Journalism will become the center of gravity for YouTube’s next era

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.

Journalism is uniquely equipped to fill that gap — not because it makes floods of money (it doesn’t, and YouTube knows that), but because it confers legitimacy. Journalism is the thing that tells the world: this platform doesn’t only entertain you; it helps you make sense of the world. It’s the difference between being Netflix and a civic institution. This shift has started, but is in its infancy. Journalists are starting to make successful independent jumps onto the platform. The most successful leaps have come from the Vox universe, where journalists such as Cleo Abram, Johnny Harris, Adam Cole, and Joss Fong have built out independent enterprises that both cover their niches more effectively and garner more views than legacy media publications.

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. When millions of people rely on you for understanding, people expect you to start speaking with more care, more structure, and more transparency. You need editorial standards, fact-checking processes, and reporting. There’s a difference between clarity and performance, and you start to sound more like a journalist, even if that’s not what you intended to become.

At the same time, journalists who want relevance in the 2020s will have to learn the flip side of that equation: the intimacy and immediacy YouTube and other shortform video platforms perfected. They’ll need to speak in a human voice and cadence, build trust at scale, and drop the institutional distance that blunted traditional news for a generation. YouTube demands a relationship that feels closer to friendship, not expertise from a distant perch.

The reporters who thrive on YouTube will be the ones who can translate complex ideas with emotional clarity. It will be the people who understand that credibility is now built as frequently through presence as it is through bylines and hits at legacy institutions. Creators are moving towards journalism, and journalists will move towards creators.

YouTube doesn’t need journalism to boost ad revenue. It needs journalism to anchor its reputational power in the same way newspapers once anchored civic life. If the 2010s were about watching Casey Neistat and Emma Chamberlain vlog through life, the back half of the 2020s will be defined by creators who fuse journalism’s rigor with YouTube’s language. Those hybrids will determine whether YouTube can compete with Netflix on the biggest screens in people’s homes for the long run, not just as entertainment, but as an institution that helps society understand itself.