Influencers are news distributors now: Inside Technical.ly’s Creator in Residence Program

Since our origins hundreds of years ago, news organizations have operated three steps of journalism: We gather facts, we assemble them (into stories of whatever format) and then we distribute them. 

Details of each stage varied over time. We went from collecting colonial-era letters to spotting trends in a .csv. From laying out a print newspaper to editing a podcast. Delivering alt-weeklies to coffee shops to hitting send on a newsletter.

All stages continue to evolve. It’s that last distribution step that strikes me, as a publisher, as the one undergoing more change than the rest. 

Americans report declining rates of trust with practically all institutions in the United States, including with journalists, per Pew. Local news organizations (where they still exist) fare better than national ones, but across the board Americans increasingly look toward individuals they follow on social media to get their news and information. 

Here sits the $150 billion creator economy, and Technical.ly is embracing our evolving role with the pilot of our first-ever Creator in Residence Program. 

In September, we hired comedian TaTa Sherise — aka Na’Tosha Wyles, whom we first met as our office manager — to produce a weekly video, interpreting some of our reporting for new audiences. It’s gone swimmingly since.

We first worked with Wyles in 2023, as part of the Lenfest Institute’s Every Voice Every Vote initiative to make Pennsylvania election reporting more approachable. Then we retained her for a fun client video for Delaware coding bootcamp Zip Code Wilmington. 

For the next year, she’ll blend our newsroom and client work for new audiences. 

In the pandemic,  the old idea of “trusted messengers,” in which different communities look to different kinds of leaders for information, took on a public health focus. TaTa’s audience skews more toward Black women than Technical.ly’s broadly diverse community, and so she acts as a trusted messenger for our brand of local economic and tech reporting. 

This approach, where journalists embrace partnerships with creators and influencers, is slowly gaining acceptance in the news industry. The American Press Institute recently launched a formal learning cohort around the idea. 

So far this fall, we’ve worked with Wyles to produce videos around AI in the classroom, the cybersecurity talent gap, election integrity, gaming’s relationship with salary, social media privacy tips and more.     

We think this is a strategy that can work across underserved communities. It marks for us a very intentional change to a trend that has already been underway in the social media era: We gather the news and curate the stories, but work with new voices to distribute them to new audiences.