consent or remuneration.
Some interviewees use LLMs for content production tasks, but none talked about them as distribution platforms or competitors.
Publishers — including both legacy journalism outlets and indie info providers — have been concerned for years about declining traffic from search engines as LLM-generated overviews have become more common. Audiences are certainly turning to these tools to access information.
No interviewee described using AI tools like LLMs as a distribution platform, although several raised concerns about audience use, given documented concerns about LLM accuracy and attribution. However, many of them use LLMs for limited tasks within their production workflow (see “going solo”).
The legacy journalism connection
Most of the platform pressures identified in this section apply equally to legacy journalism as to indie info providers. The conflict between platforms’ goals to maximize engagement and info providers’ goals to inform is not unique to indie info providers, nor is frustration with platforms’ power to unilaterally change their terms and what they prioritize. Like indie info providers, legacy journalism has responded by maintaining a presence on multiple platforms and trying to drive traffic to platforms where the audience relationship is less mediated.
Where they differ may largely be a matter of size. In practical terms, organizations large enough to have a dedicated technology team have more capacity to use tools that require more technical expertise, including local instances of open-source software. Solo or small providers may face pressure to rely more heavily on the tools with the best customer service or those that bundle services that meet multiple needs at once.
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