🔴 Who can afford to be a creator?

There are three forms of capital that shape a creator’s path to success. Money is only one of them.

Last weekend, I got on stage to share what I’ve learned about the economics of creator businesses to journalist attendees at the Pulitzer Center’s annual conference in D.C.

I’ve sharpened and built on those thoughts for today’s newsletter.

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Who can afford to be a creator?

Anyone, in theory, can build an audience and start producing content. But the economics of becoming a creator depend heavily on what you bring into the business before it earns its first dollar. The assets that make you most valuable — your network, your expertise, your skillset — are often the most expensive to acquire.

I spent last Saturday in Washington, D.C. with 30–40 fellows at the Pulitzer Center’s annual conference, where emerging journalists from universities across the country gathered to share their reporting on under-covered issues and learn from industry veterans and other professionals.

It was a full-circle moment for me. Four years ago, I'd sat where they were, preparing to present the findings of a journalism project I'd poured nine months of my life into.

I knew I didn't quite fit the traditional mold of a journalist back then. I loved reporting, but I was also drawn to the more community-oriented, personality-driven corners of the internet, where storytelling took different forms in people building audiences around their interests, expertise, and perspectives.

I didn't know what a career combining those things could look like, and at the time, the industry wasn't exactly encouraging journalists to find out.

This was 2021, I was starting graduate school, and the idea of a journalist cultivating a personal brand could still provoke a major argument about professional credibility and ethics. Taylor Lorenz, then an internet culture reporter at The New York Times, was among the most visible journalists building public identities that extended beyond their bylines.

She was beginning to build a following that rivaled those of the influencers she covered. In 2022, after leaving the paper for The Washington Post, she argued that journalists needed to build audiences of their own rather than depend on the institutions employing them. The comments sparked a days-long argument on Twitter, with fellow journalists questioning whether building a personal brand was becoming more important than doing the reporting itself.

Now, in 2026, I was back at this conference, this time after writing dozens and dozens of profiles on creators building sustainable businesses. Some were journalists, others had backgrounds in entirely different industries, but their experiences had given me a much clearer picture of what it actually takes to make a living independently. I was there to share what I'd learned, and what the fellows could take from it as they considered their own careers.

But as we spoke about all these possibilities, we kept coming back to questions about access:

Money is an obvious part of the equation, but hardly the only currency that matters. The cost of publishing has never been lower; the cost of building something that lasts is another story.

All journalists are skilled purveyors and disseminators of information, but one with a decade of industry connections has a different starting point from someone fresh out of college.

I presented these advantages to them as three kinds of capital: social capital, intellectual capital, and economic capital. Each shapes what a creator can build, how quickly they can grow (and how durable their business will be), and how much risk they can afford to take.

Someone with strong social capital might secure a paying sponsor or investor before building a product (take next week’s Spotlight guest, Tayla Cannon, who secured a $1.1 million investment for a software she hadn’t even launched, because she had enough audience interest and support).

Someone else with exceptional intellectual capital might attract valuable customers without posting every day, and others with economic capital can hire help, effectively buying back time to invest in developing skills and relationships they don't yet possess.

The creator economy rewards the ability to convert one kind of capital into another, but those conversions aren't automatic, and they don't happen on the same timeline for everyone.

When telling journalists — or any aspiring creators — they can build their own media businesses, I wanted to also be honest about what it takes to get one off the ground, what resources they might need, and what risks they're being asked to assume.

Your network can be a distribution channel, a source of credibility, and eventually, a customer base.

Kyle Poyar, a software pricing expert, spent four years writing his newsletter, Growth Unhinged, without earning a single cent. His venture capital employer barred him from monetizing it, so he focused, instead, on building an audience through LinkedIn. When he finally tested advertising, would-be sponsors had been circling for years. The first company he sent rates to bought more than $100,000 in inventory without even asking for a call.

LinkedIn is still at the top of Kyle’s newsletter growth funnel. In a newsletter issue he published last year — cheekily titled "LinkedIn isn't over, you're just bad at it" — he laid out the playbook behind a platform following that's grown to 110,000, with 14 million impressions in a year.

Sophia Smith Galer, a former BBC video journalist and Vice senior reporter, built her career on the balance between authentic presentation and editorial rigor.

She was making vertical explainers on TikTok before most British journalists were trying, carried the same skills to Instagram when it launched Reels, and now runs a consultancy that teaches newsrooms and experts to do the same.

What started as a reporting skill became a specialization, then a business. Her playbook offers three lessons:

Economic capital is an hourglass.

Savings, a partner's income, or a well-timed severance check can buy you months, maybe years, to figure things out before the business needs to be self-sustaining.

Liz Kelly Nelson, a former VP of strategy and operations at Vox, left in November 2023 to launch Project C, which helps journalists go independent. Her advice is to plan the leap the way an executive builds revenue projections, starting with the numbers: