“Does this channel have more juice in it?” YouTuber J.J. McCullough on a “sustainable” life as a news creator

J.J. McCullough: I thought I had a pretty sweet gig with this TV station. I’d thought that was my career trajectory. I’m relatively good on camera. I can speak extemporaneously, with some degree of fluidity. I had blogged and things in the past, so I had a preexisting internet audience and a preexisting audience of people that knew me from TV as well. So I was like, well, maybe I should give this YouTube thing a try. I bought a little camcorder at Best Buy, and I started making videos in a spontaneous way. It was something to do after losing my job, a way to keep me relevant online.

When I talk to young people [on YouTube] today, they often have a very well-developed sense of what metrics they have to be hitting at what time — like, “If this video isn’t getting 6,000 views, I’m finished,” or “If this video gets 6,000, then [the next] video needs to get 7,000, and then 10,000.”

Because I was coming into this so naive and ignorant, I really didn’t have any metrics like that in my mind. I was more thinking of it from my own perspective: How can I develop these skills? How can I get used to making videos regularly? How can I become disciplined enough to obey a schedule of content production?

It’s hard for me to remember exactly when I “broke through.” Around the same time, I got a job offer to start writing a weekly column for The Washington Post. That job brought a bit of financial stability while I was doing this experimental YouTube thing. I lost the Post job three years ago. At the time, it didn’t seem like that big of a deal because my YouTube money had exceeded my Post money.

The number was gradually going up and reaching highs that I’d never seen before — during COVID, [going up] to a degree that I think made me a little delusional about how much money I was going to be making. But the COVID bubble was short-lived. People didn’t have time to spend all day watching YouTube videos anymore.

I’ve definitely come down from a high. It’s become a sustainable lifestyle. The revenue fluctuates a fair bit, and that can be pretty stressful, as any YouTuber will tell you. But as far as my ability to maintain the lifestyle that I want, this is a good job for that.

McCullough: We live in a time in which there is so much information and media available to consume, and a lot of it is not high-quality. A lot of it is frivolous, ridiculous, or actively harmful. We can all think of examples of the kind of content that is not useful to be spending a great deal of time consuming. I want to be a good example in this crowded media marketplace. I want to be offering something that is a useful, healthy alternative that people could be consuming instead.

McCullough: That’s definitely a question that all creators should ask of themselves: What are they offering that is distinct? I think I do good research. I value being honest and blunt. I put a lot of effort into clearly illustrating the things I’m saying. I go to the library a lot to do research; I don’t just Google things and spit back the first results that I get.

Some people find it a little bit novel that I’m from Canada. I sometimes get frustrated when I see other YouTubers who are from some interesting part of the world and don’t ever acknowledge it. They just try to pretend that they’re American, that no one should ask questions about where they’re from or what sort of interesting new perspective that might offer.

McCullough: The world is a big, complicated, fascinating place, and I’m often intrigued by random things that I come into contact with. I’m just finishing up a video about the Indigenous peoples of Canada. During the course of researching that video, I was looking at the Canadian census to see how many native Canadian people there are in this country and I came across lots of ethnicities I’d never heard of before — ethnic groups that have only a couple thousand people in Canada. A deep dive into that would be an interesting video.

After making videos for so long, you learn to think in a certain way. It’s the same with when I was a columnist: You train your brain to sort different stimulus into whether it’s something you feel excited enough about make a prolonged engagement with it.

McCullough: I try to find the definitive book as much as possible on some of the things that I’m discussing, which is usually not that hard to do if you go to the library. In my videos I’ll often hold up a book that’s a comprehensive summary of some topic, and [viewers are] surprised that somebody has written a book on that.

I really like C-SPAN because they have a lot of interviews with authors. You can get a pretty good summary of a complex topic just by listening to an author who’s done a lot of research on something talk about the subject matter. I never use Wikipedia.

McCullough: Wikipedia is written in a very particular style with a neutral point of view. It’s not deceptive, but it’s written from [the point of view of] a small minority of people who dominate the creation of Wikipedia articles.

The perspective I’m interested in is often from journalists or serious researchers. I [read] serious journalistic outlets [like] The New York Times and The Washington Post, where I used to work. I like The New Yorker and The Atlantic a lot as well. These are places where you have journalists writing serious, in-depth investigations on all sorts of different cultural, historical, and political phenomena.

I think ambiguity is very important to trust the viewer with. A lot of channels try to always have a perfect, tidy story, particularly when it comes to cultural things…
I’m looking for source material that conveys some of the messiness of the world and the degree to which things often don’t have a perfectly tidy answer.

McCullough: I’m not a journalist. I’m not doing independent investigations. I’m mostly summarizing the research other people have done. There are other channels that offer that, but I’m mostly summarizing the literature.

Some YouTubers offer a long list of sources, works cited, that kind of thing. I don’t do that, mostly because it adds to the production time, but I try to at least hold the books up and put up screenshots of articles, so that if people are curious they can verify the things I’m saying.

McCullough: I don’t think I’ve ever had a big controversy about that kind of thing. There have been a handful of times when there’s been factual errors. In one video I mentioned some guy as being Catholic when he wasn’t Catholic, so I deleted the video and re-uploaded it with that changed.

My audience catches little things very quickly, and as soon as I upload a video, I often have a bit of anxiety. In the rare cases that something wrong gets through, the audience lets me know, usually within the first hour or so. If there’s a serious enough problem, I will delete it.

Before any video goes live, I post the video to my Discord server and try to get at least three viewers to check it. They often notice things, and I often make small changes based on their observations. In those cases it’s less about facts and more about typos. I’m a little bit dyslexic, so I have a real tendency to use the wrong numbers or put numbers in the wrong order — 1798 instead of 1978, things like that. It’s useful to have multiple eyes looking on whatever you make.

Would I like to have a New Yorker-style fact-checking team? Absolutely. But within the context of the kind of content that I’m making and the ambition it has, I feel like I’m doing things pretty responsibly.

McCullough: My audience is relatively young, although as I get older my reference for what is young is shifting a lot. It’s mostly men. Half of the audience is from the U.S., Canada is maybe 20%, and then other parts of the world in smaller slivers. It’s mostly people in their early-to-mid 20s to early-to-mid 30s.

[When I meet viewers on the street], they all seem like pretty moderate people. They don’t seem like they have very strident political views in one direction or the other. I think they’re interested in getting outside the noise machine of overly tendentious left-right politics.

I used to work for a TV channel that was pretty conservative, with a pretty clear point of view. At one time I thought of myself as being predictably conservative. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve mellowed out a fair bit. I’ve realized that the world is very complex and there are no easy answers to any of these things, and that there are unattractive currents in conservative politics that I think are worth being on guard against — in the same way that, when I was more conservative, I was hyper-vigilant about the excesses of the left. I feel like now I’m more vigilant against the excesses of the right, and a lot of my audience is probably the same way. They’re not super left-wing, but they’re not ardent conservatives either. They’re looking for someone who has the integrity to be honest about the moment that we find ourselves in and speak in a blunt way.

McCullough: I was pretty turned off by Trump, honestly, as I think a lot of moderate conservative people were. I was not in favor of his election the first time, but I tried to have a more standoffish attitude where it was just kind of like, “Oh, well, let’s see where this goes.”

As the Trump government got more odious, I became more firm that this is not something that I’m interested in. It wasn’t until his second election in 2024 that I made a video where I came out hard against him.

That caused me to lose a fair number of subscribers. I think I still had quite a lot of MAGA-type people who were following me because I had been pretty studious in the first term about weighing in too much about that kind of stuff.

Now I’m thinking about it more like: Have we reached the limit of how objective you can be in the context of a political figure who you just feel is, objectively, very awful in a very distinctly negative and destructive way? Is it possible that some political leaders are just really bad, and you have to say that in order to be objective? To try to treat them “fairly” is actually just to be engaging in a kind of misinformation.

So much of our political system is based on the premise that that must never be the case — that it must always be possible to be fair, because everybody must always have some redeeming qualities in equal proportion to their unattractive qualities. But the possibility that that’s not true — that there are some people [whose] scales are not objectively weighed evenly — that’s something that I’ve had to grapple with as I continue to make my content.

McCullough: There’s a quote from Marty Baron where he says the objective of the journalist is to report what you’ve learned — to give a good-faith effort to investigate something, but then to tell the truth about the information that you’ve acquired. That to me is the gold standard of objectivity. It’s to treat the audience like adults who can handle hearing the truth, even when the truth might not be flattering to preconceived notions that they might have about certain theories, politicians, philosophies, or policy approaches.

If you could take some sort of truth serum and just be forced to only speak honestly about things, what would you say? That’s a thought exercise that I think about a lot myself. I think that we all deep down know that we are not being honest all the time. We all kind of know on some level that we’re kind of massaging facts. We’re kind of hoping that things lead in one direction and not another. I try to overcome that natural inherent motivation towards bias that we all have.

To be honest, to be objective, to be fair, requires remarkable self-discipline. I’m hardly perfect, but it’s something I try to strive for when it comes to the pursuit of objectivity.

McCullough: I don’t want to be ungrateful, because it’s a tremendous landmark to have passed. I got the golden plaque and everything, but at the same time, my channel had been growing very slowly for the last few years. Around the time I got 800,000, it felt like things really started to slow down. When I finally passed a million, it was really slow going. I am losing subs in what sometimes feels like equal proportion to gaining them.

I sometimes like to joke that I not only hit a million subs, I hit a million subs like 10 times in the last year because I would pass a million and then I would lose a few.

When I hit a million, it hit me more as a reminder of the stagnancy of my channel rather than the growth that I think passing a mark like that is supposed to represent. It’s more of a moment of reflection for me than pride. Does this channel have more juice in it? Is there another grand landmark I can aspire to pass, or is this as good as it’s going to get for me?

I hope there’s more that I can get out of this. I like being a YouTuber. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. But at the same time, a very important thing in life is to feel that you’re not stagnant and that you’re forever advancing in your career — at least, that’s very important to me as a creative person. So what is that going to look like in my post-million-sub era?

McCullough: I’ve never had a problem with that. A lot of times the sponsor doesn’t even know what video their ad is going in. I think when you’re smaller, sponsors tend to care about that. But once you’re established, there’s a sense of ‘J.J.’s not going to do anything too out there.’

I try to not do some of the more political videos with sponsors, because it might bother the sponsor, but it also kind of cheapens the seriousness of the video. If I’m making a video on an important political topic that I feel passionately about, it’s awkward and weird to transition into hawking some product. It undermines the dignity I’m trying to go for.

You see it all the time: Somebody makes some very serious video on, like, a humanitarian tragedy, and then they segue into shilling for some stupid mobile game app. I don’t want to be like that. Even though it comes at a financial cost, there is an integrity that I want to maintain.

McCullough: There are more of those than people might suspect. For a lot of YouTubers, it’s labor costs, but I don’t pay people except for [a person in Ottawa] who helps me with the editing. I buy a lot of things for the videos, like when I hold up like books and stuff.

I spend a fair bit of money on stock footage subscriptions. I have a subscription to the Oxford English Dictionary that’s like $100 a year. I have a subscription to Newspapers.com, also around $100 a year. I’m paying for a lot of little things for that help with the research and the overall quality of the video.

McCullough: It’s profitable. Sometimes I meet parents who are like, “My kid wants to be a YouTuber,” and they treat it as if this is a ridiculous fantasy — what a dopey idea. But I was able to do it. I have tons of friends who are professional YouTubers. Not everyone can do it in the sense that not everybody has the skill set or the discipline to do it, but I think it can be a perfectly comfortable [livelihood]. It can be a path to a middle-class lifestyle.

You’re not going to be the next Logan Paul. But if you want a middle-class lifestyle — maybe equivalent to what your parents had — it’s possible to do that. I know lots of YouTubers who are married and have kids and they have a normal middle-class income and lifestyle. Just because it’s a new type of job, just because it’s public-facing, just because it has a kind of veneer of celebrity to it, that doesn’t mean that it’s completely out of reach.  [Ed. note: McCullough isn’t married and doesn’t have children.]

McCullough: I respect mainstream media a great deal. I think they’re doing better work than a lot of new media people do.

No one has really risen to dethrone them in terms of news-gathering. A lot of people have risen to dethrone them on the opinion and commentary side of things — people will go to YouTubers and podcasts in a way that they used to have to go to the editorial pages or roundtable shows on CNN or whatever, where people yap at each other and argue about politics. I made a whole video recently about how opinion journalism has been replaced in large part by online content creators. But as far as I know, in terms of journalistic enterprises that do serious on-the-ground reporting…there’s very little of that being done [in the content creator space].

Legacy media still is in a pretty privileged position and deserves respect and deference for that. When you see these people that offer themselves up as “the new wave of online journalism,” half the time, all they’re doing is reacting to somebody else’s reporting, as opposed to contributing reporting of their own.

The challenge of our time is whether or not audiences care about that kind of stuff. Do audiences care about reporting? Do audiences care about traditional journalism, or are they only interested in opinion content? Are they only interested in analysis of the news rather than the gathering of the news?

I worry about newsrooms running out of money and not being able to financially sustain themselves, which is why I think it’s important when you can to subscribe to media outlets whose work you enjoy, as I do.

McCullough: How do we distinguish the kind of content that people are consuming that involves politics and the news — as in, consuming it for informational reasons versus consuming it for entertainment reasons?

This comes up a lot with those wacky characters who are supposedly gaining influence in the political commentary space. You can think of whoever you want, but there are a lot of wackos out there and people often worry that the wacko’s approach to politics or whatever is gaining traction in American democracy.

Maybe that’s a legitimate thing to worry about. Horrible extremism, prejudices, bigotries, hate — all sorts of stuff we don’t want to see gain a foothold in politics. But on the other hand, I sometimes wonder: Is a lot of that stuff just cheap entertainment? Like, are [viewers] watching this just because it gives them a bit of a thrill because these people are nuts, and they’re wacky, and they’re saying horrible things that are nevertheless kind of titillating?

That’s something anybody who observes the political scene and the journalistic scene has to develop a better sense of.

When I was a kid, it was a golden age of talk radio. There was a lot of crazy right-wing talk radio, and a lot of weird guys who did conspiracy theories, UFO stories, and paranormal shows. I never bought into that, but it delighted me on some level because it was entertaining and weird and fun.

I think there’s a degree to which a lot of that is one of the motivations behind why people are consuming so much wacko stuff online. They find it entertaining, and it doesn’t necessarily inform their view of the world.

I think the concern is appropriate, but I also think it’s important that we don’t sensationalize and thus overstate the cultural or political relevance of stuff that might only be consumed for pretty shallow and frivolous reasons.