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A new BBC director general arrived at W1A in May. In his first public address, Matt Brittin announced he was a long-time viewer and listener but a “first-time insider”. The former Google Europe boss wrote about the urgency facing the corporation as it seeks to fight off existential threat in an email to staff.
Brittin said: “Excellence at the BBC has always been founded on great, creative storytelling and brilliant, independent journalism. Today it also means making sure we get the right stories in the right formats on the right platforms. We must be where audiences are, and experiment more bravely: test ideas, learn quickly and back what works.”
Reaching audiences is the greatest conundrum in the TikTok age, as traditional organisations are overwhelmed by a constantly fragmenting digital landscape.
The media paradox
There has never been a bigger appetite for news, information or content. The global podcast audience is projected to grow to 619.2 million listeners in 2026, up from 584.1 million in 2025. Netflix has reached 301.6 million subscribers. Substack has 35 million monthly active users. TikTok sits just shy of two billion active users.
Yet there are dwindling audiences for legacy news brands, leading to countless rounds of journalist redundancies. Press Gazette reported 3,434 lay-offs in 2025 across the UK and US. Another £500 million in savings has to be found at the BBC – Brittin’s first, unhappy job. His appointment was prompted by the departure of Tim Davie, who resigned following a Panorama documentary about the 2021 US Capitol riots which allegedly edited a speech by US President Donald Trump in a misleading way.
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Deborah Turness, BBC’s head of news, also resigned. In May, she gave the 2026 Sir David Nicholas Memorial Lecture and the main thrust of her disquisition was the explosion of independent journalism – creator journalism – that saw new and not-so-new faces building direct-to-consumer (DTC) media brands.
Turness didn’t hold back: “I believe the established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism in a more fragmented media universe.” The future belongs to journalists who can combine institutional rigour with creator-style intimacy.
Independent journalism as a form of protest
She pointed to the fact that the UK is now Substack’s second-largest marketplace after the US. According to Substack, some of the bestselling UK creators on the platform are former journalists or political advisers who relish the freedom and immediacy of the community subscription model.
These include Jim Waterson’s London Centric, Sam Freedman’s Comment is Freed, Azeem Azhar’s Exponential View and Jonathan Nunn’s Vittles. Nunn was captioned in The New Yorker as “kicking against the insular, calcified world of British newspaper restaurant writing”. Journalism is not disappearing; it is being re-bundled around people, communities and trust rather than institutional media brands.
Waterson’s London Centric is the perfect example of the legacy-journalist-turned-creator pathway. An alumnus of BuzzFeed and The Guardian, his Substack is about delivering stories from the capital and holding truth to power.
He writes: “How much do you really know about who has real power in London? What would happen if journalists actually had the time to investigate the powerful people in our city? What if there were a news outlet that tried to find the real story rather than trying to go viral?”
@jimwaterson Sadiq Khan has introduced a new “Weekend Hopper Fare” in a bid to get more Londoners to take the bus this summer. The new fare means that every weekend of summer, you’ll be able to travel all day on London buses for just £1.75. Rising levels of congestion and roadworks mean buses are getting slower and fewer people are taking them. This is just one scheme to tackle the problem, with the mayor setting aside £20 million to bring people back to the buses. However, with competition from rental e-bike companies and the issues of speed, will it be enough?
Waterson’s TikTok is also a growing concern as he investigates everything from London souvenir shops (514,000 views) to trialling the new Lime bike design (456,000 views). It’s niche and special interest. He writes: “London Centric is a project that will succeed or fail based on whether people are willing to pay. There are no shadowy financiers involved. No foreign state is paying the bills.”
Also fighting the power in the shadows is Carole Cadwalladr. The ex-Observer journalist is no stranger to this battle, having exposed the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica conspiracy, after which she nearly lost everything. Cadwalladr’s platform is a Substack: How to Survive the Broligarchy. She writes: “This is a newsletter about understanding what that means in the new age of tech bro oligarchs – the Broligarchy. And finding new ways of holding it to account.”
She is also co-founder of The Nerve, a publisher launched by five former Observer reporters who used their redundancy payments from Guardian News & Media to launch the business. The team, including ex-Observer New Review deputy editor Sarah Donaldson and ex-editor Jane Ferguson, chose not to transfer to Tortoise Media when The Observer was sold in April 2025.
The Nerve, incidentally, is the first UK publication to be part of newsletter platform Beehiiv’s invite-only Media Collective. In the US, notable members include Status, the newsletter from former CNN correspondent Oliver Darcy.
In her “about” letter on Substack, Cadwalladr writes: “From 2016 to 2024, I used Twitter as a central tool of my journalism. It helped me in so many ways that I’m not even sure I could have published the work that I did without it. But Elon Musk is now the shadow head of state of a global superpower and whatever that platform is no more. I don’t know what that means but I do know we need other forms of communication and organising. This is a first attempt at finding another way.”
Speaking directly to her audience, who are now helping to fund her investigations, feels like both a pragmatic pivot and a political statement: if the old platforms can no longer be trusted to support public-interest journalism, then journalists must build new, reader-backed networks of trust, accountability and action.
Journalists forging paths as creators
It’s not just news feeling the creator heat. Fashion and lifestyle publications have long been in the new media’s scope, and those who confidently pivoted from the apparent safety of heritage banner brands have successfully found their voice. Take Lucinda Chambers, fashion director of British Vogue for 25 years. Chambers left in 2017 and set up Collagerie, a lifestyle platform which had a pre-money valuation of approximately £7.42 million in 2024. Her styling series on Instagram reaches hundreds of thousands of views as audiences respond to her authority and accessibility.
Also looking for another way is Amol Rajan, who announced in January he was leaving the BBC Radio 4’s Today programme to pursue interests in the entrepreneurial and creator space. The broadcaster will continue to host Radical, his discussion podcast focused on alternative solutions to the knottiest problems in society, as well as University Challenge.
In April, it was revealed he would appear in the second series of The Celebrity Traitors. If all goes well, Rajan will return from Scotland perfectly placed to, as Turness put it in her lecture, produce content that reads like a “one-to-one experience, a feeling of intimacy and a greater connection, versus the polished, controlled formality that is in the DNA of the established media.”
@amol.rajan 🗣️Very exciting day. Some professional news! I’m leaping into the Great Digital Narnia of the Creator Economy, unleashing my inner Del Boy, building my own company and having a go at being an entrepreneur. I’m very much staying at the @BBC, but leaving @BBC News. I’ll keep doing Britain’s oldest TV quiz – University Challenge – and most exciting podcast, RADICAL, which is surging. But I’ll step back from ‘Amol Rajan Interviews’ and the TODAY Programme later this summer, and have just emailed the team to let them know. It was very important to me that the news didn’t leak and they were the first to know, which they were. Look out for a message of thanks to them here later today, because they are the best of the best. Anyways: golden days ahead. The best is yet to come. I want to grow an empire of ideas and IP. If you want to be part of the journey, give me a call. Life is wonderful. 🧡💪🏾🚀🎙️🎬💯
For the BBC, and for the wider establishment, this is the challenge: how to preserve the authority, rigour and public-service value of institutional journalism while learning from the intimacy, agility and community logic of creator-led media.
The future will not belong only to Substackers, TikTokers or broadcasters, but to those who can gain attention and trust across all of these spaces. In the new media order, it seems authority is no longer automatically inherited; it has to be performed, personalised and earned in public.
By Emilie McMeekan, insights director for CORQ. Picture credit: Jim Waterson, Amol Rajan
Reading list
- The revolution will not be summarised: The truth about what it will take for the media to integrate creator journalism (free to read)
- Substack is Tumblr’s older sister: The resurgence of microblogging and the appetite for 2010s digital behaviour
- British journalist Chris York is amassing millions of views through on the ground “rants” about Russia’s war on Ukraine
- 52% of Brits get news from social media: Gen Z creators reformatting current affairs for youth audiences
- Trend Board: BBC News’ TikTok audience is +1,092% in three years as UK publishers pivot to video
- Trend Board: Half of UK journalists have less than 5K followers on social, but these reporters are gaining traction
- Creators as columnists: The social stars who are sharing their expertise in the mainstream media
- The oracles of chic: Stylists, influencers and editors growing consumer engagement with effortless luxe
