Creators x Creators
CLEO & JOHNNY
Illustration by Moy Zhong
At the beginning of 2024, mass layoffs dominated newsrooms, leading many pundits to proclaim that the industry was facing a "media apocalypse." But there are bright spots despite the uncertainty, starting with a pair of video journalists and longtime friends: Cleo Abram and Johnny Harris.
We called up the duo to invite you into one of their conversations on what it means to "go independent," the potential of creator-led media businesses, and Johnny's love for...moss.
— NATHAN GRABER-LIPPERMAN
Listen to their conversation in full
The following excerpts have been edited and condensed for clarity
On the State of Journalism
Johnny Harris: There’s a lot of people that think that journalism is a status. And it is in some countries—in France, you’re given the status of “journalist” by the government, and you get access to certain things.
Cleo, you’ve said this so well, so I’m just gonna steal it from you right here in front of your face. You are a journalist if you are doing journalistic things, which is actively and earnestly inquiring into facts and truth about the world, and trying to communicate that truth to an audience.
Cleo Abram: You and I talk about this all of the time—journalism is an action. One of the things that has been tricky over the last couple months, though, given a lot of layoffs...more and more people are having a conversation of, “What does journalism look like right now?”
On Derek Thompson’s podcast Plain English, they talked about how the media ecosystem has become a “barbell.” There’s massive media companies that are wildly successful primarily based on subscriptions—think The New York Times—and then there are smaller organizations or individual journalists either on their own Substack, in very small newsrooms, or potentially on YouTube.
Both of those groups seem to be doing quite well at the moment…but all of the chatter about the death of journalism seems to be primarily the hollowing out of journalism. Derek Thompson said, “The death of the media seems to be more like the death of the middle,” which is a quote that I liked a lot.
Johnny, you and I find ourselves on one end of that barbell, looking at the rest of the barbell, and thinking about our place on it.
JH: It is easy to look at what we do, and put the platform as the main marker of what it is—which is YouTube and “YouTuber.”
But the heart of the enterprise is to go find factual information, and communicate that to an audience who wants that information. And so in that sense, we’re not being “YouTube influencers,” even though we have some of the trappings of a YouTube influencer.
That’s an important distinction that we spend a lot of time talking about with our peers in the legacy world: that this is valid. I think people are waking up to the fact that it’s valid.
CA: Yeah, and I just want to brag about you a little bit, Johnny, because you were extremely early to this. You were the first person I saw really do this leap from a media company like Vox…you took those exact same skills, that same dedication to journalistic norms and beautiful visual craft, and did it on your own.
I watched that for several years and thought, “Holy sh*t. If he can do that, maybe I can do that.”
You’re the OG.
“The Barbell”
Illustration by Chris Schwaar
On What Going “Independent” Means
CA: We know that many more people are getting their news from social media. And the question is, is social media capable of educating people in the way that the organizations that are collapsing are?
There are studies that show that if you ask people sets of very fact-based questions about what’s going on in the world, folks that get their news primarily from social media won’t answer those questions quite as well. And when people are less educated, you see an increase of corruption and a decrease in voting.
How do we prevent those things in a world where there’s more and more independent journalism, but also just news being consumed from social media?
JH: I’m going to ask you a question here, because I’m actually quite curious for your response.
I think the word independent means a lot to us. We use this word as, “Yeah, we went independent.” Like, we changed into this other costume of journalism—we are now independent.
And I’m curious what that means to you. Why do we like that?
CA: There are two pretty different answers. The first is that we are independent of the constraints of the business model of a larger media company…which is awesome. Like, the work that results is joyful, but also deeply obsessive, and that makes for really, really good quality journalism.
And then there’s the other question of, “independent from what, exactly?” Fundamentally, we are mini media companies. Are we independent of the incentives of advertising? No. Are we independent of the incentives of platforms that we publish on that, by the way, every media company publishes on? No.
So I’m sorry for that non-answer in the second category, but I have no idea.
JH: No, I wanted that because I think there isn’t a real answer. I think it’s more of that first one, actually—being independent means that the audience gives you permission. “You want to be into McDonald’s ice cream machines? Go for it. I will follow you, because you’re this indie journalist who does this and that.”
For my personality, that is awesome, because I’m all over the place. My craft is the thing that stays the same, but my interests do not.
On Johnny’s Budding Journalism Business
CA: I’d love to hear you talk about the aspirations of byHarris and what you’re building. Like, what’s the potential of that?
If there’s an ecosystem that you’re creating of independent journalists that all have some underlying “root system” and “flower” in their own different ways...what do we get from that ecosystem?
JH: Wow, I love the root system thing. And I will expound on that analogy, and maybe push it towards its breaking point in just a second because I’m super into, like, fungi communicating with their roots.
CA: Moss! Johnny loves moss. Ask Johnny about moss, it’s the best!
JH: That’s my one obsession that I have not shared with the internet, and maybe I never will. You heard it here first, folks.
So byHarris is this concept that is totally new and growing and in this startup-y, flexible thing. The idea is, “What if we build a company that has a bunch of smaller teams run by one individual, independent journalist?”
CA: So what are the roots in this analogy? What do they share?
JH: They share, first and foremost, process.
We don’t just have complex reporting, we then have to make beautiful videos. A lot of that comes down to really solid process and planning, which sounds really boring. But, like, that is the lifeblood of our business. Project management—institutional knowledge that allows us to do it in a smart way.
Then business. As we grow, as a collective, we are able to say, “Hey, we are not just one YouTube channel, we are a group. We can command a bigger place in the market.”
And finally, it’s a brain trust. That thing that you miss when you leave the big institution called having an editor—wiser journalists that guide you and teach you—you now have in this sort of collective.
We’ve already sort of started this with our new channel, Search Party. That’s the pilot of the byHarris model. Sam Ellis, who is a former Vox journalist, has now come under our umbrella; he owns the channel in the sense that he owns it editorially, but it is a byHarris channel.
CA: There is a baseline level of, “byHarris takes the risk, and Sam Ellis takes a salary and healthcare.” But I think what makes it different from a media company just starting another channel and hiring a face for it isn’t only genuine editorial control, but also making sure that people share in the financial upside of that.
I think that combo is pretty different, at least when we were in the throes of these kinds of negotiations and going back and forth with media companies—before we each launched our own channels. That wasn’t what was really on the table.
“byHarris’ Roots”
Illustration by Chris Schwaar
On Journalism as Entertainment
CA: Verbally-read ads are a format that is popular among podcasts and YouTubers. But there’s some kind of question mark—even in mass media—about whether the host of a journalistic podcast should be reading those ads.
JH: I think that the attention economy dynamic is actually more harmful to good journalism than ads because it incentivizes you to grab and hold every single second of someone’s attention.
I believe that a good storyteller—a good journalist—should be able to earn someone’s attention. That is just fundamental. And I don’t think that we should gripe about that.
But as we grow, I feel the incentives of retention. We need to dial in every single thing. I can feel that kind of profit-maximizing mentality applied towards journalism…which can work.
There’s trade-offs there, though. I’m like, "Do I choose the journalistic thing? Or do I choose the thing that’s going to make people stay the longest?"
CA: I completely agree with everything you just said. And I also want to make the complicated case against people paying for news being the solution there.
There’s a famous thesis done by George Gallup in 1928. His entire thesis was watching people read newspapers. At the time, most people had assumed that the most-read articles in newspapers were the most important ones—the ones that were promoted on the front page, basically.
What he discovered was that a lot of the time spent reading the news was comics and classifieds. Things that are much more like entertainment: crosswords and puzzles.
If you look at the basis of the business of the New York Times today, they are one of the most incredible entertainment companies…as well as doing some of the world’s most excellent journalism. That is what makes their business work.
What people are paying for fundamentally is not isolated, great journalism—it’s the bundle with entertainment. And that has been true for 100 years. We talk about the internet as something that disrupted or atomized news, that you weren’t buying a newspaper anymore. But it didn’t disrupt the fundamental behavior of the audience.
JH: At the end of the day, the attention economy is indeed endemic to any kind of media.
Yet my broader point is that the AI-generated algorithm takes that and puts it in hyperdrive. When I’ve talked to TV people about this, they live in a black box. They’re jealous of how much data we have. They make something, and as long as the Netflix executives like it, they put it out. Viewers will watch it, but they’re not confronted in real time.
Like, I published a video this morning. I’ve already checked it 37 times, the minute-to-minute data on how it’s doing. I’ve been checking the comments like I’ve been doing every week for the past seven years. Is it an extension of that algorithmic trade-off?
That is something that I am very wary of and want to be highly mindful of all of the time, because I don’t want that trade-off to occur too much. And I agree that entertainment is always going to be a part of this. I’m just wary of how powerful it’s becoming.
CA: I totally agree. I think that’s very self-aware.
On Journalism’s Future
CA: The advice that I would give anybody who is coming into a pretty uncertain journalistic world is to try to find the roles that are close to the work that you want to be doing in the future.
What I mean by that is don’t go get the “prestigious” job where you are not getting better at the task every day. Do something that allows you to practice over and over and over again, the hard skills that you feel like you’re going to need in 10 years, and 10 years after that.
It’s a little bit of a cop-out, because I don’t know what those jobs are going to look like. But I do think that focusing on the hard skills that you need—whether that’s editing, animation, traditional journalism, or first-person exploration of hard journalistic topics—all of those things will help you get to where you want to go, no matter what it looks like.
JH: The hard skills thing is huge for me. My whole story was…just fixating on learning animation, Photoshop, and Illustrator. All these tools that allowed for communication.
The other thing is to notice that you’re walking into a new Wild West. We’re living on this wave of being able to do really exciting journalism in a very fruitful business environment…that also has some big question marks and concerns.
So come into this with an open mind as to what form and what expression your journalism is going to take. I never thought I’d be a YouTuber who’s doing, like, deep dive investigations into the FBI. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that YouTubers would be doing that a few years ago.
Be flexible, be open, and learn hard skills. It’s an exciting and kind of tumultuous time we’re headed into.