By Joon Lee
“Creators are also running into the ceiling that legacy media once hit. When you scale to cultural force levels, you need to become more serious.”
For the past decade, YouTube creators have spent their time trying to look less like journalists and more like entertainers. But the next phase of YouTube’s evolution is going to flip that dynamic: journalism is about to become the backbone of the platform’s growth, prestige, and cultural relevance.
The 2024 election made this shift impossible to ignore. YouTube — and the broader creator world — got hammered with criticism for the way political narratives were shaped by podcasts with no editorial oversight, no fact-checking, and no reporting muscle behind them. When creator-driven conversations outweighed traditional newsrooms in shaping public understanding, it exposed how vulnerable YouTube was to the very thing it never built for: civic responsibility at scale.
Right now, the most successful creators are quietly inching closer to roles that resemble legacy media. Tech creator Marques Brownlee has become his generation’s most influential voice in consumer technology — filling the space once occupied by critics like Walt Mossberg. Philip DeFranco may have started by covering interpersonal drama among online creators, but his show has matured into something closer to a nightly news broadcast than a vlog. Even MrBeast — whose empire is built on spectacle — is now treated like a public institution whose decisions carry civic weight, with real speculation about whether he could build an entertainment company on the scale of Disney. Meanwhile, creators like Jon Youshaei and Colin and Samir are, essentially, running trade publications for the creator economy. YouTube creators are now covered like celebrities, politicians, and CEOs. And once you operate at that level — once you function like an institution — you need the one thing entertainment alone can’t provide: journalism.
YouTube feels this pressure, especially as it battles Netflix for dominance on the largest screen in the home. Netflix can rely on prestige programming to justify its cultural status. YouTube can’t. It has scale, distribution, and watch time, but on television, people expect something closer to civic and cultural authority. YouTube still struggles with credibility. If the last era of YouTube was about watch time, the next will be about trust.
Full article: https://www.niemanlab.org/2025/12/journalism-will-become-the-center-of-gravity-for-youtubes-next-era/
