Learning on the job, together

TL;DR

🔄 Most indie info providers arrived here through a career pivot — there’s no standard path in or for professional development.

🧪 Self-teaching is the norm — trial and error, free resources, and monitoring analytics drive skill-building, especially around social media.

🤝 Peer networks are the primary learning environment — formal and informal communities of fellow creator-journalists carry most of the professional development load.

🔁 The ecosystem is fairly insular — interviewees mostly learn from people with similar backgrounds and few have tapped into small business networks or the SBA.

💡 There’s an untapped opportunity in cross-industry learning — creator, open-source, indie dev, and public scholarship communities have knowledge that could directly benefit indie info providers.

Explore Full Report

Professional Backgrounds

Indie info providers are navigating instability in the journalism industry. There is no single pathway to become an indie info provider or even consensus on how they refer to themselves.

Professional Development

Indie info providers are learning on the job, together. Learning from — and with — peers from similar backgrounds represents an opportunity.

Indie info providers are bridging humanity and rigor. In contrast with legacy journalism, they tend to marry authenticity with authority, with a very clear sense of their voice and the way they build credibility with their audiences.

Distribution Platforms

Indie info providers are offsetting risk with a multiplatform distribution strategy. Similar to many other kinds of information providers, they feel pressure to be everywhere at once online.

Making Money

Indie info providers are struggling to build sustainable revenue. Interviewees have similar financial challenges to both legacy journalism and other new small businesses.

Going Solo

Indie info providers are finding this work fulfilling but difficult. Like other early entrepreneurs, interviewees tend to work alone, and a lot – as one described it, “every waking hour” – with time divided between the content and the business.

About This Study

Participating Creators

Parallel Study: Sneak Peek

Nearly every indie info provider came to this role as a result of a professional pivot, and the learning curve looks different depending on one’s background.

Trained journalists may struggle with the business side, while those without journalism experience may feel they need to develop their communication skills or their sourcing or verification practices. As there is no standard career path into this field, there is no standard path for professional development either.

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.

While many of the interviewees had taken a structured course of some kind, self-teaching, trial and error and a strong entrepreneurial spirit are critical.

Eleven out of 26 U.S. interviewees said they had taken some sort of structured course relevant to their creator work. All but one took courses in business skills, ranging from accounting and budgeting to more advanced strategy and revenue development. Without exception, the business courses they took were journalism-specific. They turned to Project C, CUNY’s entrepreneurial journalism program, LION Publishers, Tiny News Collective and others. That’s particularly surprising because so many of their business challenges are relevant to new entrepreneurs across disciplines, not just journalism.

Indie info providers also found ways to learn on their own. Self-teaching could mean learning through trial and error, or it could involve accessing free materials online or from a library. Social media, in particular, seems to be a skillset that creators learn by trying things out (although three people took courses on producing vertical video). Most interviewees decide what to post by soliciting audience feedback or monitoring analytics and identifying patterns over time. One person also described their strategy for avoiding trolls and harassment as something they learned primarily through experimentation. They also teach themselves technical skills like website building, basic programming, video editing, ad sales and more.

They mostly learn new skills alongside one another.

Indie info providers turn to their formal and informal networks to learn new skills. They rely on friends, former colleagues and “mentors from all different types of worlds.” Like the structured courses they told us about, the more formal networks they named were similarly journalism-centric: Project C, which manages a Slack community of 200+ creator-journalists, was the only community that more than one interviewee mentioned by name. (That’s likely because we recruited participants in partnership with Project C. Many other communities for indie info providers exist, among them the Evidence Collective, News Creator Corps, Listening Post Collective, CUNY’s Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators Program, LION Publishers, SciCommers and the Tiny News Collective.)

While indie info providers from journalism backgrounds and those from other backgrounds have complementary skills and growth areas, interviewees tend to learn from people with similar backgrounds. Just one person said they had joined a local small business networking group, which they found immensely valuable for skill development, relationships and finding local advertisers. This person thought their peers would benefit from broadening their networks in this way, especially if they serve a local audience.

Because so much of their professional learning takes place within networks, many of our interviewees engage in mentorship programs with journalism schools, professional societies or conferences. They all said these were important professional relationships for them, both to stay connected to the field and to pay forward the way they had learned. As one person explained, “I still dedicate a lot of time when people ask me about starting your own business or about being a solo in the newsletter world. Because people did that for me and I have an ethical obligation to share that, especially now that I’ve been doing this a little bit longer.”

Many available resources that are not journalism-specific have largely gone un-utilized by interviewees due to time, access or awareness.

Most interviewees see themselves as small business owners (see “making money”), yet only one interviewee mentioned participating in a local small business networking group. Nobody mentioned taking advantage of resources or services from the Small Business Administration or from Small Business Development Centers, although they would likely be eligible. It’s hard to know why interviewees didn’t talk about these opportunities, but it is possible they do not have time to take advantage of them, or are not aware that they exist at all.

The relative insularity of the professional development ecosystem could mean that the indie info providers we interviewed are unaware of relevant opportunities from adjacent fields. For example, the broader creator field has built a great deal of knowledge about monetizing independent work; indie web developers have long focused on building an audience on owned sites rather than depending on platforms; the open-source community has given deep thought to the sustainability of independent projects; and public scholars have deep expertise in research and communication.

This finding suggests that indie info providers would benefit from networking broadly and considering business models and resources outside their original industry.