Creators are the new front page
Jul 3, 2025
Thoughts of a founder by Alex Taylor
My sister doesn’t fire up a news site with her morning coffee; she opens TikTok.
In under a minute she can tell you why the dollar is sliding, because @kylascan [Kyla Scanlon] just broke it down in 90 seconds, long before CNN’s push-alert hits her lock-screen.
She’s not an outlier.
Pew’s latest survey shows the share of U.S. adults who regularly get news on TikTok has leapt from 3 % in 2020 to 17 % in 2024, and it’s 39 % among under-30s*.
Zoom out and the pattern is even starker: roughly one in five Americans now relies on digital influencers for news*.
And for the first time in the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, social and video networks collectively outrank both TV and news websites as the place audiences encountered news in a given week*.
What’s changed isn’t just distribution,
it’s trust.
Creators appear in feeds we’ve curated ourselves; they speak in first-person, on-camera, every day. That intimacy breeds a loyalty that banners and bylines rarely match. Legacy metrics like views and CTR miss this entirely; the real currency is watch-time, comments, how many people return for the next clip.
Traditional publishers can’t out-creator the creators, but they don’t have to. They already own editorial rigor, archives, legal teams, and ad-sales muscle. Put those assets behind the right personalities and magic happens.
The Washington Post’s TikTok account, fronted by staffer Dave Jorgenson, has amassed 1.8 million followers and 96 million likes while keeping the paper’s standards intact*.
That audience is younger than the Post’s core readership, and far more likely to read the full story once it scrolls across their “For You” feeds.
Get it wrong though and it can be expensive…
Lots of traditional publishers try and treat social media like mini-TVs, and keep getting burned.
CNN+ spent hundreds of millions, projected two million subs, and shut down after 30 days with fewer than ten-thousand daily users*.
Quibi raised $1.75 billion and still couldn’t convince more than 1.3 million actives to watch its studio-slick “quick bites,” folding inside eight months*.
Back in 2018, digital outlet Mic axed most of its staff and sold for pennies after a Facebook-driven “pivot to video” flopped*.
The playbook is always the same when it goes wrong;
big sets, anchor-style delivery, vertical edits that still feel like TV.
Audiences scroll right past.
The brief for publishers is simple:
Curate, don’t commandeer. Find creators whose style already fits your voice, then give them context, fact-checking, and a revenue share.
Surface attention metrics. Trade “view-through rate” for average seconds watched, sound-on rate, and comment content. Don’t chase the vanity metrics of programmatic.
Package the partnership. Treat creator shows like modern columns: recurring, sponsor-ready, and syndicatable across site, socials, CTV, even live events.
Share the upside. Revenue splits beat flat fees; equity in success keeps both sides iterating.
Ignore this shift and you’ll keep pumping out autoplay rectangles that audiences swipe past.
Embrace it and you inherit ready-made communities, fresh formats, and storytellers who turn scrolling into listening.
Creators already own the front page of Gen Z’s internet. The only question left is whether publishers want to rent space on it, or watch from the sidelines while someone else publishes tomorrow’s first draft of history.
Sources:
*https://apnews.com/article/eacd42bce73d6e11cbc760caf28c993a
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Jorgenson
*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNN%2B