News & current affairs creators TV producers should know about

16 creators and channels covering news and investigative journalism.

I’ve previously touched on the growth of news influencers and news organisations getting into YouTube: high profile individuals such as Piers Morgan and Megyn Kelly (who this week announced she’s launching her own podcast network), as well as established news orgs like Channel 4 News and the The Sun. Perhaps it is fair to assume that at some point soon - or soonish - the BBC will take an even bigger step into this space, while other former print publishers are also ramping up their efforts, such as this video by the Daily Mail on the battle of Kharkiv.

In addition, YouTube has recently been helping journalists set up as creators on the platform, and so it is reasonable to believe that they see news as the next big genre to focus on.

As the consumption of news and journalism via YouTube and social becomes even more mainstream, the more the thorny issue of fact checking will come to the fore, both from a political perspective but also with audiences who are already trying to seek out trustworthy sources.

To understand how we got here it is important to consider that what we are living through is the crashing together of polar opposite regimes when it comes to news and fact checking. Using the UK as an example, but each country faces their own version of the same challenge: we have a long-standing and widely understood media landscape when it comes to broadcast news and reporting. There are two key features: firstly, laws covering things like contempt of court, libel and copyright. And secondly, rules on media regulation - Ofcom for TV and radio, and all the other bodies for games, cinema, print media and advertising. The result is that if you live in the UK, you are likely to have a broad sense that there are rules applying to news and media outlets, and you perhaps might be aware these differ depending on whether you are consuming TV/radio or print.

However, this comes crashing into conflict with the Wild West that is the internet, which from the start was a place where anything goes; a globalised expanse free from regulation although still subject to the laws of each country; somewhere that in theory anyone can publish anything. There were several key aspects that created the internet we have today in terms of how news and facts are treated and why we are still dealing with these issues now:

• Nearly all the dominant platforms started in the US, and therefore are not steeped in the laws and cultures of other countries (so as one example, the USA’s laws on copyright and libel are different from the UK)

• The companies and their staff have not necessarily been socialised within the UK’s media landscape, so Ofcom is unfamiliar

• Tech companies have successfully argued that legally they are providers of platforms and are not publishers, and therefore have protections from being held responsible for the content people publish to their platforms

• Each company has their own individual set of additional (and changeable) rules of what is and isn’t permissible on their platforms.

Put all this together, and we get a messy mix of huge volumes of content being published to these platforms. Some of this content is subject to territory by territory media regulation, while other content has not gone through any sort of editorial verification process and rather is completely dependent on each creator’s own journalistic training or legal understanding. Meanwhile, the platforms are pulling other content because it goes against their own policies, however some of this content may have been fine to be broadcast on UK TV under Ofcom’s rules.

As well as these issues, there is also the question of investment in original journalism. Many creator and channels are providing ‘takes’ where they package up existing news and put their own spin on it, and therefore have less of a focus on chasing down stories and breaking news. So the expensive and time-consuming work of digging up stories is often being left to traditional news organisations. As we’ve seen, especially for local news, this is an area where journalism has been under huge financial pressure for quite some time.

I’ve put together a list of various news and current affairs creators who are individuals or independent companies rather than existing news organisations (I’ll do a list of them in the future). I’ve included creators and channels that are producing videos similar to news packages and films, rather than podcasts or discussion formats at this stage - again, I’ll do one of those too in the future. The usual caveat that I’ve not verified any of the content, and I’ve embedded YouTube videos as Substack struggles with TikTok embeds - worth noting however, that many of these creators are more active with bigger audiences on TikTok, so I’ve included those links too.

Dylan Page
Platforms: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram
Subscribers: TikTok: 14.9m, 1.2bn likes; YouTube 674k; Instagram 1.5m
YouTube views: 84m

Dylan Page - aka News Daddy - is one of the biggest news creators who hasn’t come from a traditional journalism background. He says: “I set out to revolutionize the way news is consumed by making it engaging, accessible, and entertaining for the new generation of digital audiences. On TikTok, I cover everything from breaking news, current affairs, politics, entertainment and culture, distilling complex stories into easily digestible videos.” His TikTok channel is broader in subject matter than his YouTube channel (indeed, it is worth comparing them both); recent TikTok videos include protests in Serbia and the strife in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was invited to a recent Nato Summit, and also is appearing in the next Sidemen series for Netflix as a contestant.