I Go Inside ‘CNN Creators.’ But Can It Compete With Newsfluencers Already Winning?
I talk to Aaron Parnas, V Spehar and the CNN team attempting to grab Gen Z as news gets remade (and tell you who’s cashing in)
I cover the creator economy. I wrote about the Golden Globes podcast award mess, how Dancing With the Stars seduced Gen Z with social media, the NIL gold rush for athlete-influencers and the Gen Alpha stars shaking up podcasting. I’m natalie@theankler.com
Not long ago, CNN sent a group of young journalists to London for a two-week bootcamp where they learned how to host a live show, met with legends Christiane Amanpour and Becky Anderson and prepped for the launch of an entirely new initiative for the 45-year-old global news organization.
CNN Creators, which premiered last week on CNN International, fuses the media organization’s reputation for professional, serious journalism with the more casual and spontaneous energy of social media. It’s not just a weekly show (airing Thursdays and streaming on CNN All Access, the streamer that launched today at $6.99 per month) but also a multi-platform project with its quartet of journalists set to post reported dispatches on technology, art, culture and sports across CNN’s website and social media channels throughout the week. (Clips of the first episode are available on YouTube and YouTube Shorts.)
“Christiane Amanpour [told me] it reminded her of when she started out at CNN, that startup culture that CNN has always had,” says Creators co-host Bijan Hosseini, 33, who’s been with the company for a decade (Amanpour, 67, started at CNN as an assistant on the international desk in 1983, three years after the network launched). Hosseini adds, “To have all those people take time out of their days to come and be part of this project just shows how important it is to the network to really nail this.”
Not just important, but imperative. With local news organizations around the country crumbling — Medill’s 2025 State of Local News Report found that 3,200 have disappeared, and more than 270,000 newspaper jobs have dried up in the last 20 years — trust in mainstream media has never been lower. Audiences, particularly young people, aren’t reading newspapers or watching the news on television anymore as they’ve replaced those institutions with a steady stream of clips from social media. This year, 72 percent of Americans said they get some news from social media, according to a poll from Pew Research Center. And 43 percent of adults under the age of 30 said they regularly get their news from TikTok.
CNN has more than 295 million followers across major social platforms, but these days it’s competing with every pundit (not to mention sitting politician) with a podcast, every ex-broadcaster turned Substacker and every newshound on TikTok. How’s any cable stalwart supposed to find an audience when it’s thrashing around in the same noisy, highly polarized information mosh pit as thousands of other voices?
A new cohort of news creators — or newsfluencers — offers some clues. Take Aaron Parnas, the 26-year-old with 4.5 million TikTok followers who’s made it something of his signature to record short news dispatches from airplane bathrooms. One recent missive, posted last month to break down the “mass chaos and panic within the White House over the Epstein Files,” has more than 410,000 likes.
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“It’s not just the news that I’m giving,” Parnas tells me when I call him up a few weeks after he filmed that video. “It’s the fact that I’m willing to give news in an airplane bathroom, 35,000 feet in the air. Who cares what I look like? Who cares how I sound? Oftentimes major media companies fall into this trap of everything has to be perfect, and as a result, they get left behind.”
Then there’s Vitus “V” Spehar, the TikTok creator behind Under The Desk News who tells me they aren’t afraid to call President Trump’s decision to demolish the East Wing of the White House “extra weird” because “people are craving knowing if something is right or wrong, if it’s weird or not, when everything feels out of control.”
For today’s newsletter, I’m exploring the ways social media has transformed how Americans stay informed at a time when, yes, everything feels out of control. In addition to Hosseini, I interviewed CNN International exec Meara Erdozain to bring you the first in-depth look at the org’s answer to the TikTokification of the news. And from creators Parnas and Spehar I got a look at how independent journalists are bypassing mainstream channels to make an impact — and in income — in the news game as larger organizations struggle with a model to keep their legacy approach alive.
Ahead, the story behind how the news is getting remade — and who’s cashing in:
CNN exec Meara Erdozain’s strategy to build the network’s creator cred
How Parnas and Spehar took unorthodox paths into journalism — and built credible reporting chops as their audiences exploded
The youth advantage they leverage to win Gen Z (and the older cohorts chasing them)
How Spehar mixes progressive politics — and culinary chops — into coverage that still attracts a politically diverse following
Why Parnas says his just-the-facts investigative approach holds to “higher standards” than traditional journalism
What they earn — and how they’re monetizing across multiple platforms
How Gen Z’s news habits are splitting from older generations
Personal vs. Sticking to Facts
“There’s no one in the world who has more power than the caterers in D.C. They know everything.” This is how V Spehar explains their unusual journey from the culinary world to journalism. Spehar’s first brush with politics was working at a New York restaurant helmed by then-Congressman Anthony Weiner‘s brother. By the time they arrived in D.C. — after a pit stop catering the 2012 Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fl. — they were addicted to the intrigue.
Spehar, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, began posting TikToks about food policy during the early days of the pandemic, but their account blew up on Jan. 6, 2021 when they posted a stage-whispered video from under the desk in their home office calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment and take over as president.
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Back then, Spehar tells me, people turned to TikTok for information and comfort. Today, they say, their 3.7 million TikTok followers are “looking for information and activism.”
Based in Rochester, N.Y., Spehar posts regular nightly news dispatches on TikTok where they break down the headlines, and on Thursdays offers up a “Good News Only” post. They’ve TikTok’d with NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, interviewed Sen. Elizabeth Warren about the government shutdown and recently amassed 1.2 million views for their video about why the Supreme Court is likely to overturn the Voting Rights Act.
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Since finding TikTok fame Spehar has sought opportunities to learn from trained journalists, working in social media roles at the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post and also completing a fellowship at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. But they’re often more comfortable giving their own perspective on the news than journalists who came up through legacy systems.
“Even my conservative audience — and I have a fairly large conservative audience — is accepting of [my positions] because they’re like, of course V is going to do a whole thing on the Supreme Court and gay marriage because they’re gay married,” says Spehar.
Parnas has never worked in a newsroom but says he learned a lot about reporting and newsgathering in law school (he earned his high school and undergraduate degrees concurrently and his J.D. at 21 from George Washington University Law School). “I spent a large chunk of my legal career doing investigations work, and that’s hunting down information, interviewing witnesses, writing up these long reports just like I would an investigative article,” he says. “And I would argue that the ethical standards lawyers are held to are higher than that of a traditional journalist because you do have to report to a bar.”
Parnas spends all day at his desk, he tells me, absorbing news from world leaders’ social media accounts (he has notifications turned on for posts from every member of Congress), monitoring C-SPAN, chasing down leads from tipsters and combing through legal filings. Working out of D.C., he engages directly and frequently with policy developments; just yesterday he posted 10 videos that covered everything from Trump musing about a third term and the National Nuclear Security Administration furloughing workers during the government shutdown to a Neutrogena makeup wipe recall.
Where Spehar often injects a little personality into their coverage, Parnas prefers to play it straight. “I do my best when I make content not to share my own personal thoughts,” he says. “No information, no person is completely unbiased, but I just try to stick to the facts as much as I can.”
Still, Parnas hasn’t been able to avoid bringing some of himself to his reporting. The son of Lev Parnas — a former Rudy Giuliani crony who in 2022 was sentenced to 20 months in prison for fraud and campaign finance crimes — self-published a book in 2020 distancing himself from his dad’s political dealings. “The only reason people know who I voted for publicly or my political stance is because I had to make a name for myself,” says Parnas, “because I was instantly defined as my father’s son rather than myself.”
Parnas and Spehar are two of the most prominent voices among a newsfluencer cohort that also includes former CNN-er Jessica Yellin (who has 800,000 followers on Instagram including the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Katie Couric), Vice alum Sophia Smith Galer (560,000 TikTok followers) and former Washington Post TikToker Dave Jorgenson, who struck out on his own with Local News International earlier this year (172,000 TikTok followers).
Serving Up News to Info-Hungry Customers
TikTok might be where many news creators first find an audience, but to make real money (and in many cases turn a sideline into a full-time career) they turn to other platforms, including Substack, which plays host to more than 30 news and politics publications that make at least $1 million a year through subscriptions.
Spehar launched Under The Desk News on Substack in October of last year and now has more than 3,000 paid subscribers; they’ve hired researcher Jed Bookout to help with Tuesday posts about everything from “Resistance Grannies” to how Trump is funding the construction of his new White House ballroom, and tapped GLAAD veteran Lana Leonard to cover LGBTQ+ issues.
Today Spehar makes the majority of their money through Substack and in-person speaking engagements, though they’re investing in launching a new show on YouTube (where they have 213,000 followers) early next year with the hope that revenue will grow from the less than $1,000 per month they’re making on the platform now to become the engine that drives the rest of their business.
They like to describe their business using food metaphors, telling me that the goal is to turn every viewer into a “a five times a week customer.” They explain, “TikTok is your deli, your bodega. Bacon, egg, cheese, salt, pepper, ketchup. It’s going to be good every time.” Instagram? That’s where you go to window shop. “We’ve got bacon, egg and cheese, but we also have a flower shop… YouTube is when a bodega gets a fancy restaurant — like, this shit’s going to cost me a ton of money. It’s got to be really, really good, high quality, but still sort of honor the reason people like my food,” they add. Then there’s Substack. For Spehar, that’s their food truck. “We’re out there, we’re meeting people, we’ve got guests that come on and do pop-ups with us. We show up different places, and you don’t know when we’re going to publish.”
Parnas, meanwhile, only launched The Parnas Perspective on Substack in January, but it’s already the “Top Bestseller” on the platform’s ranking of News publications and is raking in enough dough (he previously told The Cut that he makes “six figures annually” from Substack subscriptions) that he was able to become a full-time news creator in February.
“It’s the best decision I’ve made for my career,” says Parnas, adding that he loves “being my own boss.” He hasn’t ruled out working for a mainstream news organization someday, though, as long as “I have editorial control over the content I produce and I don’t have to give up my own voice for the sake of the institution.”
When I ask whether he thinks traditional news outlets can compete with newsfluencers like him, he’s definitive that they can — with one caveat: “You can’t put someone who’s 60 years old on TikTok and expect them to get young people watching.” He knows his youth is part of his draw with Gen Z, who “want young people giving them information.”
CNN’s Swing for Gen Z
It’s into Spehar and Parnas’ world that CNN is launching CNN Creators.
Legacy news organizations have experimented with creator-first projects in the past. In 2018, NBC News launched Stay Tuned on Snapchat with hosts Gadi Schwartz and Savannah Sellers. And The Washington Post drew a big audience to its social accounts thanks in large part to the popularity of Jorgenson, though as journalist Matt Karolian broke down in a recent Substack post, views to its Washington Post Universe YouTube channel have been in freefall since Jorgenson left the newsroom.
Meara Erdozain, CNN International’s senior vp of programming, tells me CNN’s broader streaming push — CNN All Access is its second attempt at a streaming product in a little more than three years — opened the door to experiment with a show like CNN Creators. “We’re obviously very focused on our digital, multi-platform strategy right now,” she says, “and this opportunity slotted right into that.”
With CNN Creators, she’s focused on reaching a young, multi-platform audience by leaning into the personalities and diverse backgrounds of the show’s hosts. In addition to Tulsa, Okla. native Hosseini, the show features Australian BBC News vet Antoinette Radford, the British and Chilean sports journalist Matias Grez and Italian digital video producer Ivana Scatola. None of them boast large individual social media followings, and Erdozain says the focus was on finding charismatic hosts who are also “passionate journalists.”
The show is being produced out of CNN’s new bureau in Doha, Qatar, where the company is building a state-of-the-art studio that will support CNN Creators’ mandate to be reporting news stories throughout the week that can live across YouTube, TikTok and CNN.com.
“Our goal with this is really reaching as many people as we can, whoever they are, however they consume the news,” says Erdozain. “There’s going to be a lot of experimentation along the way, but the aim is… how can we meet [the audience] wherever they are?”
One of the challenges for CNN will be to find the balance between upholding its reputation for rigorous journalism with the looser, more direct style that tends to appeal on platforms like TikTok. The hosts are still feeling out how that will work as they ramp up to the full launch of the show in the new studio space in early 2026.
“I wouldn’t go so far to call myself an influencer,” says Hosseini. “But this is why the project was so exciting to me, because CNN has had our back a hundred percent. They said, ‘We want you to cover the stories you genuinely want to cover. Do it with your own pizzazz, your own personality.’ I hope people get that out of the show. I hope my friends watching at home say, ‘That’s the Bijan that we know.’”
Hosseini’s friends might even be learning a thing or two about him. In the opening minutes of the first CNN Creators episode, he reveals — with a sheepish look — that his first name is actually Tyler.
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