How Creators Can Partner with Media Outlets

When I was 18, I dreamed of becoming a fashion journalist. 

Throughout school, I focused on gaining the experience that would set me up to enter the industry: I started a blog, held editorial positions, interned, and secured as many bylines as possible. 

But I’ll never forget something my dad said when I started to search for a post-grad job: “Have you looked to see what’s happening in the industry?”

Suddenly, the rose-colored glasses came off. At the time (mid-2010s), magazines were moving online or closing their doors altogether, and full-time staff were being replaced by freelancers. And so, my dream of becoming a fashion journalist quickly disappeared. 

My story is not that unique among j-school grads. In fact, most of my j-school peers aren’t in journalism or have never pursued it. And now, the same can be said for young aspiring journalists. Four years of training and energy for the work, only to not pursue it. Not because they stopped wanting it, but because they look at the industry and concluded there was no path forward without a following first. 

For most of modern journalism's history, credibility was manufactured through institutional standards. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal didn’t become the media outlets they are without structure. An assignment editor decided what got covered, a reporter brought in a story, and it moved through producers who checked sources, flagged bias, and asked for another pass before anything was published. 

The Society of Professional Journalists codified it in a code of ethics. And while journalism is far from perfect, it created a sense of trust and credibility, so you could feel confident in what the outlet told you.

That infrastructure is collapsing under consolidation, and it isn't collapsing evenly. Gallup reported that trust in traditional media outlets sits at 28%. Additionally, according to the 2021 Media Gender Gap Report by the Women’s Media Center, women only produce 41% of content in the U.S. news media sphere. Yet layoffs have disproportionately pushed women and BIPOC journalists out of the field, leaving most newsrooms white and male (which is not at all surprising given the corporatification of Big Media). According to the Institute for Independent Journalists, women and other marginalized genders accounted for 73% of those affected by cutbacks and consolidations, while journalists of color made up 42% of those affected.

So here's the question: if the institutional vetting system is disappearing, who's deciding who deserves attention now?

Knowledge creators are stepping in to fill the gap. 

Yet, audience size is largely irrelevant. Instead, newsrooms are screening for consistency, niche fit, and a track record you can watch accumulate in public. In other words, your body of work (social media, newsletter, podcast, etc.) is the new resume. 

This is exactly why subject-matter expertise is becoming what newsrooms are increasingly reaching for. Bringing in a knowledge creator isn't really different from what newsrooms have always done, pulling in professors, economists, and academics to speak to a story. What's changed is the mechanism, not the instinct. A knowledge creator with a consistent, visible body of work is functioning as the new version of the credentialed expert, minus the institutional letterhead.

So if you're a knowledge-driven creator looking at this shift and wondering how to actually get inside it, here are some takeaways:

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