← Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Mixed Signals from Semafor Media
Johnny Harris on building a journalism project that doesn't sell out
00:54:06
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- [00:01]
Johnny Harris
But we bought a Canon 7D on eBay for $1,400, and we bought it on a credit card and then we went to the local plasma donation center and sold our blood every month, every week.
- [00:14]
Max Tawny
Oh my gosh.
- [00:15]
Johnny Harris
And you could get $85 if you did both arms. And so we both did both arms every week. She has like an autoimmune disorder. We found out later. It's like this was not the right thing, but we would do that to like, then go pay the credit card and like, so that we could go shoot wed foreign.
- [00:40]
Max Tawny
Welcome to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media, where we are talking to all of the most interesting and important people shaping our new media age. I'm Max Tawny. I'm the media editor here at Semaphore and with me, as always, is our editor in chief, Ben Smith. Ben, what do you watch on YouTube? What, what's being consumed there?
- [01:02]
Ben Smith
You know, very little journalism, lots of sports, live stuff, and, and you know, occasionally a good mini doc.
- [01:08]
Max Tawny
Well, Ben, the reason why I ask is because our guest on the show this week is someone who a lot of people watch on YouTube, even if he's not popping up in your sports heavy specific algorithm. That's Johnny Harris. Harris is the founder, the co founder of New Press, which is this kind of journalist collective for people who like interesting cool videos online. And of course, many of our viewers and listeners will know him from his extremely popular YouTube channel where he explains pretty much everything to us, from elements of geopolitics to what is fascism, to how modern money laundering works, to the JFK assassination and associated conspiracy theories. He's explaining how the world works in a very popular format on YouTube. Ben, do you do. Did you know Johnny Harris? I met him somewhat recently and I knew him kind of from his videos on the Internet. I was mildly starstruck when I kind of bumped into him at this very elite happy hour, to which I was the least famous person there. But did you know Johnny Harris?
- [02:15]
Ben Smith
You know, I knew of him really through my friends at Vox, where he and Cleo Abram got their starts with our old colleague Joe Posner, and really where they created this explainer format that made Vox video this huge breakout thing in the 2010s Internet, and then spawned a bunch of real stars, certainly Johnny High among them.
- [02:33]
Max Tawny
We had Cleo Abram last year who explains science and technology on YouTube, kind of breaks down some of these complex themes into things that millions of people want to watch on the Internet we had Pablo Torre who does something very similar in sports. He's in the middle of just this year long basically expose of this very complicated clippers aspiration transaction. And Johnny does this of course for elements of politics and history and money and how the world works. I think a lot of people in our business see this particular zone as a bright spot right at a time when a lot of people are not reading or are reading long form articles and that type of stuff a lot less. They are still consuming what is pretty high quality video content that delves into some of these topics that are take a little bit of using your brain to engage with.
- [03:21]
Ben Smith
Yeah, I mean this is one of, I think one of the many spaces where these digital platforms are doing stuff that is longer and more complex and smarter than most of what you see on television.
- [03:31]
Max Tawny
Well, we want to ask Johnny about that. We want to ask him about how he basically went from zero followers to over 7 million while dealing with kind of difficult topics at times. How he's built a business around that. A lot of the topics and subjects are not necessarily the most advertiser friendly and yet he's really making a go of it somewhat successfully and kind of where this is all going and what it means for the type of videos that we are going to be kind of consuming on the Internet and what kind of media company he is trying to build. Well, we have a lot clearly that we want to get to at Johnny, so let's bring him in right after this.
- [04:10]
Ben Smith
Hey, mixed signals listeners. If you have like me, spent a bit of time listening to marketing podcasts, you will know that many of them are just a bit too on message, filled with PR fluff and recycled talking points. That's why I'm excited by a new show from our generally quite blunt friend Josh Spanier, Google's VP of marketing. It's called Frontier cmo. It's from Think with Google. Josh is hosting unfiltered honest conversations with the most disruptive minds in marketing and tech about what's really happening, what's failed, what's next and the truths you need to know to stay ahead. These are your notes from the Frontier search for Frontier CMO from Think with Google, wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.
- [04:56]
Johnny Harris
Are you guys Both in Washington D.C.
- [04:58]
Max Tawny
we are both in New York City. Yeah.
- [05:00]
Johnny Harris
Oh, whoa. For some reason I'm in Washington dc. Weirdly, we should be flipped. You guys should be here, I should be there.
- [05:07]
Max Tawny
We were just.
- [05:07]
Ben Smith
I do think of you as a Washington guy and I pretend to be a Washington guy, but I live in Brooklyn.
- [05:11]
Johnny Harris
I want to pretend to be like, I don't. I'm like, why am I here? Like, I. Washington D.C. is not. Doesn't fit me. And for some reason I'm here. And it's because of Vox, really. Like, Vox was born here and so I just was here. But I'm like, I belong somewhere else. I'm feeling that more and more lately.
- [05:27]
Max Tawny
So I feel like where we kind of want to start is your trajectory. You have over 7 million followers on YouTube. Pretty nice large number. We have just a few less, just a little bit. How do you start from zero and get to 7 million while you're making these kind of complex videos about, you know, the Cold War or about fascism, which was the one that I was just watching your explainer on? Are we kind of returning to fascism? What is fascism? These are interesting topics, but they aren't always something that gets one to that large of a. Of a follower count. How did it. How do you. How did this trajectory explain your arc to us? I guess.
- [06:06]
Johnny Harris
Yeah. So I wanted to be a filmmaker. Like, I wanted to be a cinematographer growing up. And I tinkered with cameras and computers all the time. And when I then went and served a Mormon mission in Tijuana, I grew up Mormon, am no longer Mormon, as one can see on the channel. I have a whole. A whole set, a whole sub genre of Mormon history and my journey with Mormonism. But when I was a missionary in Tijuana, I had this sort of awakening of like, man, I'm fascinated with this border and with this, like, division and with this tension. And I kind of couldn't look away from it all. It was sort of an awakening for me. And I grew up in a small town in southern Oregon, very away from like, the world. And after my mission, I came back to byu, the Mormon college. And I study. I started studying international relations. And I sort of thought like, my. My dreams of being a filmmaker were my childish dreams. I need to put them away. But I couldn't get away from it. I kept buying cameras and like. And like, you know, my wife. My wife and I got married very young, as Mormons do, and we started. We ran a wedding photography business and just started shooting video. But at the same time I was studying international relations, moved to Washington D.C. and went to grad school for like, international peace and conflict resolution. Like, I wanted to be like a diplomat, but I. But I was like, also shooting weddings and studying things and learning animation. And so I think that the Kind of professionalizing on both of those vectors separately, but then together, eventually started working at a think tank. CSIS started making animations for them and then vox. VOX was actually the major launching pad. But VOX to me was like the, the moment where my two personalities came together, where they're like, we like that you're an artsy filmmaker, but we also like that you're like an IR nerd and like, go ahead and be wild and crazy and free. And that was the culture of Vox in 2014 when it was born, was just total laissez faire, but with rigor and standards and that I give a lot of credit to that origin story. But then the glue that brought it all together was like the culture at VOX at a very specific two year period where we were able to just mess around and learn. And that's where I learned to turn it into what I call journalism today. You know, I never thought I was gonna be a journalist, but like they said, okay, this is journalism. And I was like, okay, cool. That's what I want to do.
- [08:37]
Ben Smith
The thing that you do, you know, which is say, you know, high quality, intelligent, long form video journalism. There are, you know, giant American corporations, I guess they all belong to the same people now, but you know, cnn, cbs, they're spending enormous amounts of money and hiring lots of people to try to figure out how to make that stuff work on the Internet. What's the secret?
- [08:57]
Johnny Harris
I think the secret is that you can't be a top down corporation spending lots of money trying to crack the code. I'm a believer that it is the excitement and curiosity and passion of a creator, of a person who is creating something that when blended with the standards of rigorous, high quality, factual journalism turns into this magical thing that people want to watch. And in the cutthroat market of YouTube, the attention economy, where people could easily be watching anything else, you really have to have that ingredient of like real passion. Like the audience feels that they, they almost demand that as a, as table stakes for the consumer experience on, on YouTube, for better or worse. And so I kind of stumbled upon this through this kind of accidental series of events. But what I've learned is that the magic is actually in empowering a creator to do this as opposed to trying to engineer a strategy from above.
- [10:05]
Ben Smith
If I can just push on that a little, because I was at BuzzFeed and you were at Vox and we had a lot of success in video. And when we started applying buzzfeeds kind of like video tactics to journalism, the sort of feedback I got. And it was accurate. Was really all you're doing is adding costs. Like what journalism is, is like layers of expense. All these. The kind of rigor you talk about. Take a video that would have cost $300 and suddenly it cost $3,000. Because you're fact checking, you're pre reporting, you're making sure it's right. You've got lawyers and it's. And you know, when you say it, it sounds easy, but actually, if I sort of look across the YouTube landscape, there's like, not a lot of people doing the thing you're doing, which is to say, like, applying quite serious journalistic standards to these digital forms.
- [10:47]
Johnny Harris
Yeah. It is expensive, it is resource intensive, and it's also something that is way cheaper than the other forms of news that we currently see and the other forms of journalism somehow. And I think it's because it comes from. And by the way, it gets 10x the viewership. And I believe that there is a business that can be made from this style and this approach. It's not going to be the BuzzFeed model, but in as much as we're seeing a transition from viewership from legacy formats and institutions to this more atomized world of chaos that we're currently living in, I do believe that the ad spend and the models that funded that old world are going to translate over here. And what we're trying to do, not just with my channel, but with the broader media company called New Press that we're building is we're trying to build an institutional framework that actually upholds those standards, supports those creators, and then builds a commercial engine to actually make it affordable and make it something that we can do even more rigorously than we do today. So the fact that we've proven the model with now four channels with no fundraising and no money other than what we've gotten from brand deals, means that I think we're potentially fundraising right now, and we're going to try to just repeat this model more and more and prove that it's possible.
- [12:11]
Max Tawny
So we want to get to New Press in a second, but can you just kind of help explain both to the audience and to me, what the standard video looks like from, like, kind of an economic perspective? So talk about how many average views, you know, each of these videos gets. How long does it take to make one of these videos? How much does it cost to make an individual video? Like, and how do you make that kind of make money?
- [12:37]
Johnny Harris
Yeah. So luckily, and this is an important part of the story, I didn't mention I am the creator. I'm the guy who is curious and writes scripts and reports things and hosts things and travels and all these things. My partner, my. My, my life partner and my business partner is the CEO of our company. Her name is Iz and she runs the business and is. We wouldn't have been able to do any of this without her as the organization builder. So that's a conversation more with her in terms of the actual finer points of the economics. I will give you an overview on sort of how it's made and where the major costs are. With our model, everything is centralized around these creators and the brain of that creator. The creator is. It's like a federation. It's like every creator is like a state. They have their own little mini constitution. And we're like very like Jeffersonian states rights. Like the creators are everything. And so the creators decide I want to make this thing, they pitch it, there's pitching, whatever. But like we don't editorially steer them. We help safeguard the standards of rigor. But then when they want to make something, they go to town reporting it. The major costs are a research producer, somebody who is there. They're effectively like the fact checker, but they're also like the hardcore become an expert in that thing person. And they spend six weeks just talking to everyone, doing all the interviews, doing all the transcripts, reading all the academic papers and becoming an expert on the topic. Sometimes that's the creator. For years that was just the creator. But as we scale, that is a topic and then. Or like that is like a category of person and cost. And then there is the creator writes the script. That takes a couple of weeks. A story editor edits the script, goes through a big fact check and then it gets produced, it gets filmed. And then there's another on my channel. It's like three months of editing and animation. My video is like 45 minutes long. And they are very production heavy. I really believe in beautiful visuals and really like, like, like, like an immersive visual experience. And so we put a lot into that. And that's very expensive. Those are like highly proficient technical people. Again, for years that was me doing it on my own. Now we have a team of maybe 10 people who are just editors and animators. And then that's sort of the cost of goods sold. That's like what it costs to make something that gets out into the market. And then we have overhead, we have like production managers who are making sure that everything's done on time. And we have now we have like a leadership team, like executives. We have a CEO, head of production. Like, we have. We're starting to build out kind of like a middle tier. So I guess the short of it, the other thing I should say is this is a much smaller operation for the new channels. The new channels are loss leaders. They lose money for a couple of years and they. The creator gets paid a salary until it starts to make money, and then they get a rev share. And so it's more proving the concept and getting the reps in like you would if you were starting all on your own. And so that's a much more. It's like a leaner operation until it starts to be proved, and then we can, like, put more budget into scaling it out. But we really believe in that seed stage of a couple of years of like, cultivating the channel.
- [15:57]
Max Tawny
How many of these. How many videos are you producing, both for your channel and for some of these. These other channels, like a year? Because this sounds like obviously a process that takes, as you mentioned, months in some cases.
- [16:06]
Johnny Harris
Yeah. Last year I made 31 videos, and it was a very foolish decision. I burnt myself out so hard, which is like the perennial problem with creator economy stuff. It's like the incentive is to just make more Feed the beast. And, you know, my channel funds the whole machine, and so I'm incentivized to make more. And to do that at our standard is a very laborious process. This year, going back to the drawing board, I'm making 12, and because I'm making a new show, that it's going to take the standard of our videos and like, double it. It's going to be all the standards and rigor that we currently have, but it's going to add in a field component. I'm going to be in the field talking to people, being close to the issues on the ground. And that's kind of the climax of my. Of sort of my format is like, now that it's proven and it works, we can, like, invest in it and make it a bigger thing. So this year I'm only making 12. The other channels are kind of in their own journey of volume. They're kind of figuring out where that volume is, where they can make a lot, be ambitious, but not sacrifice an ounce of journalistic rigor and the standards of good journalism. That's like the most sort of important thing for us.
- [17:18]
Ben Smith
A source tells me the new show is called the Human Element. Why?
- [17:22]
Johnny Harris
Oh, a source. Look at this.
- [17:25]
Max Tawny
Yeah, we do our research over here, too. You do a Few months of research and stuff we do.
- [17:30]
Ben Smith
I send like four emails.
- [17:31]
Max Tawny
Two emails. Yeah, exactly.
- [17:32]
Johnny Harris
Nice, nice. So the human element, which I have not announced publicly, but I'm happy to tell the world here is a. You know, I. I've gotten really good at the explainer thanks to, thanks to Vox, like vox, Ezra. Ezra Klein and Joe Posner and Joss Fung. These were masters of, of the explainer ethic. And I just like fell in love with that at Vox in 2014. I was like, oh, these people want to speak to the audience. They want to help them understand things. And over the last five years of being independent, we've really mastered that. We really help people understand really big, complicated topics, however nerdy. And like 5 million people will show up. But in that, I always feel this tension, which is, okay, we've. We've mastered this explainer from the macro. You see these big topics and how they work in the history and the. And the political theory and all this stuff. But what about the people who are affected? Like, what about that? And that's a way harder thing to gather. And yet I think, especially in a world of AI that can kind of synthesize and explain a lot of things, an AI can't go to a village in India and like, look at how digital revolution in India is affecting that person in that village. And I think that that paired with the explainer is the ultimate sense of understanding. It's a sense of feeling and connection, empathy, but with all of the data and the sort of systematic approach of the explainer. So the human element is going to be effectively a stab at documentary more than it is at sort of video journalism. It's going to take on big topics and it's going to do it in the explainer ethics.
- [19:04]
Ben Smith
Wait a second. How long were you at vox?
- [19:06]
Johnny Harris
I was at VOX for four years, but it was, boy, it was create your own adventure. Like, I gotta say, like those days, I was making my own era. It's a very different era. And like, the standards were there. And honestly, I take what we're building at New Press is very much VOX early days encapsulated and like safeguarded. Let the creators do what they want, make sure it's journalistically rigorous, go without what happens next, which is something we can talk about. But yeah, I guess I would end that by saying I love that there are blurry lines and a lack of expectation among younger people. Don't have a news definition. That is sort of like the old way. It's totally. Everything's being reinvented and I love that.
- [19:51]
Max Tawny
Help us bridge that timeline a little bit between when you're making these for vox, you're making all these kind of cool things, but then you strike out on your own. Talk to us a little bit about that kind of zone between zero employees and now we've got a fact checker and all these people running around.
- [20:07]
Johnny Harris
So I left Vox in 2020. I'd been kind of leaving for a couple of years. Became a contractor, but sort of ready to do my own thing. Struck out on my own again. One man band. Like I used to doing all of the things and love doing all the things, but quickly ran into the treadmill of just like, man, I got to make a lot of stuff for YouTube and I can't do this on my own. Is. My wife was a YouTube creator. She was doing more lifestyle. She had a show with Eater, but she was more of like a organization builder. Like she. She like hired like an EA when she had like 20,000 subs. And I'm like, what are you doing here? You're hiring people like you have an ea and. And then she like hired an operations person and then she like hired like editors. And I was just like, what is happening? Like, you're not, you're not allowed to do this like until you have like a million, you know. And. And she was like, no, no, no. And she like built out this organization. It actually started to like work. After a while, she ultimately burned out and was like, I don't want to live publicly. YouTube is not the place for me. But I like the building, I like the organization. So she took her organization like her employees and she just brought them over to me. And that started the long process of me slowly handing off my editing and my animation. It was like a three, four year process of me like taking my white knuckles off the tools and is all of the while actually building the proper mechanics of an organization in terms of like, you know, getting people W2 and figuring out health insurance and figuring out performance reviews and all of these things that like, I don't want to do and I'm not good at. She was uniquely good at thinking how to. How to build that stuff out and learning that stuff. And while also being a creator as well who was helping kind of produce me a little bit as well. And so I think our chemistry together built this kind of infrastructure and this kind of playbook and set of resources and teams and connections and business. She started to get deals and started to figure out negotiating deals that then turned into this magical Combination of what if you take a creator who wants to leave an institution but doesn't fully want to do this on their own and pair it with some operational infrastructure, That's a magical thing. And that's where the idea was sort of hatched. And that's when we started to talk to our previous colleagues who also kind of wanted to leave their organizations. And we said, what if you come in with us? And that's when we started to think about the economics of giving them some of the upsides that they feel like they're in on it, but taking down, taking away all of the risk. And like, it really came from our personal story. We didn't set out to do it like that, but after a couple of years of doing it, we suddenly had 10 employees and it was working. And we were making one year, we made 48 videos. It was maybe too many, but, like, it was working and we. It just. It just taught us the magic of scaling the vision of one creator. And we wanted to do that over and over. And that's sort of how New Press was born.
- [23:06]
Max Tawny
Let's take a step back because we've been kind of talking about it and we've been talking kind of interchangeably about your career, your channels, the videos you make, and New Press, which is this kind of new initiative, company collaborative, that you're working on, that you've just launched recently. What is New Press? Can you explain it to our audience?
- [23:25]
Johnny Harris
Yeah, so we believe that there is a lack of trust in institutions. People are losing trust in institutions. I think that's not a very controversial assertion. And that is hitting media in a huge way between platforms and viewer preferences. People are migrating over to these other ways of gathering information. And that's people trusting people more than trusting brands and institutions. And so we think that, and this is sort of wrought from my experience leaving Vox, building my own channel, not thinking that I would do anything media company wise, just wanting to build my own channel, but realizing that a creator who is excited about something, but that then can have institutional support and standards that they're required to uphold is a magical thing. And once we did that, with me again with my wife building that infrastructure, we said, why don't we do this? With our. With my old colleagues who were also kind of itching to leave Vox, we're bumping up against the constraints of their voice versus the institutional voice. But they didn't want to go be entrepreneurs. They didn't want to go, like, find health care and figure out accounting and hire people. And yet they wanted to be independent. And so we offer what New Press is, is the middle way. It's a way to come on, have zero risk. We pay them a salary, we own the ip, but we empower these people to have their own vision for their channel. It's their voice, it's their stylistic vision. And in the case of Sam and Kristoff, our second and third channel, it's like their craft, like they were animators as well, and so they kind of put their own craft into it. And what New Press is, is basically the place where creators can build their channel, but they are buffered and supported by a media institution where the brand new press is well below the creator. The creator's first new press is under here, running the ship, commercializing it, making it make money, supporting with people, and the creator gets to just do their thing, and then with time, the channel will make money. If you were on the front lines of the creator economy, doing it on your own, you'd make a lot of money. The creator economy is good right now. If you have low overhead, you can actually make a lot of money making YouTube videos. If you have a big channel, they, the creators will get in on a big portion of that earnings. Like there'll be like a rev share, so they can get in on the kind of the incentives of the creator economy without having to take on all of the risk. And our goal is to build a collective, maybe 10 or 15 of these channels that are based in explainer and understanding and that are kind of an antidote to kind of the creator version of journalism that is like opinion and outrage and speed and volume.
- [26:13]
Max Tawny
Well, we have a lot more that we want to get to with Johnny Harris, but we have to take a short break. So we'll be right back after this.
- [26:29]
Ben Smith
In this week's branded segment from Think with Google, I talked to Google's VP of marketing, Josh Spanier, about AI's evolution. It's been a few weeks since we talked about AI, Josh, but in your Frontier CMO podcast and in your conversations with marketers, how are feelings about AI evolving?
- [26:46]
Josh Spanier
Ben, this sounds a little cheesy, but I've been thinking about this in terms of, oh, to let's go. The first three years of the digital transformation, the AI transformation we've all been going through, was really around uncertainty and efficiency getting more for less. But what I'm seeing with really advanced progressive marketers is that efficiency only gets you so far. And actually the let's go part of this is reinventing marketing using new tools, new systems, New ways of working to actually do things that in marketing we've never been able to do before. So inside of Google marketing we've been able to synthesize creative testing, outcome based planning, synthetic audiences, idea generation in the space of an afternoon to actually find new things that we've never done before. That's really, really exciting. This let's go attitude is actually being reflected in how people are using Google's products as well, which is really, really exciting. How they're using AI mode in search, how they're using creative tools to generate stuff for YouTube. It's actually seeing people really excited about the possibilities instead of asking or fearing what AI is going to do to them, asking what they can do with AI. That's a whole mindset shift, which I think is really, really exciting.
- [27:55]
Ben Smith
You can hear more of Josh's conversations with marketers on his new show Frontier cmo.
- [28:08]
Max Tawny
Ben, you have been a person who has started and launched different media companies with different kind of ethos and ways of, of doing things and, and funding different things. You've started things while you know, losing some money and saying, okay, well we'll make money here eventually. Some of that' out, some of it hasn't. Listening to what Johnny is saying and how he's starting to kind of launch this kind of new thing on top and around his already kind of successful own experience on YouTube. I don't know, what do you think of what he just said?
- [28:36]
Ben Smith
I mean in a way, like a lot of what Johnny just said is part of my pitch for Semaphore. Some of it isn't, but like the notion that the real energy is in finding a middle path for obviously there are journalists and creators and creative people who want to be totally alone and have the kind of like desire to figure out Obamacare and whatever else that required to be an entrepreneur. But like lots of great journalists also want to be able to have the direct connection to an audience that you have as a creator and their own sense of self and of their own voice. But also want and I think this is true particularly in kind of hard news reporting and text based reporting like want an editor, want a team, want a brand that sometimes you get into trouble, you can hide behind in sort of higher conflict Beat reporting. The platform that is YouTube is a kind of unique thing. There's not, I mean Substack doesn't totally work for breaking news reporters and for people who break a lot of news but also just kind of follow stories wherever they go in a less ideological way. And so in A way we've built a commercial platform. There's no equivalent, I think, in our exact world for something that you can plug into, the way a creator plugs into YouTube. But no, but I think that that middle, whatever you just called it, the middle space or whatever, is just. Is the place everyone's trying to get to. And the luxury of starting something right now is you can just start there.
- [29:50]
Johnny Harris
Yeah, totally. And YouTube is a key part of the equation in the sense that what we have mastered by why we, me and Iz, who was also a creator for a time, what we understand is how the YouTube ecosystem works and the language of that ecosystem, which again is kind of playing with fire. There's a lot of really like, bad incentives. We run up against the incentives of an attention platform that is meant to draw out strong emotions that attach people to the content. That is like a core sort of like, like energy on that platform that produces, I think, a lot of really like bad information. And, and so how do we combat that, I think is the natural question, like, how. How are we playing in that ecosystem? It turns out the thing people don't talk about is within that same bargain of attention and content, you also have a bunch of people who want to learn about the world. You have millions and millions of people who are actually very hungry to be nourished with solid information that, that also exists in addition to the people who want to be outraged and angry. And so we have tapped into that. And like, that is actually my big, heartening, optimistic take on the creator economy. And the attention economy is like, turns out there's millions of underserved audience who want to learn and they' just deeply underserved. And so we're going to build the thing that not only enables creators, but enables a specific kind of creator, one who actually wants to teach people about what is going on in the world and why the bigger context. And so every one of our channels is filtered through that. Can you teach about the world instead of just produce a bunch of stuff that people watch?
- [31:35]
Max Tawny
I'm curious to ask a little bit more about those kind of negative incentives and kind of the, the allure sometimes of. Of chasing that. What are some of those kind of negative incentives? How have you avoided, how do you build a successful channel without kind of embarking on that dark path?
- [31:53]
Johnny Harris
So the benefit of having me be like the guy who tried out first back before this was more of an established thing is I got to learn a lot of these lessons. Just in the Wild West, I was a small channel for a Lot of years and like just got to play around and mess around. And the negative incentives are number one volume, it's the double edged sword of YouTube is like the more you publish, the more success you have, the more money you make. So let's just publish all the time and keep feeding the beast. And it's, they've really optimized that supply side, that creator side incentive to get us to just like show up to the platform all the time and feed the beast. And that is awesome because what that means is like you actually the more you, the more you plant, the more you, the more you harvest. And like, yet with time and trying to do real journalistic work that can lead to number one burnout. Like that is a very regular thing for me and all of my friends in this world. We do too much and then we just like can't do anymore and we burn out. And I've had a few instances where that happens. But more more importantly, potentially for like the model is cutting corners journalistically and or leaning into topics that are maybe like not the most nourishing and not the best for, for like the world. And so I went through, I had a couple things of instances where I messed up, where like I cut corners, I mischaracterized things I didn't report fully. And like, I guess the beautiful thing on the other side of that is the audience calls you out viciously, like, there is no Heidi behind a brand. I didn't have the New York Times to be like, sorry, bye, it's the New York Times. This was me and I was being skewered by the audience who I've trained to expect rigorous journalism because I've stated that I'm the rigorous journalism guy.
- [33:41]
Ben Smith
Is there a video you're thinking of in particular?
- [33:44]
Johnny Harris
There's a couple of. I made a video once. I did a whole deep history on European imperialism and I was deep in a storytelling mode. I was trying to make European imperialism really digestible in a way that I wanted it taught to me. And so there's this moment where I characterized Christopher Columbus and the way that he arrived to the new world. It's kind of a nuanced little pedantic thing. But long story short, I made a big logical leap and misrepresented the history in a pretty significant way and it got ripped apart. People who knew a little bit about this were just like, dude, this is not, not accurate. Like, you're breaking this down so simplistically to the point where it's actually not useful and the audience Dogpiled on it. And I had a terrible few days and I learned my lesson and I was like, what am I doing? And from there I came back being like, we reshaped our fact checking process and it's now the fact check. It was the basis for our fact checking process today, which is like ironclad. And now we publish a bibliography with every, a fact check for every one of our assertions in the description. Where you can go, it's time coded. It's effectively like, like peer reviewed academic study level bibliography, but like literally down. It's like a footnoting process. And that was all because it got skewered by the audience. And so that those incentives of being so close to it, where you can publish, publish, publish, you can cut corners. If you state, I'm a journalist and I'm representing good information, you have this collective crowdsourced accountability structure that like, I think people don't talk about all the time. They're like, oh, these, these YouTubers, they can cut corners left and right. It's like, dude, we've got, I got, got 7 million people to stand accountable for and they will destroy me if I, if I BS them.
- [35:17]
Ben Smith
I also, like love the kind of negative crowdsourcing of social media. It just keeps you honest. I mean, I was working for newspapers just a little before the Internet and you could just say anything in a newspaper article, you were never going to hear about it. And the Internet really means that, particularly that kind of journalism where, like, you just have a paragraph where you make a bunch of really broad assertions that you can't really back up. It's called the nut graph. Like that doesn't work anymore because people on the Internet will screenshot it and be like, you're a moron.
- [35:42]
Johnny Harris
Which is great. Yes.
- [35:43]
Ben Smith
But it's interesting. I was watching your video introducing new press and you have this line about everybody's voice being equal. And a lot of talk about crowdsourcing. And I think that while in my own experience, the negative version of crowdsourcing, the like, you're an idiot dogpile. Correct is, I agree, genuinely like a cleansing fire. It's great. The promise of crowdsourcing and of citizen journalism, broadly, which has been something people were talking about since you and I, you know, since we got into the business and with sort of the promise of the early Internet, I would say broadly, hasn't delivered on that promise. Like, occasionally there's some amazing crowdsourced project, but if you look at, you know, the kind of vox populize, vox day Stuff on X. It's not a machine for generating good information. And I'm curious, I was sort of surprised to hear you leaning into that, actually.
- [36:27]
Johnny Harris
I deeply believe in the value of crowdsourcing and what I'm doing now with New Press, which New Press is this collective model, but it's also a website, newpress.com where the audience can come into an algorithm free space and they can contribute to our journalism. We have 40,000 users, free users who have signed up and I have been asking them questions for my show, the Human Element, crowdsourcing locals in the places that I'm going. And let me show you, Let me just tell you a story of one version of this to tell you the version of it that I think is the successful version. And it's something I've been doing since Fox on the Community tab and on Instagram, sort of informally, but it's. I'm now trying to codify it. I went to Taiwan, I was going to Taiwan and I wanted to understand the kind of mental experience of this identity war. China wants Taiwanese people to be Chinese, Taiwanese people want to be Taiwanese. There's a whole battle around that. I wanted to understand what that feels like. It's part of the human element lens. And so I reached out to the audience and said, over on New Press, I'm having a discussion about what it means to be Taiwanese. What does that mean to you? Brought in lots of people, both Taiwanese people and non Taiwanese people, to participate in a discussion or to ask questions and got some really good, juicy thoughts and feelings. Some garbage, some trolls. But we have a very intense moderation system where we just cut out anyone who doesn't have the good faith curiosity ethic that is New Press. And so it's like a very gated community for curiosity. First goodwill, no trolling, no dog piling. None of that exists here. And what that resulted in was not a representative sample of all Taiwanese people or all people on the Internet, but at least like I could sit here and report and talk to experts. But I'm sitting here reading through discourse and discussion from hundreds and hundreds of Taiwanese people. And then I ended up curating 13 of those people who were, I call them, high value contributors, people who really had nuanced interesting takes that represented the New Press lens of curiosity. And I invited them to a meetup in Taipei. And in Taipei we all got together in a little cafe one evening and we had a two hour discussion that was like the live version of that. And we filmed it. And that's going to be in the video. And so that is my version of bringing in human perspective early, early on, let it wash over me so that when I'm doing all the geopolitics explainer stuff, I have that coursing through my brain as like, like the complicating ingredient to the realities on the ground. And so that's my version of it and it's already working. I've done that with Palau, with Myanmar. Didn't have the meetup in either of those places, but had the same sort of idea of getting questions and local commentary from people in the audience who want to come into this other algorithmic free space and have a discussion in sort of Web 1.0 style. Just like it's effectively a forum. Like it's nothing special, like technologically.
- [39:33]
Ben Smith
And it's funny because, I mean, I sort of feel the tension between this kind of. Right. This very pure platform you're trying to build and YouTube, which is, I think in some ways, like to many of our guests, you ask what is the most surprising, most outstanding feature of media right now? It is just the unquestioned dominance of YouTube. Do you think that in five years from now, 10 years from now, YouTube remains as dominant or do you think that things like what you're doing start to eat away at that centrality?
- [40:00]
Johnny Harris
I don't, don't think what I'm doing is going to eat away at the centrality of YouTube. I think it's going to be an ancillary feature for a niche audience of people who want to engage in a certain way. But the scale of YouTube is so big. It's like saying, is satellite television going to go away because this channel is launching? It's like it is so big and so all encompassing and the avalanche that it is is so everywhere and has so much momentum. No, I don't think any of us are going to create some other world. I think it's going to be maybe streaming wars that fight for the most premium tier of YouTube. I think that's going to be where the war is going to happen. But in terms of all of this crowdsource generated, like sort of crowd user generated content that is such a powerful model and again, it's optimized on both sides. We talk about the algorithm for the viewers, but there is effectively an algorithm version for the creator that has us so locked in to making stuff and to optimizing to make it better. It's great and it's good in the sense that it's successful. And I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I think we're at the beginning of the dominance of YouTube as the force for media.
- [41:12]
Max Tawny
Is there stuff that you can't do on the platform that you would like to do, or do you find that you can do pretty much anything that you want? Are you locked into something in particular? Essentially, whether that is a topic or a format or something like that?
- [41:27]
Johnny Harris
You know, I. I'm always afraid that I am. Like, I'm constantly worried that I am, and that gets me to make weird new things. And so we used to make like 16 minute explainers, and then when I was like, no, I need to make these longer, and suddenly I was making 25 minutes. And then suddenly I was like, I want to be able to do field documentaries. And so suddenly I was doing that, and that performed, and then suddenly I was doing macroeconomic monetary policy explainers and those performed. I'm finding that as long as it comes from my kind of excited brain or enthusiastic brain, people will show up. So, no, weirdly, the platform has followed me where I go, which is why I'm very comfortable preaching, like, the virtues of YouTube, because I don't think I would have a space in media. I don't think I would. I never really fit in to the sort of, like the classical journalism world. And YouTube was this place where it's like, I could be kind of weird and different and conversational. You know, I'm hyper dyslexic and grew up with a learning disability. And like you, my YouTube channel is effectively my way of saying, I wish this had been taught to me in this way. And the fact that there's millions of people who are like, hell, yeah. Like, no media executive had to bless this, but like me and those 4 million brains all connected over this way, that that's not a spin, that's real. And. And the fact that I've been able to make stuff of wide, like varying style and approach and subject matter and people will show up for it is like, that's real, that's. And the human element is just an extension of that same path.
- [43:05]
Ben Smith
Once a missionary, always a missionary. That was very impressive.
- [43:08]
Johnny Harris
I know I started getting a little uncomfortable with my evangelical energy there. I was like, oh, this is getting a little weird.
- [43:14]
Max Tawny
I think that you're right that audiences love the idea that the person who they're supporting is the recipient if they're going to subscribe or if they're going to kind of contribute in some way or even just contribute a lot of their attention. This was something I was talking about last week when I interviewed the CEO of Twitch at our event. He said that basically the idea that you're supporting these creators is something that is really core to their business and that's why you see people gifting subscriptions to other fans of individual creators. But you know, you mentioned kind of in the beginning that you're thinking about, you guys are thinking about raising money so you could, you know, possibly grow this thing. Do you worry that if you do raise money or take on, you know, outside investors, I'm sure there are a lot of people who would like to invest. Do you worry that, that that might be something that the audience, you know, might take in some sort of a negative way? They might think that you're selling out or something like that?
- [44:07]
Johnny Harris
Totally. Yeah, absolutely. There's a core part of our offering is independence, authenticity, all the things that like make rooting for the underdog an exciting thing. In the kind of post institution trust world that we're living in where people don't want to, don't want the, the bankers and the financiers to be like running the world world. We have some firm lines around control and making sure that like any money we take. First off, the only people we're talking to are mission driven like family offices, people who have like not VCs, people who are really interested in civic education and want to support this at the rate that we grow it. And then Iz and I, who have steered the ship from the beginning, our red line is that we are going to be able to continue to steer the ship. And then of course there's editorial red lines that have like that are sort of non starters if anyone even has to discuss that. So yes, there's an optics thing though. There's like a. What does it look like when a big fund comes in and gives us money that is real and like even if we have it all buttoned up in our from, from our integrity, how do we signal that to the audience to make sure that this still retains the trust? Trust is so important to us and we've, we've earned it over a lot of years and, and we need to make sure that it is maintained. I think what I want to say to these people is hey guys, I do NORDVPN ad reads to pay the bills here and we've been able to bootstrap this thing so that I. And we've been able to do it through the creator economy basically with these brands. There's an entire world of advertising out there that has funded the old legacy world that money is coming over, it's tens of billions of dollars, it's coming over here to this world. If we can get in on that, if we can figure out a way to actually sell what we're doing and make these. These brands feel comfortable with creators and with creators who are covering war and genocide. Like, we will be able to build this style of journalism into something that is way bigger. There'll be way more offerings. And you have to trust that, like, I'm gonna stick to my guns on this. And I think I have to message that to people in a way that, like, they believe. And that's going to be a challenge. I don't know how we're going to do that, but I just know that we have a playbook here, and it would be a travesty not to make more good, wholesome journalism that people actually want to watch. If money helps us do that and we don't sacrifice any of our independence and control, then, like, it's something I'm very interested in.
- [46:38]
Max Tawny
Johnny, last question you mentioned at various, you know, points to this video that you work very closely with your wife, who was, you know, on campus camera video personality yourself, now runs a lot of the business and kind of operation stuff, and seems like some of the brains, you know, behind that element of your success and while also, you know, producing you to a certain degree, you guys are interacting a lot both in, you know, the workplace and in, you know, obviously your personal lives. You're talking about, you know, raising a family together. How do you navigate that without wanting to pull each other's hair out.
- [47:11]
Johnny Harris
Yeah, it's a lot. We're an intense time of life. You know, I. My boys are 10 and 13 now, so, like, we're coming out of what was a very intense time of life. It gets better. Anyone who has a child under eight years old, it gets better in terms of just, like, they. They actually can, like, run a little bit of their own lives now, barely, but it's.
- [47:33]
Ben Smith
It.
- [47:33]
Johnny Harris
It is intense. And I think especially when we were scaling, we had 20, 30 employees and no middle management, yet we were still kind of, especially her, like, on the front lines of people and managing. It was intense. And we developed some rules, some, like, boundaries. Like, after this time of the day, we don't talk about the business. Like, we used to have all of these, like, you know, porous boundaries where, like, during pillow talk, suddenly we'd be talking about this, like, one employee, and it was just, like, terrible. So we've. We've Learned to to build those boundaries for our well being. Luckily, it is a core part of how we bond as a couple. Like, we love to nerd out about building and we love to nerd out about stories and we love to nerd out about the future of this thing. It's very fun to do together, but it's also challenging and it's just been a thing we've had to navigate and grow up as we've done it together. But we've always worked together from the very early days. Our first camera we bought in when we were at byu. We didn't have money like we were working both like half part time student jobs, but we bought a Canon 7D on eBay for $1,400 and we bought it on a credit card and then we went to the local plasma donation center and sold our blood every month, every week.
- [48:55]
Max Tawny
Oh my gosh.
- [48:56]
Johnny Harris
And you could get 80, you could get $85 if you did both arms. And so we both arms every week. She has like an autoimmune disorder. We found out later it was like this was not the right thing, but we would do that to then go pay the credit card and so that we could go shoot weddings. We were just like, we're gonna do a wedding business. And that was six months into our marriage. We were both children basically, and that was a telltale sign of how we were gonna do things. And we've kind of been doing it like that ever since. Kind of flying a little too close to the flame all the time and trying to make stuff together.
- [49:30]
Max Tawny
So yeah, that's a message to all creators out there. If you want to know how you get to a place that Johnny gets to, you gotta, you know, give your own blood to fuel. Start your creator dream.
- [49:42]
Johnny Harris
Yeah.
- [49:43]
Max Tawny
Johnny, thank you so much. This was so interesting.
- [49:45]
Ben Smith
Thank you, Johnny.
- [49:46]
Johnny Harris
Good to chat, guys. This is great.
- [50:00]
Ben Smith
Everyone agrees that marketing is transforming, but there's a massive gap between agreeing on the future and actually building it. Think with Google bridges that gap. It's the resource for leaders who are done with the what and are ready for the how. Whether you're integrating AI into your workflows or rethinking measurement from the ground up, Think with Google provides the insights that turn strategy into growth. So don't just talk about the AI opportunities, operationalize it. Visit thinkwithgoogle.com. So, wow. I'm pretty intensely committed to my work, but I have never sold blood Max. Just to start at the end there, to start with that moment of how Johnny bought his first camera. What does that tell you about this creator world and who it's for?
- [50:49]
Max Tawny
You know, I think what I have learned from this era of media, and I think that this is kind of a somewhat uncomfortable truth, is that this can be a really good business and a good livelihood if you are just truly willing to grind kind of nonstop. And it doesn't have to mean that you are producing things all the time. It just means that you have to love, you know, what you're doing and be kind of insanely dedicated to it. To kind of get to the top. We had Emily Sundberg on the podcast who is publishing her newsletter, you know, five times a week. Among having a pretty robust social life and a personal life and all this kind of stuff. You know, I know that she has kind of expressed some astonishment at people who've complained, like, oh, it's a lot of work to do something. She's like, no, I love doing this and it's awesome. And like, I, this is how I got to, you know, where I am. And you know, I think a lot of normal people out there would, would think this is a tremendous amount of effort to kind of put into this thing. And I do think that's what we've seen with most of the guests on this show who we invite on here because we think that they're impressive and interesting and producing something meaningful is they're all working insanely hard and going above and beyond to put this thing out there. And just modern media doesn't really allow you to coast.
- [52:01]
Ben Smith
Yeah, but I wonder. There was so much sort of discussion among, I would say, your generation back when millennials were in charge.
- [52:08]
Max Tawny
Careful about what you're, careful about where you're at.
- [52:10]
Ben Smith
There was a lot of discussion of work, life, balance. And I do feel like that's not a thing we hear about a lot on here. We'll have a self care episode later. But actually, but it is not obviously just this greater economy. I was at a party at Justin's house recently, our CEO and Bob Woodward was. And I introduced him to my colleague Eleanor Mueller, a great reporter. And I was sort of saying to him, it's kind of tough to be a young reporter these days. Like, I think it's kind of hard to break through in certain ways. And he said, oh, you think it's tough to be a young reporter? Think about being an old reporter, how hard that is. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he said, well, I mean, of course, if you're going to be a successful journalist, you have to work all day and then you have to take a brief break to eat or see your family and then work all night. And I find that as I age, it's harder to work late into the evening.
- [52:51]
Max Tawny
Yes.
- [52:52]
Johnny Harris
Yeah, exactly.
- [52:53]
Ben Smith
More or less the same thing.
- [52:57]
Max Tawny
Well, that's it for us this week. Thank you so much, as always, for listening to another episode of the Mixed Signals podcast from us here at Semaphore Media. Our show is produced expertly by Manny Fadal, with special thanks to Josh Billenson, Rachel Oppenheim, Anna Pizzino, Daniel Haft, Garrett Wiley, Jules Zern and Tori Kaur. Our engineer is Rick Kwan and our theme music is by Steve Bohm. Our public editor is Joe Posner, our former head of video here at Semaphore. Joe, let us know what you think.
- [53:31]
Ben Smith
And if you are watching this on YouTube, please subscribe there. If you're I guess you can't really watch this on new press, but you should, you should subscribe to that. It's pretty great. And please do follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
- [53:42]
Max Tawny
And if you want more, you can always sign up for Semaphore's media newsletter, which is out every Sunday night.