This spring, five newsrooms spent eight weeks building real creator partnerships from the ground up. Here is what they learned, and what it means for any newsroom considering this work.
Earlier this year, Influencer Journalism ran the inaugural CatchLight Creator Collaboration Cohort: an eight-week program that brought five newsrooms together to build ethical, effective partnerships with content creators. Each newsroom received funding toward a partnership, coaching across four working sessions, and a shared method for doing this well, the STEPP Framework.
The newsrooms came from across the country and across the local news landscape, from community-serving outlets to statewide publications. What they shared was a starting point: most had never seriously taken on creator-partnership work before. By the end, every newsroom that completed the program left with a vetted creator partner, an internal working structure, editorial guardrails, and a repeatable process. Some are already in production. Others are planning fall launches. All of them built a capability that did not exist eight weeks earlier.
If your newsroom is weighing this kind of work, here is what the cohort surfaced, and what we would tell you before you start.
Nearly every newsroom arrived carrying the same worry: can we trust an outside voice to represent our reporting? What if they get something wrong, or say something off-brand, or embarrass us? It is a fair concern, and it is the one that keeps a lot of good newsrooms from ever starting.
It tended to fall away the moment a newsroom actually sat down with a creator. One team told us its early trepidation had been, in hindsight, naive. The creators they met were professionals who understood editorial review and came with their own production processes and timelines. One creator raised the question of how his comedic style might affect the newsroom's brand himself, before anyone brought it up, and wanted to talk through where the lines were. Another had worked with newsrooms before and walked the team through her whole process. These creators were experts in a craft the newsroom did not have in-house.
The most useful thing a newsroom can do here is treat a creator partnership like a freelance reporting contract, which is work newsrooms already know how to do. You vet the person, agree on scope and terms, build in editorial review, and then trust their expertise to deliver. Framed that way, the whole thing stops feeling unfamiliar. As one editor told us, a good creator partnership starts with recognizing you are working with an expert in their craft, and leaning on that expertise rather than second-guessing it. If your newsroom is holding back out of fear, that fear is the first obstacle, and it is mostly unfounded. The way through it is not more caution but treating the creator as the professional they are.
If the creators were the easy part, the newsrooms themselves were not. Almost without exception, the friction that slowed a partnership was internal, and this is the finding we most want other newsrooms to sit with, because it is the one people are least prepared for.
The obstacles were capacity, coordination, and buy-in. One newsroom's most honest constraint was that no single person there owned social media; the audience team was stretched across several newsrooms at once. Simply assembling a working group of the right people from editorial and audience took a couple of meetings, and that newsroom rightly named it as a crucial first step it had not known it needed. For another, the early hurdle was internal skepticism from colleagues rather than anything to do with a creator. When a newsroom stalled, it was rarely because a partnership fell apart. It was because the newsroom could not free up the time, get the right people aligned, or bring hesitant colleagues along.
This should shape how you plan. If you assume the challenge lives outside the building, in finding the right creator or negotiating the deal, the internal work will catch you off guard: carving out capacity, getting editorial and audience on the same page, making the case to skeptical colleagues. The newsrooms that got furthest treated internal structure as the first task, not an afterthought. They pulled the right people together early and settled who owned what before they ever reached out to a creator. Our honest advice is to budget at least as much energy for the internal work as the external, and probably more. The capacity and the buy-in are what you have to build.
When newsrooms begin this work, there is a strong pull toward a creator they already admire: someone with a big following, worked backward from there. The ones that resisted it did better.
What helped was starting from the goal. Before weighing a single creator, the strongest newsrooms asked what the partnership was actually for. Were they trying to build reach, deepen trust, reach a community they did not cover well, or learn a format they could not produce in-house? The answer changed who the right creator was. One newsroom, once it got clear on its goal, realized the curation account it had first been drawn to was the wrong fit, because what it really wanted was a creator who could make original content. Another chose two mid-sized regional creators over accounts many times their size because the audience match was stronger. Fit beat reach, repeatedly.
This is where a shared framework earns its place. We ran the cohort on STEPP, and its most valuable function was not a common vocabulary but a defensible basis for saying no. One newsroom used it to screen out a creator with more than 400,000 followers because that account's editorial independence did not hold up. That is a hard call to make on instinct and a much easier one to make against a clear standard. A big following is seductive; a structured way to judge fit is what keeps you from chasing it. Before you fall for anyone, define what the partnership is for. The goal will tell you who the right creator is, and protect you from the follower count that is not actually serving your aim.
The common thread across all five newsrooms is that creator partnerships are less mysterious than they look from the outside. The work is mostly familiar: vet a professional, agree on terms, protect your standards, and let an expert do what they do well. What makes it feel daunting is not the creators or the platforms. It is the internal work of making room, aligning people, and choosing with intention instead of being dazzled by reach.
So if you are a newsroom or an organization weighing this work and wondering whether it is for you, our honest answer is that you are probably more ready than you feel, and the readiness you are missing is not the kind you would guess. Get clear on your goal. Get your own house in order before you reach out. Treat the creator as the professional they are. Do those three things and you are most of the way there.
Each newsroom in the cohort wrote its own account of the work, honest about what was hard as well as what worked. They are worth reading in full as models for your own.
The CatchLight Creator Collaboration Cohort was run by Influencer Journalism, part of Field Nine Group. For more on how we design and run programs like this, visit Adriana Lacy Consulting and read our case study on designing cohort programs that build lasting capability.
A newsroom with no dedicated social staff used the cohort to assemble a cross-team working group and plan its first original creator collaboration, a series on the city's beloved sausage culture.
For a nonpartisan newsroom covering politics, the toughest part of a creator partnership came before any outreach: deciding which creators it could work with without putting its credibility at risk.
How a statewide newsroom known for long-form reporting turned to two Montana creators to build brand awareness in a market it was working to enter.
The eight-week program, led by Influencer Journalism, will equip five newsrooms with funding, coaching, and a proven framework for creator partnerships
