Creator journalism is the work of journalists who publish directly to an audience that comes to them by name and returns. Three-quarters of media leaders surveyed by the Reuters Institute plan to have journalists behave more like creators this year. That relationship can live in the journalist’s own channel inside the publisher’s app, where it stays with the newsroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In January, the Reuters Institute<\/a> published what 280 media leaders planned for the year. Three-quarters (76 percent) said they would try to get their journalists to behave more like creators. Half would partner with creators, a third would hire them, and 28 percent planned creator studios. Wired set out to turn its best-known writers into platform personalities, from vertical video on TikTok and Instagram to live events. The New York Times put the faces of its correspondents on its homepage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The same survey carries the worry that comes with the plan. Four in ten leaders (39 percent) fear losing their best editorial talent to the creator economy. The report’s example is Dave Jorgenson, the Washington Post’s TikTok journalist, who left after eight years to set up on his own. The reach of the Post’s YouTube channel that had hosted his videos crumbled, according to data from Rival IQ. The followers went with him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around a quarter of people worldwide (27 percent) get some news from creators who focus on news, according to the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026<\/a>, and 13 percent say creators meet most or all of their news needs. Only 3 percent rely on creators alone. People who follow creators consume more traditional media than the average respondent, so the two are used alongside each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The detail that matters for a European publisher sits in the chapter on news creators<\/a>. In Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the people respondents name as news creators are often journalists and presenters from established media who have extended their presence onto social and video platforms. The report calls them hybrid journalist creators and gives Jan B\u00f6hmermann of ZDF as the German example. In those markets, the creator a reader follows often already has a desk in a newsroom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lucy K\u00fcng, who is writing a book on the creator economy, sorts creators into four types in the first issue of her newsletter Creator Shift<\/a>: celebrities, influencers, niche experts and creator-founders. The niche expert, the specialist who turns deep knowledge of a narrow field into a direct audience, is in her words “the natural home for news industry exiles”. We made the same point in a company post on 23 October<\/a>: the court reporter who knows every judge in town, and the sportswriter readers trust on every transfer, are niche experts already.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What they lack is the second half of the creator’s job. In an interview with FIPP ahead of its World Media Congress, K\u00fcng described the rules<\/a> that hold in the creator economy: the personal rather than the professional, direct distribution, and a permanent feedback loop with the audience. A byline gives a reader a name. A creator gives the reader a person who answers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Many journalists have started building that half on their own. A third of the 1,515 journalists in Muck Rack’s State of Creator Journalism 2025 survey said they publish independently, outside a traditional media organisation, Poynter reported<\/a>, and half of them had been doing so for more than five years. Only 6 percent earn a full income from it. The habit is there. The home for it, so far, is a platform the newsroom does not own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A follow on TikTok or Instagram is a contract between the reader and the platform. The newsroom cannot reach those readers when the algorithm changes, and cannot keep them when the journalist leaves. That is the cost behind the 39 percent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is also what the platform does to the relationship itself. Heiko Scherer, tchop’s founder, wrote in The habit of being expected<\/a> that social platforms built their habit around who’s there, while news products built theirs around what’s new. A reader who replies to a journalist on Instagram and gets an answer comes back for that person. A reader who opens a typical news app finds something new and, in Heiko’s words, nobody notices they had been there. The creator relationship is the first kind, and a publisher can host it as well as a platform can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We argued in our 12-month plan for publishers after Google<\/a> that the asset is the reader who comes back on their own. A journalist with a direct audience is the fastest way to create that reader, because people return for people more reliably than for institutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A working section that behaves like the creator’s feed, inside the product the publisher owns. Six parts make it work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Three numbers tell you whether it works: how many readers follow the section, how many of them received a reply this month, and how many came back on a day with no push.<\/p>\n\n\n\n tchop gives publishers their own news app and web app with the community built in, which is what a journalist’s channel needs. Any section can show the author’s name and photo on every post. A journalist can run a section with the app-only contributor role, posting from their phone without access to the editorial backend, or editors can grant posting rights to named people per section. On a personalised news feed, readers follow the sections they want, so a journalist’s section has an audience of its own. Each section can send an automatic push when a new post goes live, and readers get a notification when someone replies to or mentions them. The newsroom keeps moderation, analytics and the audience. Funke Digital and Ruhr24 run their reader apps on tchop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The publisher’s own AI agents can prepare a journalist’s posts through tchop, and the journalist decides what goes out under their name.<\/p>\n\n\n\nWho are the creators people get news from?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What makes a creator different from a byline?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why does the platform keep the relationship?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What does a journalist’s channel inside your app look like?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Where tchop fits<\/h2>\n\n\n\n