The YouTube Stars Replacing Late Night — and Writing Colbert’s New Playbook
Amelia Dimoldenberg, Sean Evans & Theo Von have broadcast beat, owning both their shows & audience. Plus: a digital-first plan for Colbert's next act
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 reported on golf’s big YouTube swing, covered the major deals and trends of the creator economy in 2025 and scooped a leaked Spotify deck revealing the company’s new assault on YouTube. Reach me at natalie@theankler.com
When Dave Jorgenson, better known as The Washington Post TikTok Guy, was in high school, he wrote his future self a letter asking, “Hey, are you working at Letterman yet?” He later landed an internship at Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, an experience that served as inspiration for his work at The Post. But when Jorgenson decided recently to leave the newspaper after eight years, late night wasn’t on his radar. Instead, he’s headed to YouTube.
Jorgenson announced in the New York Times yesterday that beginning next month, he’ll focus full time on the YouTube channel, Local News International, that he started as a side project five months ago. He also hopped on the phone to tell me about his plans, which look a lot like how you’d conceive a late night show for the digital era.
“I was doing humor-based content to educate you about what’s happening,” Jorgenson says of his remit at the Post. “Looking forward, how do I make the modern version of that on YouTube?”
Local News International already has a modest 100,000 subscribers on YouTube and with the help of two Post colleagues, Jorgenson plans to grow his audience through a combination of short-form clips that come out four or five days a week and weekly long-form videos inspired by Last Week Tonight. He’s in conversation with potential partners for the weekly series.
“It’s really exciting for me creatively to be able to branch out in that way,” he says.
Jorgenson’s news is auspiciously timed, coming just days after Stephen Colbert announced that CBS was canceling The Late Show and eliminating late night from its broadcast schedule. The move has spurred a lot of hand-wringing in Hollywood about the future of late-night television — my Ankler colleagues Richard Rushfield, Lesley Goldberg and Katey Rich have all written about the backstory and implications.
But late night isn’t dying. It’s just moving to YouTube, where clips of monologues and comedy bits draw way more engagement than they do at 11 p.m. and where a new crop of digital-first shows are attracting the viewers, especially young men, who once might have regularly tuned in live for The Tonight Show.
“The line between podcasts and talk shows are getting pretty blurry,” Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos observed earlier this year. Indeed, what are This Past Weekend w/Theo Von or Good Hang with Amy Poehler if not talk shows that now rival late night for audience as well as guests? (Nicole LaPorte wrote a great piece recently for The Ankler breaking down all the ways YouTube shows and podcasts have reshaped the modern-day press tour.)
“The new talk show hosts are Theo Von and Andrew Schulz and Alex Cooper and Andrew Santino and Bobby Lee and Joe Rogan,” says Billy Rosenberg, the co-CEO of podcast network and studio All Things Comedy. “If you had to redo that Vanity Fair image of Trevor Noah and Steven Colbert and Conan O’Brien, that famous one, it would be all those people.”
This week I talked to a half dozen sources in the digital and late night worlds who have a slightly rosier view on the future of late night than you might have read elsewhere. Keep reading to dig into:
Why a digital-first late night model is already working — just not for the networks that own the clips
The strategy behind Hot Ones, The Adam Friedland Show and other digital-first hits, and what legacy TV should learn from them
How Colbert (or any late-night alum) could build a multi-revenue-stream empire off-network
The one former linear TV late night star who is absolutely crushing it digitally
Late night’s YouTube disconnect: despite billions of views on YouTube, shows are leaving money on the table
Why owning your IP — not booking A-listers — is now the key to late night success