🔴 The $9,000 bet that launched a creator career

One year ago, video journalist Fernando Hurtado left behind a $125k job at NBC and Telemundo to start anew as a creator journalist on YouTube. He bet on himself, taking out a $9k loan with no interest in the first year. Spent it all on equipment.

Would he be able to pay it back before it began accruing interest?

For better and for worse, year one of Fernando’s show, In the Hyphen, didn’t go to plan.

This is not financial advice, but Fernando credits that debt time bomb as a motivating force; one year later, he’s made enough to pay it off and then some.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

🎧 If you prefer a podcast platform other than YouTube, we’re on Apple, Spotify, and all the rest.

By Natalia Pérez-González

In January 2024, Fernando Hurtado walked away from his six-figure job at NBC, bought $9k worth of equipment on a credit card, and gave himself one year to build a YouTube journalism channel before the interest started kicking in.

He’d been making excuses for months, finding new reasons by which to delay launching on his own. "I know what gets me going," he told us. "Debt. If I don't have this looming over my head, I won't have a goal."

His first proper video — after an introductory video explaining why he left his job — flopped. For two days, views on “Why So Many Americans Speak Chicano English” sat in the low hundreds, the dead zone most new channels can’t escape.

Out of nowhere, the view count rocketed past 100,000. Five days after launch, Fernando hit YouTube’s monetization threshold — 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch-hours. He could begin earning from YouTube Adsense.

He also had five inbound sponsorship offers, all at once — solid brands, the kind he'd seen work with other creator journalists. He opened negotiations on premium pricing and stayed firm.

Easy money; he’d be paying off his debt in a matter of weeks.

The high didn’t last. Within weeks, all five of his would-be sponsors walked away. It’s a common tripwire for new creators experiencing the shock of a major early win — mistaking temporary success for momentum and leverage.

Before leaving to start In the Hyphen, Fernando spent five years at NBCUniversal on the digital innovation team, accountable only to his editors.

Traditional newsrooms keep a firewall between editorial and revenue — journalists rarely see how the money works. Part of why Fernando left was that he wanted to understand both functions. (He credits our interview with Lindsey Stanberry as part of what pushed him toward that realization.)

At NBC, he was honing a taste for deeply reported explainers about language, culture, and identity; work that sat between traditional English-language news and Spanish-language broadcast.

He craved an unmediated relationship with his audience. And underneath it all, he simply wanted to see what was possible. He'd just turned 30, with skills, savings, and a theory about where journalism was heading. He left to test it. Could he make a living on his own?

After those early partner conversations fizzled, Fernando took Colin and Samir's brand deal course, where he gained a pragmatic understanding of what he really had to offer the brands he wanted to work with.

Finally, five months after the runaway success of his first video, he closed a partnership with Amazon’s This Is Small Business podcast. The deal came through a relationship he’d built years earlier while working in traditional journalism. Ten videos in, hundreds of thousands of views later, he had proof of concept; the project could support itself.

For creators with little experience on the revenue side, sponsorships introduce a different rhythm into creator work: drafting ad reads, waiting on approvals, and building in buffer time so a brand can sign off before a video goes live.

Before taking the Colin and Samir course, Fernando was starting from zero every two weeks — one video, one sponsor, then back to hunting. Now he sells packages: three videos minimum, planned weeks in advance. Better ROI for brands, easier production for him, and a revenue floor he can count on.

When we spoke, he told us about 60% of his upcoming videos had sponsorships attached, up from 10–15% in his first six months. He's also started monetizing short-form more intentionally — most of his speaking gigs came through TikTok and Instagram, and now he's selling short-form sponsorship packages, too.

One year in, Fernando has quelled that editorial-revenue firewall — learned how to leverage each to support the other. Now, he spends about 15 hours a week producing flagship YouTube content, leaving room for the other parts of his life: teaching at USC, speaking gigs, and selective freelance editing.

Fernando is in his fifth year as an instructor at USC. The ever-shifting nature of the journalism industry is mirrored in his classes; his students arrive fluent in editing but unfamiliar with journalism ethics, or the difference between persuasion and exposition. At the start of his tenure, the dynamic was reversed.

He’s seen this trend in both his classes: Visual Journalism and Multi-Platform Olympic and Paralympic Storytelling. He’s planning a third, too, on the business of creator journalism, aiming to pass on his hard-won lessons about how to make a living as an independent creator.

That $9,000 debt? Cleared with time to spare. In the Hyphen year two, he told us, will be about creative ambition: more investment in production, travel for stories in Mexico and Latin America, and a newsletter to capture reporting that doesn't make it into video.

Fernando is still earning less than he did at NBC, but his monthly revenue for In the Hyphen is increasing at a rewarding pace, and he owns every decision about what gets covered.

Connect with Fernando on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to In the Hyphen.

Fernando selects his stories to maximize potential viewership and to make the most of his limited time; an every-other-week publishing cadence is grueling for a solo creator with other jobs.

He has three main topics that tend to drive his and his audience’s interests:

This framework enables two things:

His biggest-hit Chicano English video came from the largest curiosity gap he'd ever experienced as a journalist:

He followed that thread with more research and more interviews than any other video. The correlation was direct, he told us, his identity and language videos consistently outperform — and they're also easier to produce because they're people-centric.

Before launching, Fernando participated in a Google News Initiative entrepreneurship lab. An exercise prompted him to write three comments he hoped to receive — the kind that would signal he’s making an impact.

He wrote things like "I'm so glad something like this exists" and "I've never seen a journalist cover us in this way."

Now, he's gotten those comments almost verbatim — especially on the AAPI Latinos video. The qualitative reception, he said, has matched the quantitative success.

Define your pillars early. Know what you're not covering. When you feel a genuine curiosity gap — one where you personally want to know the answer — go deeper than you think you need to. That's usually where the hits are.