With Newpress, Iz and Johnny Harris incubate video journalism for the creator era

In 2020, after five years at Vox, journalist Johnny Harris left to start his own YouTube channel. Today, the channel he built with his wife Iz, featuring “videos that help you better understand the world,” has more than 7.5 million subscribers.

Now the Harrises are using what they’ve learned to build a business that helps other creator-journalists. Last month, they announced the public launch of Newpress, a production company and community platform for creator journalists. Iz leads the company as CEO and executive producer.

“As we started to scale [Johnny’s channel] and develop more rigor around the stories we were telling and the journalism we were doing, we [identified a version of this with the] editorial scaffolding and support so necessary to doing good journalistic work,” Iz said. “At that point, both of us were like, ‘This would be a lot more fun to expand beyond one single person.'”

Me and a group of creator journalists are building a corner of the internet for good faith, algorithm-free community discourse where the audience can contribute ideas and expertise to our journalism. It's old school internet, slow, human, transparent, and built for connection and…

— Johnny Harris (@johnnywharris) February 19, 2026

So far, Newpress has helped three journalists launch their own shows. While the journalists focus on making their content, Newpress owns the intellectual property for each show and handles much of the business side, from hiring video editors to helping secure sponsorship deals.

“We try to make things that help people understand the world, and we try to do that through the lens of creators themselves,” Iz said. “Newpress functions as a way to formalize and contextualize that, more for the industry than for the individuals who consume it. They understand the language of a network of creators who are collaborating together.”

Along with Harris, the other founding creator journalists are former Vox producers Sam Ellis and Christophe Haubursin and founding Vox editor and Pulitzer Prize finalist Max Fisher. Each show is unique to the journalist’s expertise and interests. In his show, Search Party, Ellis covers the intersections of geopolitics and sports. Haubursin’s Tunnel Vision delves into internet mysteries and phenomena. Fisher contextualizes technology and world news in The Bigger Picture. All three shows primarily consist of deep-dive, horizontal videos between 30 minutes and an hour long, illustrated with B-roll, graphics, maps, and data visualizations. The descriptions on each channel’s videos recommend following the others.

“I got really tired of having conversations about how distressed [journalists] all were that news consumers were fleeing traditional news sources for social-based video because of the quality of the information on those platforms and the algorithmic incentives,” Fisher said. “[With Newpress] there is a way to be within that ecosystem — to speak to news consumers the way that they want to be spoken to — and to bring incredibly high quality information that lives up to the values and principles that always drew me to traditional media.”

Studies show that news consumers increasingly prefer to watch their news and to get their news from online creators. Vox pioneered the explainer video format, but they’re time-consuming to make, especially for an independent creator-journalist. Newpress offers a playbook and guidance for more journalists to succeed in the medium.

“It’s not unheard of for successful YouTubers to scale up and launch new channels, but it’s usually under a more traditional media structure,” media reporter and analyst Simon Owens said. “What’s cool about Johnny and Iz’s approach is they’re providing the infrastructure and funding to get a new channel off the ground — which is the hardest part for any solo creator.”

Each journalist has a different contract deal with Newpress. Some have a guaranteed salary and receive a revenue share when their channel breaks even; other deals are higher-risk, higher-reward. The money each channel generates is reinvested in it. Iz and Fisher didn’t disclose contract terms, but said that both the company and the creators are incentivized to uphold their ends of the deal and make Newpress a place where creators want to stay, not just out of obligation.

“What was really exciting about [Newpress] was the idea of being in a place where, if I put in 300% more work, [I] get 300% more take-home [pay],” Fisher said. “That’s something that you can do structurally with this kind of model where it’s built around a set of platforms that already exist that make it very easy to broadcast. But at the same time, there’s this production company that has a lot of costs built into it.”

About 95% of Newpress’s revenue comes from advertising and sponsorship deals. As an additional revenue stream, the team created a Newpress membership platform where members can watch and discuss videos and suggest future stories. Paid users get access to exclusive content, ad-free videos, and live Q&As. Membership is currently priced at $60 per year.

As for signing on new creators, Iz said Newpress will — but not too many. At most, the company will bring on eight more established creator-journalists to help them launch their own channels.

“I think we have to be very thoughtful and measured,” Iz said. “We put a lot of time into not just the collaborative, creative, and journalistic processes, but also [into] learning to really pull out of each of the creators what they want their show to be, what it should look like and feel like, and why it exists.”