TL;DR
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Starting a new project can be a long slog, with “startup mode” famously requiring high levels of uncertainty and intense hours. People who go into solo projects knowing that they’re building a business might expect the intensity. But many of our interviewees didn’t realize that was what they were doing until they had already started.
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.
Most interviewees are going it alone, with too many roles and too few hours.
Our interviewees tend to work alone — and a lot. Some described their work as consuming “every waking thought” or “like, 100 hours” a week, while others manage to contain work to closer to 40 hours. Those who spend less time on their indie info provider projects are often juggling multiple jobs, with a total workload far in excess of a 40-hour week. Interviewees started their indie info provider endeavors as early as 2003 and as late as mid-2025; while early entrepreneurship is intense, it has stayed intense even for those who have been doing it longest.
No matter how many hours a week they work, interviewees reported splitting their time roughly equally between content work (research, interviewing, writing and creating videos), business development (marketing, revenue strategy and audience engagement) and administrative tasks (budgeting, scheduling, taxes and responding to emails). Those who are attempting to scale beyond a solo venture spend somewhat less time on content work than others. On the other hand, indie info providers with a strong reporting focus spend somewhat less time on business development, although they feel guilty about this choice. That said, there is no typical week in this business: interviewees’ focus varies based on immediate needs and news events.
A few interviewees have been able to expand their operation to include a small full-time team, but most have not. Even when indie info providers are able to hire some support, these supporting roles typically cover small and concrete areas of work, such as social media, ad sales or short-term help during much-needed time off.
Indie info providers are exhausted, and the unsustainable physical and mental toll impacts what they can produce and when.
Many of the interviewees feel exhausted and isolated. They’re acutely aware that they care more about their projects than anybody else, and it takes a toll. This also occurs with early entrepreneurs in other industries.
“I burned out like every other month being a one-woman show, so I think it’s just capacity to keep going [that] continues to be a big challenge.”
“This lives in my head. I am the only person on some level that cares about it, you know, and that is a weird experience.”
The physical and mental toll impacts their decision-making. Many reported making content choices on the basis of their publishing schedule rather than news value, and turning down other opportunities due to low bandwidth.
Despite the difficulties, interviewees find their work fulfilling and appreciate the editorial and managerial independence.
Every single person we spoke with finds their indie info provider work fulfilling. But are they happy? Just over half said yes, while most of the others highlighted the tension between the fulfilling nature of the work and limited time and financial resources. A few took the question philosophically. “I don’t answer questions like ‘am I happy?’ because I’m not a happy person,” one said. “I’m a bottomless pit of need,” another quipped, while a third mused, “What does ‘happy’ mean? I will be discussing this with my therapist later.”
Almost everyone would choose this path again, given the choice. By far the most common thing interviewees would do differently is think about business earlier: they wish they had “known it was a business,” “charged more,” “thought of it as a career” or “gone in with a business plan.” That is almost certainly specific to former journalists, and much less common among indie info providers from other backgrounds.
Several interviewees would like emotional support and help troubleshooting, and professional relationships with peers fulfill that for some. Interviewees who aren’t former journalists feel less supported.
To address the numerous challenges they face, many interviewees turn to peers who understand these stresses. They have a “group text,” a “sounding board” or even a standing coworking date with other indie info providers. These relationships are valuable for “brainstorming” and “spitballing” even if they are unlikely to lead to formal collaborations. Interviewees also benefit from feedback and skill-sharing within this type of relationship.
Co-production with other creators, even when it is informal, is a strategy to save time. This can look like swapping guest posts, creating something together or interviewing one another reciprocally. Indie info providers enjoy this type of collaboration and said it could be valuable to grow their audience and reach, but they also observed that it has to be genuine. “That’s so important for this ecosystem, for people to cross-promote to support each other when it’s genuinely of interest, not fake, you know, paid cross promotions. Your audience is too small and sensitive and they can tell when you’re doing that,” one person said. Several indie info providers said explicitly that they think about cross-promotion strategically, whether seeking opportunities with larger outlets (or to support smaller ones), reaching out to people on complementary platforms or finding intersections with audiences they want to reach but have not yet.
A few interviewees who are not former journalists find it challenging to develop stronger relationships with other indie info providers. Either they aren’t aware of people working on similar beats, or they do not see a way to collaborate that makes sense for their finances or their schedules. Another interviewee — who said that “being alone” is the hardest part of the job — also finds it difficult to relate to other indie info providers because of extensive experience on the business side of media organizations. ”There’s a phrase, ‘to run a business means to touch reality.’ I think there are a lot of people that work in the media who never touched reality. And touching reality, by the way, sucks.”
Similarly, many former journalists miss the day-to-day support they found working in larger organizations, but realize these jobs may no longer exist.
Former journalists who transitioned from legacy media find themselves missing many functions of a larger newsroom they once took for granted. They no longer have access to editorial oversight or legal review they might have once had, and all decision-making lies with them. When the same person writes, edits and publishes the content, they worry about an accountability gap.
The tasks they handle go far beyond accountability: they have to coordinate their own health insurance, backstop their own time off, sell their own ads and figure out their own legal status as a business. They struggle to juggle — or do without — these tasks, and balance their life with priorities outside of work, like simultaneously holding full- or part-time jobs, raising families or completing a doctoral degree. However, several former journalists noted that the journalism jobs with larger organizations may no longer exist, citing massive layoffs in the industry.
Advanced technology makes it possible to work alone, but most interviewees wish their tools were better integrated into their workflows.
Beyond standard office software like email, word processing and presentation tools, indie info providers rely on a wide range of software tools for managing workflow, research, content production, content distribution, managing finances and automating across these functions.
For technology to save time and effort, the indie info providers need integration between tools and functions. Yet only a few who are particularly tech-savvy described their technology as a “stack” or otherwise said they have achieved this integration. Instead, technology is a broad challenge for many. Knowing programming and coding basics, being able to work with different kinds of products and knowing how to troubleshoot are essential.
| Tools mentioned | ||
| Area of work | Specific task | Tools |
| Managing workflow | Task & project management | Asana, Airtable, Sunsama, Trello |
| Research | Managing sources & story fodder | Feedly, Newspapers.com, Notion, Obsidian, Zotero |
| Automating records requests | MuckRock, proprietary tools | |
| Brainstorming story ideas | LLMs | |
| Production | Dictation or transcription | Descript, Dictate, Gemini, Grain, Notta, Otter, Rev, Riverside |
| Graphic design & image/audio/video editing | Adobe suite, Canva, CapCut, DaVinci, Figma, InShot, Lightroom | |
| Text editing | Grammarly, Wordtune, off-the-shelf LLMs, custom GPTs | |
| Programming | LLMs | |
| Sourcing images | Free image libraries (Unsplash, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Pexels) | |
| Distribution | Web hosting, newsletter service, & CMS | WordPress, Substack, Ghost, Beehiiv |
| Social media syncing & management | Publer, Zapier, RSS tools, N8N, Restream.io | |
| Finances | Subscription management | Built into web or newsletter hosting for some; Campaign Monitor, Memberful, Stripe |
| Accounting | Quickbooks | |
| Integration & automation | Integration & automation | Zapier, N8N |
While many use AI tools like LLMs for some tasks, they are not a primary resource.
While most of the interviewees use LLM tools at some stage of their process, almost none use them to produce content directly, with many gravitating towards specialized tools instead (see table above). At least eight indie info providers are actively opposed to the use of LLMs for content creation, and some of them avoid LLMs entirely. As one told us bluntly, “I think that people should use their big brains, and you can put that in there.”
The legacy journalism connection
One of the sharpest contrasts between legacy journalism and our interviewees is the absence of institutional support. Those who came from large newsrooms acutely feel the lack of editorial oversight and legal resources. Running a one-person operation makes it difficult to take time off or balance work with other priorities. Yet for some, going independent is less of a choice than a necessity as the U.S. journalism job market continues to contract and newsrooms, small and large, shutter or cut staff. That is, some indie info providers have found themselves on their own, whether they intended to be or not.
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