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 at Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter that’s being sampled for a limited time for paid subscribers to The Ankler. I wrote about the Golden Globe podcast award mess, how Dancing With the Stars seduced Gen Z with social media, the NIL gold rush 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, which is free over at Like & Subscribe, 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.
Read my full column at Like & Subscribe about 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
The rest of this column is FREE to all subscribers of Like & Subscribe, a standalone newsletter dedicated to the creator economy from Ankler Media. Click here or on the button below to access the full story.
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How would CNN compete?
They lost a long time ago.
In get all of my news from influencers today and I’m high IQ and high income and high spend.
I would never trust some numb skull indoctrinated in journalism school.