Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media. I’m your host, Eric Schurenberg, a longtime journalist and media executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

In previous episodes of In Reality, when we’ve talked about media, we’ve focused mostly on legacy outlets—and their simultaneous crises of evaporating trust and shrinking revenues. But that neglects the far healthier and arguably more influential part of today’s national conversation—influencers. In terms of audience size and engagement, many influencers have eclipsed most legacy outlets, especially among younger audiences. Today, we’ll correct that oversight.

Recorded live at my University of Chicago class on the future of media, this conversation features three creators who’ve built large followings without the backing of legacy brands. Eric Newcomer left a cozy traditional journalism job at Bloomberg to create an eponymous Substack newsletter and launch the Cerebral Valley event series. David Pakman runs a multi-platform progressive political opinion shop with millions of followers. And Kate Bacon translated her pre-med degree into viral science videos on TikTok before stepping away to pursue an MBA.

We talk about what makes their models work, how they build trust from scratch, and what guardrails exist in a world with no fact checkers, no editors, and no tradition of journalistic standards. We explore the tension between popularity and integrity, the business incentives that shape their content, and the lessons mainstream media might learn from the parasocial newsroom.

 

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02.39)
And now it is my pleasure to introduce our three remarkable influencers who come from different angles on this world. Let me start with Eric, Eric Newcomer is one of the early movers in this media universe who came out of traditional media. was cut his teeth as a tech writer for Bloomberg and then became one of the very first employees at the time an experimental newsletter about technology called The Information, which grew up to be quite successful. And then four years ago, he branched out on his own. Now he has a newsletter, a podcast, $2 million in revenue, employees, and a very popular tech conference, the Super Valley AI Summit, and a new one, Eric, that you can tell us about, that you’ve just launched.

Kate, Kate Bacon, another early mover in this field, a pre-med student who attracted more followers on Instagram and TikTok than any of the media organizations I work for in institutional media. Two and a half million followers in 2023 by the reporting that I saw. Kate’s methodology at What’s Shake and Bacon was to bring science

in bite-sized chunks to a cohort that was familiar with that platform. So you do shout outs to sociologists like Emil Durkheim or Ryan Dunbar and bring these abstruse phenomena to people in 30 second bites. I think it’s important to point out that Kate stuck to scientific consensus on all kinds of things like vaccinations and pasteurization.

Another thing that’s, that is an interesting thing that we can push on is that Kate has left the influencer world for now and is pursuing an MBA at the University of Colorado, right? And finally, David Packman, last but not least. Now he’s very thick in the fray on politics. And unlike most of those people in that bubble chart that we looked at, he sits very firmly on the left side of the political spectrum. He’s been at this for, I think by my count, 19 years, Eric?

Speaker 1 (02:29.802)
I mean, Dave has three million subscribers on his YouTube channel. He’s appeared on Mother Jones and the New York Times, MSNBC, kind of places you would expect a left-leaning commentator to appear, but also to his credit in enemy territory, if you will, Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman have hosted him a program twice. Anyway, Eric, Kate, Dave, welcome to the class. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you.

All right, So you come to the influencer economy by different routes. Eric, you’re the only one of the three who was actually a journalist in a prominent newsroom. Kate and David, you didn’t take that route. But for all of you, I wonder if there was a moment when you said to yourself, you know what, I can actually do this on my own. I can launch this solo enterprise and make a living at it. David, let me ask you to respond first to that. It’s really hard to say because when what you’re doing gets bigger by a few people a day for 19 years, there’s no real point at which you sort of cross the Rubicon necessarily.
It actually weirdly feels very similar even as the audience changes. But, you know, I think one of the things that has been true for me and some other content creators I know is that kind of going from zero to one dollar in revenue is remarkably difficult or at least it used to be because it was, can this make any money and be financially viable? And then once you make $1,

Speaker 1 (04:32.514)
Then it just sort of becomes a matter of optimization and scale and systems and continuing to create content. And so in a way, it’s sort of harder, or it was when I started to go from zero to $1 in revenue that it is to go from one to five million, for example. But in terms of like, when could this be viable? I think it was probably when I hired my first like actual W2 employees. It started to sort of feel like there may be something here.

And I think that happened as I was finishing my MBA and seeing a lot of my classmates become bankers and financial advisors, et cetera, paths that were not interesting to me. And so the timing was sort of, hey, I think the signal about viability coincided with a time in my life where I was sort of faced with some decisions. OK. All right, good. That makes sense. Eric, you branch out on your own from the information.

What was the impetus there? What gave you the…

So I’d seen the early days of the information and then I’d been at Bloomberg for six years. think a couple of things. mean, one, Substack made it really easy to write on your own. It felt like, okay, there’s a clear platform. This was the middle of the pandemic. So the, I don’t know, psychological cult-like factor of a newsroom had lost its hooks in me. I didn’t have, wasn’t going into the office. So I like, I can do this.

sort of on my, you could imagine doing it on your own more easily. But definitely it was the fact that like, Substack was there and I was like, okay, I’m just gonna sort of put my shingle on Substack and start. You know, I think I was fortunate that I got sort of paid subscribers pretty early on, I think. Silicon Valley in particular is pretty eager to embrace sort of somebody going independent. I think I did it at the right time and had some of the reputation. So then,

Speaker 3 (06:33.102)
I put up a paywall and started taking paid subscriptions. I think within six months, it was clear that I’d have a sustainable salary and not too, too long until it was matching Bloomberg. The risk was really just leaving and Bloomberg is a very safe job in journalism, but it felt like I needed to take a risk and do something more exciting.

Okay, all right. So you had a reputation you’d built as a traditional journalist and then I’m sure the reputation grew at the information. But Kate, you you didn’t have that tailwind as you launched this career. What gave you the confidence to say the world needs shake and bake it? Good. How are you? Do you have time at 10 tomorrow? I’ll see you.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (07:32.758)
Hey, Mark, I if you can mute.

But no worries. Yeah, you know, I’m so fortunate that I grew up in an environment in a community and a family that really prioritize and taught the value of science based evidence. And, you know, my parents being professors always taught about the importance of things that are peer reviewed and not just what they say, like, annex data, you know, but the peer review. And I think that’s so important. And I know that

Algorithms show you what you like to see, right? And I got onto TikTok. I mean, I was always doing content creation throughout my teenage years in different capacities. But when I got onto TikTok, I started to see so much science content. There were so many people that the algorithm was showing to me that were doing things that I kind of wanted to do. And they inspired me to take that kind of route of influencing. That’s not how we typically think about influencing, but it’s how I wanted to show up.

and it’s what I had just graduated with my undergrad degree in, the pre-med, the integrative physiology. And I’m a huge nerd and I just wanted to make a bunch of content on that and the ball just continued to roll. And as I thought more about my brand as I was growing, I wanted to really think about and reflect on how I was showing up because at the same time I did see other people who had massive followings that I really didn’t hold a candle to in terms of their following, but they weren’t, they were dumbing down the information to such an extent that they were losing.

the actual accuracy of the information. And they would get, you know, kind of called out for it, and sometimes they would respond well, sometimes they wouldn’t. But it’s finding that healthy balance of what is accurate and science-based, but also making it approachable and accessible for people, like in a lay sense. Because I think sometimes we get lost in the sauce of dumbing it down so much that it just becomes inaccurate. And I think that’s really

Speaker 2 (09:29.952)
a fault of pop science, something I see in the niche that is unfortunate to see, honestly. So I’ve always tried to not do that. I like to maintain the substance and the accuracy without making it too simplified.

Okay, all right, good. So you saw a gap in the marketplace for science information that wasn’t too dumbed down. I think you made me generous for some influencers who don’t dumb it down to inaccuracy. They start with inaccuracy. let me put that question to you, David. Did you see a gap? Did you see a need for someone to take?

See?

Speaker 1 (10:12.358)
progressive point of view and relay that to an audience or was it passion that drove you or some kind of combination of that and a sort of market analysis, if you will? mean, I think it was all those things plus boredom thrown in. And no, but I mean, I think especially when I started, yes, you know, you had the sort of like AM talk radio kind of ecosystem, which for reasons that

You know, or sort of longer to explain, but it involves churches buying broadcast licenses going back to kind of the start of talk radio. The talk radio space has been dominated by the political right. And then when it comes to corporate media, even the sort of like non overtly right wing editorial platforms still have a pretty significant

corporate bias, you know, with the consolidation that has taken place. When I started, there were five people, five dudes, essentially, who controlled something like 80 % of TV, radio, newspapers, magazines. So the level of consolidation was massive. And so my thought was more voices here would be better. Eric, let me put the same question to you is that, how did you feel like, you know, you knew something that

the valley didn’t know or that other journalists competing in the field didn’t know, especially those with institutional backing.

I say, you know, some things I no longer away and some things I saw and it’s easy to say you saw the things in the beginning. I think, you know, yeah, if you read a lot of my writing, I’m pretty like skeptical, critical journalists over the years. you know, in tech, had seen this period where it was like super friendly with TechCrunch. But then Facebook, there really was like this negative turn against tech. And so by the time in the pandemic, I was launching in 2020.

Speaker 3 (12:10.094)
I almost was like, oh man, like the tech press has gotten too knee-jerk negative about tech. Like I’m going to go back to writing sort of like of and for the industry writing critiques that like, you know, one investor would believe about the next, you know, I’ve been very negative about Jamal Khali Abdiya, which you know, a lot of the other VCs think is sort of a huckster. So I wrote about having contrarian optimism, writing, not lying to have to explain who like Mark Andreessen was and just writing.

for like a community that I thought was super interesting and valuable and clearly doing a lot of stuff. You know, I’ve been able to use that sort of industry sort of aligned posture to still like, you know, oppose some of the Trump stuff and you know, various things. like really, and I think what I didn’t realize when I launched was that, media, you think about your coverage area as like a beat, you know, you’re like, I cover.

like Silicon Valley. I think now that I’m building a business, you see more like, I do have like a customer. like, in my case, it was pretty easy to make the beat sort of the customer. And then I’m writing for like the insiders in Silicon Valley. They’re my sources. They’re the ones who read. Since I’m talking to them, they’re the ones, you know, there’s a nice circle there. I do talk to some journalists who think about starting sub stacks.

Yes.

Speaker 3 (13:35.854)
You I talked to someone who’s interested in space X, right? And it’s like, okay, that’s sort of like a topic, but like, is your customer the person wants to invest in it? Is it the person who sort of hates it is the person who’s a fanboy and like those end up being really different from customer basis, which then change how you actually build the business of your newsletter.

Okay, good. That’s a good segue to the next question. let’s just kind of talk about the business. So, Eric, you have subscriptions, you presumably have ticket sales at the events that you sponsor. What’s the other one besides the Cerebral Valley?

We were doing a Breaking the Bank this year, not about a month, which is a fifth year. We’ll do a sort of health tech event September.

in a second season.

Yeah, good. And sponsorships as well. Are there other sources of revenue that I haven’t ticked off?

Speaker 3 (14:35.95)
Yeah, the main one is like, you know, each pin Oracle are sponsors of our events. I mean, you can imagine, like, we bring together a bunch of AI founders and they sell cloud services to them and they’re like, oh, think about us as you scale up. And so that’s a natural fit. host dinners around the events with venture firms. So the sponsors are number one. And then we have a good chunk of paid subscription revenue, which I think validates the newsletter and then some.

sort of sponsorship ads. Yeah. And I disclosed last year through 2 million in revenue and a million in profit, but now we’re spending it and growing and hiring people.

50 % margin is

Not 50%. I, I, this was slightly, the revenue was slightly larger. just gave a ballpark on revenue. 80 % margin.

Okay. All right. Well.

Speaker 4 (15:25.464)
Yeah, Alright.

Sorry, the business reporter in me, it’s like, how do you just, you learned a lot, you get a lot of empathy for business that’s trying to announce metrics that they can beat again in the future while being honest and direct and,

Yeah, that is a different perspective. Kate, we talk a lot about business models in the class here. How did you make money?

It is like lots of different income streams. Lots of subscriptions. I never did Substack. I never got into Substack. I prefer doing subscriptions on other platforms, on TikTok, Instagram, and Twitch where I was a partner. You can have subscription tiers and people can support you that way. sponsorships are huge and influencer marketing. Yeah, those are massive. I’d say that’s where the lion’s share comes from.

With viral videos, you also get creator funds on various platforms. All the meta platforms have that. TikTok, Snapchat, all of them have that integrated to try to compete in between platforms.

Speaker 1 (16:33.784)
What kind of… what kind of funds?

creator funds, they call it. it’s like, can get a CPM, like a cost per million… Yeah, yeah. Where, mean, if you have a video that does really good on, does really well on TikTok, then you can get significant revenue from that video simply performing well without you promoting something in the video. It’s just a video that you wrote and it did well because it got a lot of views. Yeah. Yeah.

share of the sponsorship.

Speaker 1 (17:03.986)
I’m going to ask about audience capture and sponsorship capture. first, David, I see that you are now, you have a New York Times bestseller out, which is yet another line of revenue for you. And by the way, I’m a paid up reader of the Kindle version. Thank you. Skimming it already, it looks pretty impressive.

But for you, it’s, you know, you’re on YouTube, which is one of the more lucrative platforms, and that’s the creator funds that Kate was talking about, shares of sponsorship, and some subscriber revenue as well. Yeah, so we have direct memberships on our website, the YouTube ad revenue, Facebook ad revenue, ad direct ad sales. So like I have a full-time ad salesperson.

Twitch, Patreon, Substack, is not… Substack’s interesting because it’s never been like a big focus and, you know, we’re roughly like 6. something million followers across all platforms and there’s only 140,000 people that are subscribed to the Substack, but it’s increasingly, it’s a growing part of the revenue because just the kind of network effects of Substack are pretty significant right now. TikTok, Snapchat, these are all similar in that you’re just basically getting

you know, some kind of revenue split based on the views that you generate and then book publishing, like you mentioned. Why is the network effects of Substack increasing? Well, for someone to become a member on my website, they need to make an account on my website and the only membership they can get is a membership to my website. Substack makes it super easy to cross-sell.

And if you subscribe to Midas Touch, it’ll tell you, you might like David Pakman. You could just add it for five bucks a month. And so just makes it really easy. I see. All right. The question of trust came up already in this conversation, in the classroom conversation. And so one way that legacy media has had to fight that particular question was about, had to do with audience capture. So you are…

Speaker 1 (19:26.562)
You see where your bread is buttered, as it were. You see what the audience likes, and it can exert a kind of gravitational pull on the kind of coverage you do and how you do it. It requires a certain amount of resistance to avoid going down that rabbit hole too far. And as we all know, the kind of worst example of that was, came to light.

during the Dominion Voting System’s lawsuit against Fox when the discovery showed that the Fox executives and Fox on-air people realized that they were giving airtime to people parlaying false information and yet they didn’t stop because the audience wanted it. So Kate, in the question of that, I think a question that a lot of people have about influencers is how do you maintain

your integrity when you’re tugged by the revenue stream and by the audience that wants a particular result.

It is kind of an insidious culture in that regard, Eric, because you get pulled in so many different directions and it can be very attractive to kind of fall down those rabbit holes because you do get rewarded for it in the short term. However, in terms of like your integrity and your reputation, it’s just, in my opinion, it’s simply not worth it. It’s like a very strong boundary I’ve always had with myself and my content and the way that I show up online and I…

I I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious, but I really do wish more people would do that in this space with the platforms that they have, because I see so many people that don’t have those same kinds of boundaries. And I do see that they have a responsibility to show up with more integrity and they don’t. Yeah, the revenue goes up and it’s that the short-term gains and the dopamine and the monetary benefits that they reap. And that’s really unfortunate.

Speaker 2 (21:23.182)
Yeah, that’s pretty much my take on it. However, when it comes to certain controversial topics, for example, I mentioned to you raw milk is unfortunately becoming very popularized. I told myself I would only do one video on that and it would be a debunking video. If people are going to start talking about controversial topics, I’ll just make a debunking video on it because that’s where I bring in the science-based facts to these conversations. It’s not anecdotal. It’s not giving any credence.

to these harmful beliefs and behaviors. It’s more so, let’s talk about the history of pasteurization and the wonderful things that it’s done for humanity and why we don’t drink raw milk because science says we shouldn’t and here’s why. That’s how I choose to interact with those topics if I do interact with them and I don’t always do because it attracts a lot of attention and it can really just kind of be a weight with the attention that it garners and the comment sections really come to life.

variety.

Maybe an eye.

Speaker 1 (22:27.022)
Your post on raw milk got a lot of attention and both of you and I encourage everyone to follow up on it. Where do you personally draw the line? Were there particular bright lines, I will do this but not

I think there’s some things that are so outrageous that I don’t even want to platform it. also I need to be honest, I don’t have a medical degree. I’m not a doctor. And I’ve always thought about that very sincerely. I genuinely don’t think I’m qualified to talk about this. And I think there are people online that don’t reflect enough on their true credentials, especially with pop psychology and the…

Yeah, the psycho babble as some people call it. Well, they’re not licensed professionals. And at the end of the day, I am not a licensed professional and that is where I draw the line. That’s what guides me a lot in the things I do and do not talk about.

Okay, good. David, same question to you is like, what sort of editorial confirmation do you want for a topic that you raise on your show? How do you kind of confirm that you’re not accidentally treading into inaccuracy? Well, I you know, I’m clear with my audience that I do opinion. I’m not doing original reporting. And so the first thing is, you know, we do have a problem with media literacy in this country where a lot of people evaluate

trustworthiness of a reporter and someone giving their opinion as if they’re the same things, but really they are two different things. So I think one thing is I try to be upfront with my audience that, you know, I’m giving my opinion about reporting that has been done by others. I’m not at the White House hearing what Trump said, I’m reporting on it. And so check my, check the sources, go to the primary sources, fact check me, and I’ll make every effort if I get a fact wrong to correct it. mean, recently we had a picture

Speaker 1 (24:22.286)
Donald Trump has slept at a lot of funerals and we got the picture wrong. We had a picture of Trump sleeping at a different funeral than the one we were talking about. Immediately we corrected it and we said that picture is of Trump sleeping at a funeral, but it’s not the most recent one. We fixed that. I incur, you know, that’s, make every effort to correct as quickly as possible. As far as audience capture goes,

You know, I’m not looking to deliberately make content no one is interested in. So that’s kind of like first and foremost, I’m not out there saying what can generate the smallest audience today. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. I do think different platforms have different incentives. And one of the things that’s really great about being multi-platform like I am is the sort of like short-term gains that you can generate on TikTok with a certain type of content.

is very unappealing to people that are listening to like an hour daily podcast, for example. And so I need to be thinking holistically about like, what’s the total hour? And it’ll include some of the things that hopefully do well on YouTube and some of the things that do well on TikTok. But if you fill an hour podcast with that, it’s a pretty poor podcast. And so I think like the multi-platform nature is kind of a check against going all in on anything that

for algorithmic reasons will just do really well in one place and might not be super substantive. Okay, so diversification of platforms is kind of a guardrail. Eric, you have a personal relationship with, I think you just mentioned HP and other big Valley companies. When I was at Ink and Fast Company, I spent a lot of my time fending off.

the sales department that had great ideas about how to do stories that would make the day for their clients.

Speaker 3 (26:16.974)
Yeah, mean, HPE and Oracle, like, I mean, we don’t really write about them because we write about startups. So they’re, they’re nice. I mean, the harder ones are writing about, you know, sponsorships with venture firms, which I do actively write about. I mean, I think there it’s just like, we’re, very transparent about who our sponsors are. At the other day, you know, I’m building a brand, I think we’ve all sort of touched on this point, like having a very long-term view on your brand, like, is so important. And so, you know,

my audience needs to believe and I support to me personally that I go off after grade stories. So, you know, some of it is just being like super transparent and explain, um, you know, why I’m going after a story. Um, I do think one thing I wanted to say on the audience capture point is that audience capture in a certain way is not always that right. Like my audience is very interested in like writing about money, right? I get more paid subscribers when I like release.

the financial performance of startups and venture firms that the subjects don’t want. So audience capture is not all be saying flatter people or like, know, it’s sometimes pointing me often towards good journalism. So I’m certainly attentive to what posts do well. And on the flip side, me sort of having some kind of principled politicals today and while I think it helps my brand, isn’t like generating a ton of paid subscribers. So a lot of…

A lot of the things that can seem like audience capture, at least in my experience, know, sometimes they’re positive incentives. Obviously you’re over-torqued towards platforms or you’re just really focused on the short term and trying to create conflict. know, those things can seem positive in the short term and then hurt you in the long term, but there’s value in listening to your audience.

God, absolutely. Yeah. I guess there’s a distinction to be made between audience capture and algorithmic capture. I’m going to ask you all to step back now and kind of comment on the whole media ecosystem. you you have, you know, all of us understand what happens with legacy media. You have intimate knowledge of how the influence the economy works. What is it that

Speaker 3 (28:15.981)
Yeah, definitely.

Speaker 1 (28:35.7)
influencers do better than legacy media and maybe take a audit vice versa. Like maybe the role that legacy media might have going forward into the future. David, would you take us away at that? I think one of the biggest advantages in my space is just being able to act quickly and just be nimble and try things without

three months of focus groups and testing and going through multiple layers of people to approve or say no. And sometimes you can very quickly try things that work really well. know, recently there have been more events in Washington, DC with elected officials, opportunities to do more interviews in like less structured formats, which they weren’t doing before. And I can just go and do that. I could go tomorrow and do that see how it does and how the audience reacts. So I think

being able to be more nimble, try things, fail quickly at some things and figure out I don’t need to spend six months and a ton of money developing something that ultimately is not actually that great of an idea. I think that’s a big advantage. I think it still is the case that compared to most independent media productions, say up to eight to $10 million of revenue a year, large legacy corporate media,

still has the resources to do some of the bigger things that involve large technical and people resources you know dozens or hundreds of people on one project and so i think that that sort of investigative reporting that a lot of legacy media also isn’t doing is expensive to them to they also rather have someone sitting in a newsroom rewriting articles if they could

I think that our ability to do that in independent space is more limited. That’s interesting. Kate, the Pew research that the class read ahead of time showed that there’s a strong preference among younger news consumers for over legacy media.

Speaker 2 (30:47.114)
I was just writing down some notes as thoughts are coming to mind. And David, when you were just talking about your perspective, it made me think about the Pew Research article because I read that and what I thought was a really interesting stat in that article was that there’s a greater percentage of news influencers who are not affiliated with news organizations. So they’re like independent. And I think people at this time are really looking to branch away from

these older legacy media outlets because they see the bias. And I think bias is something that is really tearing us apart at the moment to be quite frank with you. One of my favorite news influencers, Kyla Scan, she does economics reporting. She this week had a brand partnership with this awesome news platform called Ground News. I don’t know if familiar.

They’re an advertiser of mine too, just as a FYI.

Awesome. Yeah, I didn’t know that they existed, it’s for those who don’t know, it’s a platform where you can essentially see the news through different perspectives, you know, because we usually just consume news through like our viewpoint or where we lie on the political spectrum. But this is so you can get rid of that bias and look at how people are viewing the news from all kinds of, you know, points on the political spectrum, which I think is so important. People are becoming more cognizant of how much of an echo chamber the internet can be.

And I think people are looking for more outlets where they can get out of that echo chamber and get away from the legacy media, get fresh, exciting, young opinions. And that’s a big reason why news influencing is becoming so popular. People can resonate with this up and coming generation of people reporting on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and podcasts.

Speaker 1 (32:27.648)
Okay, well, first of all, thank you for the endorsement of ground news. The class has heard me talk about that already. So I just want the class to know that this was not rehearsed. But the other thing I would say is that influencers can be quite biased too. And that is, as we saw from that bubble chart, it’s actually, at least when it comes to news influencers, it’s almost part of the

Absolutely.

Speaker 4 (32:40.238)
Bye.

Speaker 1 (32:57.198)
part of the agreement with the audience. Eric, now you have worked on both legacy media platforms and as your you know, as your own Sherpa guide. What was it you could do at Bloomberg that you can’t do at Newcomer and what is it and vice versa, what is it you can do that you couldn’t do when you were sort of under the corporate guise?

Yeah, I’m a big defender of legacy media and think newsrooms are super important and really believe in what Bloomberg and New York Times and others are doing. I do think, I mean, know, in a newsroom, you have sort of more resources, you have colleagues, you can work across beats. There’s just, there’s this sense that, you know, if you need to sort of confirm a story, there’s lots of people get advice and sort of things that come with, know.

Big money and competent institutions. I, you know, I do reporting. You know, obviously I’ve sort of started to hire reporters. So I do think, you know, lean outlets can can also do reporting. So I don’t think there’s some. Hard line. I mean, I’ve. I agree with you. I think influencers are far more bias. I think I’m more I’m more biased, but in a transparent way, right? Like, part of the, I think. Like.

What’s really going on? think my big picture view is that human beings trust humans, right? Like if you think of the left is like a big consumer of corporate media, that seems very intuitive. They would be inclined not to support corporate media and they want to have a relationship with individuals and like tech tools like Substack, TikTok, Facebook before that have made it much easier for individuals to have the reach of a corporation. So you no longer need to have this

huge organization to say, trust me, I, here’s where my perspective is, understand me and all that. And so I think we’re going to see like my own business influencers, which I’m happy to take the label of, build reporting, you know, teams and build a capacity to get first person, you know, get primary source information and talk to sources. But there’s still going to be this like person to person relationship, which is ultimately.

Speaker 3 (35:17.036)
What humans prefer over a big brand. It’s just so hard to have this brand that means everything to everybody. And I think there’ll be some place for that. But I think we’re going to see more and more sort of an individual human that can be tested by their audience, build the capacity to deliver primary sophisticated news to people.

Yeah, okay, good. I’m glad you brought up the question of trust and you already had a reputation that you had built up over years under a corporate umbrella, but Kate, you and David, you started from scratch and you had to build trust that institutions like the ones I worked for sort of had from decades of being around. How did you set out?

to build that trust. Kate, you first?

You have to build it from the ground up and you have to be intentional with how you show up. Like I said, and Eric, I really appreciate your point about highlighting the bias and influencer news. It absolutely does exist. And I love what you said about telling people where you stand and just being transparent, just saying it out loud. know, some of my favorite news influencers are that transparent. They just speak on it, speak where they’re coming from with the news. And I think just having that human quality, that human aspect is just, it’s really powerful and very meaningful. I’ve

I’ve had similar stances when I started creating videos and telling people how I’m going to show up online. Just, yeah, I’ve made several videos from the get-go of telling people how I’m going to show up and how I will not show up and just setting us a baseline of that. And I think also, David, I really appreciate your transparency and your willingness to correct yourself with the photo of Trump sleeping at a funeral.

Speaker 2 (37:09.59)
That’s amazing and that shows so much humility to be able to step back and correct yourself because that is so important and I’ve had to do that too. Holding ourselves accountable with the platforms we have, I think that speaks as well to building trust with your audience and knowing when to correct yourself and update your sources and change your wording as necessary. Always having the humility to do that, the ego to stay strong and keep going even though it’s really…

I’ve also applied or it’s just simply inaccurate.

In an earlier class, the conservative journalist, Jonah Goldberg, had a phrase about objectivity or bias in journalism that I thought was really worth sticking with. it was, he said that objective journalism, complete objectivity may be unattainable and even kind of internally contradictory. But what you can have is honest journalism.

And that I think is kind of what we’re talking about here. David, on the question of trust, how did you build that from scratch when you were just decided that you were gonna make that break with your other MBA, fellow MBA candidates? I I think it’s really a process. You can’t demand trust on day one. I think it’s something that you kind of build over time as people come to know you and know what to expect. And so I think…

being transparent about sources, correcting mistakes, clear, you know, objectivity and neutrality are often confused, but they’re really two different things. And I’m clear with my audience that I’m not neutral on just about any issue. You know, if someone calls me and asks me about NASCAR, I couldn’t care less about NASCAR, but I don’t pretend to be neutral about it. I’ll just be as objective as I can, given that, you know, I don’t know that much about it. And so I think just…

Speaker 4 (38:38.286)
Thanks

Speaker 1 (39:03.074)
being transparent and building a track record, think is the thing. Building a track record of, these are the sorts of sources that I tend to use and people can say these are trustworthy or not. Here’s examples of corrections that I’ve made. Here’s examples of where I’ve been clear that this is as far as the facts take us, but now I’m giving you my opinion and you just sort of earn trust over a period of time.

If you were advising a journalism student about how to build a career in this current ecosystem, what would your advice be to follow the kind of path that you have built or to start in institutional journalism or to find a comfortable nest at a corporate news provider? Eric?

Yeah, I mean, I really went up the sort of old school newspaper internship ladder. I don’t think that exists to quite the same degree. I believe in niche. think that my answer would be like, I’ve succeeded because I’ve gone all in on Silicon Valley and really understand that world. And, you know, that’s been really helpful. So to me, I would recommend like, whether it’s chess or cooking or whatever have.

have some vertical in area where you’re knowledgeable and to build sort of a community piece by piece there with real expertise and focus. mean, it is, it’s so hard to be the biggest sort of influencer in the world. And especially to get started to have an area where you’re really sort of tackling a particular angle, I think helps so much. But I do think I would say,

Now, I would say, go try to be an influencer first, I think. Because you’re really creating sort of a company, you’re building something. I think it’s so easy if you go inside a big media company to sort of take their direction, you’re not responding to an audience. I think there’s so much to learn just trying to build something from the ground up. So I think if you’re serious about being really successful today, I do think it is building your own channel, really trying to build something from the ground up.

Speaker 1 (41:18.486)
Interesting. David, would you offer the same advice? Be an influencer first. I think it’s extremely personality dependent. know, there are people who just really can’t do this for reasons that are very varied. There are people who just can’t stick to a content production schedule. This is like, you know, I used to mentor six to eight people a year who wanted to do something similar to what I do. And

Somewhere in the advice always was you need to figure out are you writing two articles a week? Are you doing 30 minutes of video a week? What were you and you you have to commit to that for years? To even have the starting point and then you’ve got to run a business and you’ve got to be good at time management and all these different things Not everybody’s good at everything and so I I do think that there are people that either for personality reasons or organization reasons or whatever the case may be

are better suited to working in an organization with clear guardrails and sort of a default path. It just, wasn’t good for me. So I did something different, but I do think just from what I’ve seen and who succeeds and who doesn’t, that there are definitely some personality predispositions that might point you one way or the other. Kate, the question is to you. What if someone were to come to you and say, I want to be the next Kate Bacon.

knowing that you have stepped away from that to pursue an MBA, what would your advice be to that person?

Well, I really resonate first off with what David said, and that it is very much dependent, like person to person and personality based. It requires so much dedication, you know, when we see like, we get so excited about seeing the gravity that people’s platforms have, how massive these platforms are, and the numbers and people get excited and with the fame that comes with that. it really there’s a not glamorous sides to it. It’s a lot of hard work behind the scenes and I’m

Speaker 2 (43:15.982)
You have to be willing to commit to that. And I don’t think a lot of people realize that there’s so much hard work behind the scenes that no one’s ever going to applaud you for. You know, that is really the trade-off that you need to honestly reflect on if you’re willing to put in that work and have lots of videos and stories that will flop. Stories that you’ll pour your heart into and they don’t have the feedback or reaction that you were hoping for.

You you got really excited and passionate about one subject, some topic, and you put so much work into it, and it really, there wasn’t a payoff that you were hoping for. You’re gonna get your heart broken like that again and again, but you have to persevere. There’s a lot of perseverance and dedication and hard work behind the scenes in this line of work.

Okay, I’m ask you for one more round of advice. So, looking at the straits that legacy media finds itself in, local media, what’s your advice to those newsrooms about how to build trust and how to find their way to a sustainable business model existence? Eric?

Man, I mean, think the New York Times is doing a good job of like, you know, putting the videos of their reporters on the news site, really connecting the audience with people. I do think, you know, highlighting like, oh, you have someone covering City Hall and bringing people along on that journey and really trying to make the reporter more accessible and more human. I think that would be a piece of it.

I I’m a big believer in like, still. And so I do think for the local news outlets, pursuing a strategy, whether it’s sort of sponsorship or like, supporter, you know, trying to deliver real value where people in the city feel like it’s worth paying for is a strategy that I still believe in, but it’s, it’s hard, you know, I’m very fortunate to apply a paywall strategy to.

Speaker 3 (45:22.614)
A business that makes a ton of money and a certain cultural importance. So I feel super lucky that I sort of backwards into Silicon Valley and like solving local news is really hard. But I think accepting that the news consumer wants to know sort of who they’re hearing from and giving them that is I think a piece of what I

See you out.

All right, Kate, your advice to legacy media.

I think we can find a way to incorporate this honesty that we’ve been talking so much about in this conversation. Like you, you have that great quote, Eric, about honesty in media. How can we apply that to these newsrooms? know, can we push up gently against those guardrails to become slightly more, you know, human and relatable? I’m noticing some distance in those, in that sector at the moment. And that’s, it’s been feeling a bit stiff for me compared to the news that I consume online. It feels more accessible and also

Frankly parasocial, which is a word that comes up a lot. I think that’s why a lot of people are attracted to the online space of news reporting. yeah, bringing honesty in and understanding what your consumers want, similar to what Eric said.

Speaker 1 (46:34.498)
For people who haven’t heard the term before, we do define parasocial.

Yeah, off the top of my head. Well, it’s, you know, when you see someone online, it could be also like a movie star, but these days it’s typically content creators or influencers. You develop a parasocial relationship with them where you feel like you kind of know them in a way that you actually don’t. They’re a stranger, they don’t know who you are, but you feel connected to them. And sometimes it can be somewhat obsessive and unhealthy, but you just develop this connection, this really deep.

personal connection to this person online, essentially. And that’s come up a lot in my work, I’m- Eric, David, I’m sure for you, perhaps?

I would guess, I would guess too. All right, so David, bring us home on this. what is your advice? What can legacy media learn from the world that you guys inhabit? You know, it’s tough for me because I’m not on legacy media for a reason. And my show used to be on 180 radio stations and I pulled it because I didn’t want to be part of that space anymore.

So I don’t know that I’m the right guy to give them advice necessarily, but I mean, think that the ones that are sort of figuring it out are figuring out how to keep doing the things that they used to do, but to put a new spin on that. Am I back? Yes. Did you lose, did you get any of that? Okay. So, you know, your local newspaper reporter has some audio visual content of them.

Speaker 3 (47:56.782)
Yes, you’re right.

Speaker 1 (48:09.9)
doing the interviews and gathering the sources for the story that they’re working on. Maybe there’s in-person events of some kind where there’s more personality-driven aspect. I’m just not really sure because I don’t exactly know. None of them are coming to me for advice. Let me put it that way. That I think is the big takeaway. All right, all right. I think my big takeaway is parasocial. And I am also very grateful to you guys for… for coming. Can you stick around for questions? Sure.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Jun 26 2025

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