🔴 Journalism skills every creator should know

One in five Americans consumes the news from social media creators instead of traditional media — and 77% of those creators have zero journalism training.*

News Creator Corps launched this fall to close that gap.

Their first cohort brought together 20 creators across 12 states, with a combined reach of 1.66M followers. Each received a $5k stipend and eight weeks of training in journalism skills like fact-checking, public records, and AI literacy.

Applications for the spring cohort are open now — the deadline is December 31st.

In this issue:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

*Source: Pew Research Center, November 2024

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By Natalia Pérez-González

Danielle Desir Corbett has been podcasting for a decade. She also runs a newsletter for her fellow creators called Grants for Creators. A few months ago, while sourcing grant opportunities, she discovered News Creator Corps (NCC), a new nonprofit with a fellowship designed to teach creators journalism skills and, ultimately, combat misinformation.

Besides her grants newsletter, Danielle manages several concurrent projects. One is The Thought Card, a podcast and newsletter for "financially savvy travelers.” She’s also spent years piecing together her documentary series, A Deeper Look, connecting the fragmented map of African-American heritage sites scattered across the country.

For A Deeper Look, Danielle partners with tourism boards to connect these fragments, traveling around to film. But at the start of this year, she ran into challenges like emails to crucial partners going unanswered, stalling her work.

This is the gap NCC was built to close.

Before launching the organization this September, Rachel Lobdell, the Executive Director, spent nearly two decades in traditional newsrooms. She built NCC based on the realization that journalists are no longer the primary translators of information for everyday Americans.

Creators have taken that place — often with no formal journalism training — and are producing content that shapes how their audiences think, vote, spend, and parent.

In our conversation, Rachel shared a story about her husband sneaking into their son's room after putting him to bed to turn off a nightlight — he'd seen an Instagram post claiming nightlights could hurt kids’ eyes. Whether that was true almost didn't matter — he'd already acted on it.

Information, whether on television or social media, moves people before they have time to verify it. NCC aims to increase the volume of pre-verified information.

When NCC opened up the fellowship for applications in September, they expected 100 applications. In an application window lasting only 18 days, they received 149.

Crucially, there is no following size threshold for submission; NCC is focused on what role the creators play in their communities and the personal mission behind each creator’s work. Rachel had planned to accept 15 to 17 fellows. She couldn't get below 20. "We fell in love with these creators," she told us.

The NCC team read every application multiple times. They watched videos, scrolled through feeds, and studied how creators engaged their audiences. Rachel calls it a “gut-feel process” — they were looking for people doing incredible digital work, people their training could actually help.

Danielle made the cut.

Katie Grossbard, NCC board member, Impact Strategist and content creator, understands the challenge of sourcing and distributing high-quality information first-hand from the creator side. She built an audience of 255,000 on Instagram starting in 2020, when the pandemic hit, and the election consumed the news cycle. People wanted news but could no longer stomach TV.

Getting it on their phones, from voices they already followed, felt more manageable.

However, most don’t know how to leverage the resources to learn how to do it well — and not all news creators want journalism jobs. They want the skills that protect the trust they've already built. They have strong points of view, and their audiences trust them precisely because of those views.

What they want, NCC posits, are skills that build a lasting, trust-based bond with their audiences: how to cite a source so their audience can verify it themselves; how to file a public records request; how to build relationships with experts who can fact-check their claims.

The fellowship runs for nine weeks, including eight sessions with one week off. The curriculum covers one topic each week. Here’s the list, taken from a review of the program by fellow Adriana Goblirsch:

Rachel wanted fellows learning from each other as much as from instructors, so the cohort was deliberately diverse: 20 creators across 12 states, including attorneys, weather reporters, women's health advocates, and NBA commentators. The cohort’s combined reach was 1.66 million followers.

The level of engagement fellows gave to the coursework surprised her. "I have never seen people take notes the way these people were taking notes," Rachel told us. "At a bar. During public records training."

For Danielle, the training filled gaps she'd felt for years, and the cohort became a resource in its own right. Within days, a fellow named James Cave connected her to a historical society in upstate New York — he'd seen her documentary work and spotted a fit. That kind of peer support was new. Creators typically operate alone, sometimes in outright competition. This felt different: people sharing contacts, rooting for each other.

While still in the program, Danielle ran an experiment. She emailed the partners who'd ghosted her — same pitch, one small addition: "Just popping in. I'm an NCC fellow."

This time, the replies came fast, calls got scheduled, and contracts followed.

Apply for the spring cohort (the deadline is in one week).
Learn more about News Creator Corps.

NCC's curriculum covers skills many creators are never taught. Here's a breakdown of some core topics from the fellowship — adapted for anyone producing information-focused content.

When you make a claim, your viewers or readers should be able to verify it themselves. On social, that means naming the source, the organization, and the date — either as text overlay, in the caption, or spoken aloud with a link in show notes. Go to the primary source whenever you can: cite the study, not the article about the study.

For research, a few Google tricks go a long way.

The goal is to build a simple audit trail that your audience can follow, and build trust with them by extension.

Build the habit of documenting sources as you research, not after. Screenshot key pages. Save URLs with dates accessed. This creates a reference library you can draw on when partners or audience members ask for verification.

Most creators don't leverage the amount of government information available to them. You can submit FOIA (freedom of information act) requests for everything from local meeting minutes, to property records, to court filings, to corporate registrations.

Usually, the biggest obstacle is knowing what to ask for. Start with your niche: what decisions are being made, and by whom? Those decision-makers are generating records.

A few tools to get you started:

When you do file a formal request, be as specific as possible; vague asks get slow responses or denials. Name the document type, the date range, the department. Agencies are required to respond within a set timeframe (federally, 20 business days; state timelines vary), but delays are common — build that into your production schedule.

Expert sources serve two functions: they validate your content, and they expand what you can credibly cover.